The Present Moment is Sleeping

     I have come finally to this moment.  I have rested, I have slid into warm water after 12 lifetimes of driving, lifting, holding myself erect, bringing myself to her level.  I have nourished, I have dabbed myself with sweet mimosa because the only person I have to think about right now is me, and me wants to wear perfume.  I have chosen a spot.  I have turned around 3 times before nestling into the cozy bed of creativity.  I have opened the taunting fresh page. I have generated at least 8 sentences and topics while going about my day this morning.

     And I can't get past the rustling of my daughter in her sleep.  She. might. wake. up.  She WILL wake up.  She will wake up and cry for mama just at the moment that I get moving, really rolling, when the waves in my sea of thought are crashing, she. will. wake. up. 

     The peaceful, resting sheet of calm that drove me to this cozy corner yielded to the old paralyses of fear - what if I run out of time? Why begin what I can't finish?  Shouldn't I do laundry, something with a clear beginning and end, something that would have an outcome - clean clothes and space where the Jabba The Hut-like mound of dirty clothes has spilled its fat belly out of the closet and into my bedroom?

    There sounds the discontented cry, a lost bink or a loud noise - I pause then type faster hoping to catch it all before the foghorn of the most important sound - my baby - blasts the non-mommy thoughts right out of my head, reels me back into the carousel of: clean diapers?What do I give her for lunch?Did she have enough dairy today?Vitamin?Babysitter's coming, what's the pediatrician's number?  The carousel I love to ride, reaching for the brass ring of my daughter's rare and sweet kisses.  And these rare minutes alone - maybe 60 of them, maybe 120 - a frenzy of thought and action, wearing myself down with the act of trying to nourish myself.

     Anne Morrow Lindburgh, referring to Virginia Woolf's proclamation that all women need is a little money and a room of one's own, modernized the requirements.  She offers that all women need now, because we've come so far, is time of one's own.  A week out of the year, 20 minutes daily, however a woman can demagnetize the shavings of the world sticking to her.  These women yearned to create, to share their messages about sculpting, moulding, babying our creativity, our Selves.  They sent messages, personal and political, to their lineages of mothers and sisters and daughters, whose traditional duties are not the ones that feed their souls.  The work of a mother and wife delight me, repay me in greater heights and depths of love and sweetness than any other work.  That work does not feed me, me who wears mimosa blossoms and gazes out the bay window at the hideousness that is winter into spring, bare scrawny tree trunks with scraggly patches of evergreen like a thinning scalp.  Me who sometimes looks at my hands on the wheel, and adores them.  Me who remembers to lift my head up, to lok at the tops of buildings, to look at the open sky spanning out above the trees on the highway.  This me who on most days has no right to live.