Open Heart Flame

Things were all mixed up yesterday. I was showered with birthday love yet had to say good-bye to my beloved son Henry who is beginning his freshman year in college. The busy weekend came to a close at a beautiful morning mass for several thousand freshmen students and parents in the school's gym, called The Kennel because the school's mascot is the bulldog. It's also Jesuit, not the bulldog, but the school.  I watched the line of priests file in behind the huge gold cross and felt a familiar annoyance that it's only men -- ok, more than annoyance --  yet I wondered why it's so difficult to shed Catholicism, its liturgy moving like syrup through my head, the words spilling out of my mouth from some dark recess. I've often wished there were a sacrament of Egress -- some formal marking of leaving the Church behind. I nearly fainted at one point during the mass. I was thinking too hard, I think (!), like I did as a girl in church on Sunday. I think it's from boredom -- the lassitude, the combination of priest drone, empty gesture and saint-fantasy. Or maybe it was my throbbing elbow, smashed accidentally by the seat when I stood up. The pain was obliterating. I saw spots in front of my eyes, felt a wave of nausea, told Henry I needed to sit while everyone else stood. I put my head in my hands, bent over my legs, closed my eyes. By the time the priest asked the students to stand in the aisles and us to lift our hands over them in a blessing, I was openly crying. 

I am overwhelmed.

It was always easy with Henry. All of it. It wasn't hard, ever, and I mean that, really. How lucky I was to raise him from shining baby and boy to young manhood. It's so hard to let him go.

My friend Doug said that missing someone is a good kind of pain, that it means the flame of love is burning, like a pilot light. We want that love on, a love that our sons and daughters will spread to new friends, new places and new experiences. 

To be open-hearted, to be free with tears and joy, is everything. 

I have everything.

Thinking About

Today is the day that ended with me getting my boys back, and I'm glad about that. I puttered around today, cleaning up, organizing my crap, reading some magazine articles, researching Chechen food for the salon on Friday and mulling over the fate of the universe, albeit the universe of my own tiny little mother mind.™ This would include my observations about the first episode of Wolf Hall on Masterpiece Theater (no, I did not read the book, but so far so good) or rather the period that is depicted (16th century King Henry the 8th/Catholic Church/Church of England and all those shenanigans) and how really ridiculous most men look in history when they're striving for power and territory and keeping down the women-folk and the poor. I'm in, though, particularly as the actor who plays Cromwell bears a striking resemblance, even in that sixteenth century get-up, to Dr. Paul Weston, the shrink from In Treatment with whom I carried on an affair, at least in my tiny little mother mind.™

I also had an interesting conversation with a mother who is very active in the movement to defeat the proposed bill here in California that would make every single vaccination mandatory for every single child in the state unless they have a medical exemption or else they will not be allowed to go to public school. I definitely do not support this bill for various reasons, some of which are kind of, sort of, connected to even the patriarchal values that were demonstrated even farther back than old Henry the 8th and his ignorance that it was his mighty sperm that lacked the necessary Y to give him an heir. Basically, that is the fact that I'm not going to let the government or the medical world force me to do anything to my children that I believe will hurt them. That led to me thinking about my instincts (which work quite beautifully, most of the time, with my tiny little mother mind™) and how they tell me that, really, we're on the edge here in 2015, with the dregs of allopathic medicine. Apparently, the libertarian Rand Paul, whom I loathe because I just don't gel with the libertarian aesthetic (or lack of one) or the cult of individualism that it espouses, is probably the best bet to keep out government over-reach (we can throw in medical marijuana, too, here), but it's just the way the guy frames it all that makes me sick, and that's because he sort of denies women's issues in an incredibly patronizing way.

Anyhoo.

Where was I?

Where are you?

We just had one of those very big jolts of an earthquake which evidently registered 3.5 on the old Richter scale and which I'm realizing is probably the reason why Sophie has had a terrible day with lots of seizures, jitteriness, clamminess and otherwise uncharacteristic behavior. I'm certain she senses these things or feels quite exquisitely the subtle changes of the planet. You see? I've brought things right round to the universe and my tiny little mother mind's™ mulling over its fate.

Musings on the supposedly "revolutionary" Pope Francis

In lieu of anything else, let's talk about the Pope and his recent admonition to couples that they should "raise children and not pets." 

Better yet, let's not, unless you're a devout Catholic who can come up with some sort of explanation for that bullshit.

Bless his heart.

Would that he spoke about the legacy of the Catholic Church in Ireland, where the bones of more than 796 children were found buried in a septic tank, discarded there by the nuns and workers of a former orphanage and home for unwed mothers.

Let's talk about the legacy of sexual shaming and the oppression of women that continues to this day in the doctrine of the Catholic Church.

Again, if you're reading this as a devout Catholic, please enlighten us on what to think.

