thoughts of summer and fatherlessness

Leave it up to the Moon, to give or take. 

To gift or strip away as She pleases. 

She knows better the story held inside your bones. 

Leave it up to the Moon, the building and the breaking down – 

the monthly shedding as parts of you fall and new ones grow. 

She knows better the longings of your heart. 

***

 Tonight, I lie in bed with a sadness within me. It feels heavy, a constriction in my chest that makes it hard to breathe. Harder than on other days, to inhale with aliveness, and harder to exhale through it. 

On days like this, I crave to run away and disappear. Without explanation or trace, merge with the ground of a far away forest. Earthing myself in surrender to the roots of the Earth. Eye corners slow-dripping tears. 

For now, it’s all I have to offer. 

*** 

It’s stored within my hips. And how can we not be getting bigger in a world so heavy. Our bodies are expanding, striving to contain it. And the world – the world hurts all over. 

*** 

I want to be free and flow. 

This summer feels so loud, and too bright. The light unsettles me with her nature of agitation.

I miss the fragility of winter. The deep dark that let me brew in resting. 

The light tires me. 

And part of this being lost comes from not knowing who I am anymore. 

I lose parts of me daily; the space that precedes the growth of something new is hurting to be filled. 

In fact, what is present now is this: these days I have been searching for my father with urgency. Through all pieces and parts of my life, through childhood memories and photos, in dreams. I searched the forest, under the river bed. I miss the father I never had. The love I never felt.

I struggle to find anything else other than my inadequacy. For my father I was never enough. His presence would never fulfil the lacking, but amplify it. The closer he was, the further away he would feel from my life, my world. I would feel this strange lacking, yet I was suffocated. 

Safety was never part of my inner world. Dreams of running away. Dreams of being found by a love so great that would alter the course of my small life.

I so often deny this aspect of self – this fatherlessness that drives me to cling to a wrong love and build homes in dark places. I hide it well, but in me lives the story of not good enough. A story told over and over by my father.

I remember when I was ten, writing poems and running down the stairs to show him what I wrote. This is not good enough. He would change the words, the sentences, the title.

I remember when I was seven, I would learn a new piano piece and beg him to listen to me play. Moonlight Sonata. Rachmaninoff. My small fingers could barely reach the notes. This is not good enough. The second part needs more force, and that wrong note – practice more.

Not enough.

Not enough.

I remember I was fifteen when the yearning for him to see me, to hear me fuelled a deep anger that would burn inside my belly for many years to come.

It’s true that as daughters we carry the pain in our wombs – of our mothers and fathers. I feel it. Some days I want to say: I am done; this is too heavy. I am done. 

But my soul is hungry to rebel against the story etched within me. I want to rebel against the fatherlessness that speaks of inadequacy. I want to rebel against every single thing that tells us to be anything else than what we are, that asks of us to be Other. On some days, I want to say I am done, but there is work to be done. I want to rebel against not enough, against this incessant search for perfection. I want to show up, flaw-full, warped. With blemished poems, with wrong notes on my piano. I want to rebel against anything that tells me it is not good enough, it is not enough.

I know just this: 

my daughter  

will walk lighter.

This, I do for her.  

“you are a child of fire and water. the strength to be the storm and to carry it is within you. so storm she says, and i will carry your every drop. your body is a continent but may your heart always remain the sea”