Do you realize

that you have the most beautiful face?
Do you realize that we're floating in space?
Do you realize that happiness makes you cry?
Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?

What a Beltane. Rain, roses, and raspberry (finally!).

As I write this, the lovely Amazons are no doubt either finishing their revelry or just arriving home. K is on his way back from being with his brothers. I am here in my bed, in my moon pajamas, with my cats.


Beltane is never a holiday I paid much attention to- the spring holidays in general don't do a whole lot for me usually, I'm more of a summer and fall person.

When I was a kid we celebrated it as my ex-step-father's birthday. ( I always found it interesting that my father, step-father, father-in-law, and the serious boyfriend of my mom's who was almost my step-father were all born within May-November of 1954- anyone wanna run that six months past Astrobarry?)

I'm no longer in touch with my ex-step-father. Tom is his name. I've seen him a couple of times in the past ten years, but only when picking up or dropping off my little sister. He looks much the same, and has as little to say to me as usual. He is a strange man, and one haunted by many demons. He has beautiful eyes.

He married my mother a month before my seventh birthday, and divorced her the summer before I was seventeen. When I was seven and eight, before my sister was born, he was wonderful. He bought me a bike and helped me ride it. He made me stilts. He got me a softball bat and glove and played softball with me. He took me on a church canoeing trip down the rapids, just me and him and the other church folks. He taught me how to watch saturday morning cartoons on the two channels our tv got.

When my sister was born he was enraptured, but really had no idea what to do with her. He didn't know how to show much love or affection, especially to a small child. Or then to a teenager. I don't really remember how it happened- it seems sudden in my memory, but I'm sure that it wasn't- but gradually he and I stopped interacting. After all, I was nearly a teenager, and not really his child. He and I began to fight, as all teenagers and parents do, and he "gave up" on me sometime around age 15 or so. I guess he felt that nothing he said or did was going to have any impact on what I did or did not do, so he decided to do nothing. (for the record, I didn't really get up to that much. I ran around and drank and smoked pot and so on, but considering some of the things that you can get up to when you're a teenager in the backwoods, I was really pretty tame. I liked to fight and to run away, but I never so much as got a tardy in school.)

He was a complex man. He was given to petty fits of anger and violence- he would rip my books or break my toys when he got angry. He never "beat" me, but he would throw me up against walls and knock me around a bit. In his defense, he never really hurt me, and I always gave as good as I got- he was a forester and firefighter, so he was a burly guy, but I've never been reluctant to hit back. He was capable of great acts of care as well though- when I was ten and got head lice, he spent every night for a week coming nits out of my waist-length and very thick hair. When my mother had cancer he drove her weekly for hours to St. Louis and Paducah for treatments.

After my mother and sister and I lived in Ireland when I was 15 their relationship was never the same. It had been having problems before, but I think he began to drink a lot more while we were gone, and never stopped. In the spring of my senior year sometime, when I was 16 and off fucking my boyfriend somewhere, he and my mother got in a fight and he was arrested for domestic violence after throwing her about 15 feet across the living room. I am eternally grateful that I was not there, because though I had my own issues with my mother, I would have tried to kill him for that, and I don't think I would have come out on the winning end.

I don't think he ever truly intended to hurt anyone. He is an alcoholic sufferer of manic-depression, among a host of other things. I suspect he was abused as a child, both emotionally and physically. He just didn't know how to control himself and release his anger. Obviously that's no excuse, but I no longer hate or blame him the way I did when I was a teenager.

From time to time I consider getting back in touch with him. I did live with the man for nearly ten years, and I think in his own way he did genuinely care for me. I don't know if I ever will or not. We'll see.

I don't remember if I sent him a wedding invitation.

Tom, wherever you are tonight, whoever you're with and whatever you're doing, I hope that your birthday is blessed. I hope you can find some measure of healing and love and growth in yourself and in the universe around you. I forgive you, and I hold you in love.

****

I am so very grateful for my tribe today. This has been a long hard spring for me, and I can't imagine how I would have done without my clan. All my life I have been searching for my family, for the people who would love me fully and humanly, for who I am and who I am not, because of who they are and because of who they are not, for people to love and cry and mourn and rejoice and grow with, with whom I could write the verbs and nouns and adjectives of life on the loose-leaf pages of the future.

They are here.

I am grateful for my sisters, who have all traveled roads as hard and diverse as mine, and who are the wiser for it. I am grateful for their beauty and joy and strength and conscience. I am grateful for the courage and love and humanity of each and every one of them.

I am grateful for my brothers, who have taught themselves and others what being a man in a tribe is. I am grateful for their compassion and support and humour and grace. I am grateful for the courage and love and humanity of each and every one of them as well.

I am so, so, grateful for my husband, whom I love without reservation, well beyond the walls of reason and into the twilight of the world. I thank god for him each morning and each night, and pray every day that I can live in such a way that I deserve to be with the wonderful human being that he is and continues to grow to be.

I hold you all in the deep quiet piece of my soul. When I look at you, I can see the children you were and the elders you will become. Time sits lightly upon us all, and the myriad of faces you wear fade into the pure light of the souls that I know.

Blessed be.