The above photo, found on the internets, was accompanied by a weird article about an experiment done on a group of the faithful. Those Catholics who "believed" felt no pain when subjected to electric shocks as long as they were gazing at Mary. I couldn't help but wonder if they don't feel the pain, either, of those women and girls forced to give up their babies because they were not married -- or those children, who were often shamed and subject to abuse because they were deemed bastards, abused, malnourished and then, when dead, thrown into an open grave like so much trash.

It's been a while since I've done this on the old blog, but writing here makes my blood boil a little less.

The fear of mixed metaphor

I am bewitched.

Clear bubbles with a dark veil, he wrote, in so many words.

After this morning's perusal, I'm avoiding the news. I had read about drought, California's drought, the worst in 500 years, they said. Plant a garden, they warned. Grow your own food. I read about wicked suburban moms in Boston and unconscious coupling and nodded off while doing so almost impaling myself on the scythe in my hand. That's what boredom does to you. I read about the obduracy of Catholics, their continued subterfuge. I ranted about the inadequacies of Catholic education to my son. He attends a Catholic school. It's killing your soul, I responded to a multiple choice test. You're learning to regurgitate and nothing else! He argued with me. I said Well then, just do it. Annotate the goddamn Hemingway. Grab the bull by his horn, wave your red flag or be gored. Catholic education: rigorous, structured, devoid of inspiration except for the nod to tradition and beautiful rituals, consigned to monks in robes and pointy hats, their heads bowed, their long tapered fingers running down an illuminated manuscript and a boy's spine.

I fear the mixed metaphor.

I told my friend that we should be heedless of the dire.

Things I've Noticed About Medical Marijuana, Sophie and The World in General

When I put on Sophie's socks in the morning, she doesn't startle when I touch her foot and then go into a seizure.

When I put on Sophie's pants in the morning, she doesn't flex her foot so rigidly that I can't get her pants leg over it.

The Los Angeles Times newspaper reports that the case against the archdiocese of Los Angeles regarding pedophile priests and Cardinal Mahoney's specific participation in shielding these men, shuffling them around the church and then hiring legions of fancy lawyers to defend him is now settled. Many of the abused will receive monetary damages, the Catholic church had to borrow from cemetary funds to pay the damages and Cardinal Mahoney never went to jail.

When she wakes up in the morning, Sophie doesn't spend forty-five minutes having myoclonic seizures.

Sophie has no body odor or clammy hands and feet.

Not a day goes by that some article or another appears about medical marijuana and its effects on epilepsy. I'm noticing that The Powers That Be are rattling their sabers, bemoaning the lack of evidence, rattling on about double-blind placebo studies blah blah blah and never once mentioning that our children have been subjected to dozens of drugs in what surely must be an experimental fashion as the combinations are near endless and no one seems to know apparently what these drugs do and have done to our children's precious bodies.

The boys and I have eaten dinner with her for weeks and weeks, and we haven't had to go into rescue mode when Sophie has a seizure at the table.

Red plants produce green conical blossoms that break into yellow flowers all on their own.

My favorite medical expression on the inserts of anti-epileptic drugs: Mechanism of action unknown.

I haven't had to drag Sophie down the hallway to her room after a seizure in weeks and weeks.

You should read these two beautiful posts before the month of February is out:

American Promise
I Just Looked Around and He's Gone


Reader, what have you noticed today?

Saturday Three-Line Movie Review

Stephen Frears' beautiful movie Philomena has great open spaces where more is unsaid than said, and the story of the quiet determination and strength of Philomena, an Irish woman looking for the son that was stolen from her as a girl, is at once a testament to living with faith and grappling with overwhelming tragedy. The story is a true one, and it's a harrowing depiction of the cruelness of the Catholic Church, without being a diatribe against it, of the centuries-old suppression of sexuality and of the conflict between dogma and faith. The movie is also hilarious and perfectly charming, beautifully shot, and Dame Judi Dench is a goddess with Steve Coogan her unlikely yet perfect foil.

Other 3-line movie reviews:

August: Osage County

Her

American Hustle

Inspiration for the Day

Griffith Park Observatory, Los Angeles, 2010

I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with senses, reason and intellect has intended us to forego their use and by some other means to give us knowledge which we can attain by them. He would not require us to deny sense and reason in physical matters which are set before our eyes and minds by direct experience or necessary demonstrations.

Galileo Galilei

There are some interesting notes over on The Writer's Almanac today about the great Galileo Galilei and his persecution by the Catholic Church during the Roman Inquisition in 1633. I had been reading a bit of news about Paul Ryan and his views of abortion, views that are so abhorrent and tiresome to me that I retreated to the daily poetry that I find on the Writer's Almanac. So, it's been 380 years since Galileo stood before the grand inquisitors for daring to buck the Bible and posit that the planets revolved around the sun, and while I realize this is a far different issue than a woman's right to control her reproductive freedom, it's not too difficult to imagine the likes of Paul Ryan as Grand Inquisitor of the "modern" age.