Letter written to high school friend
K:
Sunday Afternoon, and I am baking with my sons. We have no table yet, and the kitchen is a wide open space, calling my youngest, Gavin to drive his race cars across the endless squares of floor. A pot of red beans and rice simmers in the slow cooker. My house is full of small boys (a friend brought her son over). I am for some reason today, feeling like N again (insert high school nickname), remembering who I was. I am thinking of your family, sitting in my mother's kitchen on so many Sundays. Today has that feeling of a Sunday to enjoy food and family, knowing D will have to be taken back to College in a few hours. He will be sent back with hugs, kisses, leftover spaghetti, and baked goods to share with his team mates. Aretha Franklin plays on the radio, and I remember how we would laugh.You and your mother would be the chorus while T hammed it up in front of the video camera. Usually outgoing, I would hide behind the couch, my face hot and red from embaressment, avoiding the camera, feeling self conscious and clumsy, next to the two of you. My 10 year old is silly and overly energetic. He wants to learn to cook, but cannot settle himself enough to do so. He displaces the calm, female energy that comes from the kitchen, wanting the food to be done, impatient for the baking to be ready to eat, pouting, and going back to his video games, much as T would have. So it is Sunday and I miss you. I remember when it would have been hard for me to imagine a time without you in my kitchen on Sundays.
Love,
Freedamomma
**Mamas, do you ever have moments like this, where you really remember that you are the same person you were as a child/young person, even though your life's twists and turns leave you so far away from where you started?
"But is it my manner that keeps her from hearing, or the threat of a message that her life may change?"
-Audre Lorde
I've been feeling like this for about a week. It's been compunded by my going through old photos and seeing all these things I did before.
My life is so different now, so why do I feel the same?
“To the world you may be just one person, but to one person you may be the world.� “If you wait to do everything until you're sure it's right, you'll probably never do much of anything.�
By the way, if that were written to me it would make me all weepy and warm, beautiful.
“To the world you may be just one person, but to one person you may be the world.� “If you wait to do everything until you're sure it's right, you'll probably never do much of anything.�
There was a song on the radio that reminded me of my favorite summer, the year I was 15. It was a wonderful time, and I wonder how to get some of that magic back.
***the United States is one of only four out of 168 countries studied to not have some form of paid family leave for new moms. We join Swaziland, Papua New Guinea, and Lesotho in not having that policy in place. ***
if i got a letter like this.
I still have a couple of friends that I've had since when I was a child. One in particular. And whenever we get together, which is *maybe* once a year, we can start right where we left off because we know each other so well from growing up in those trying years. And yes, there was once upon a time where I couldn't imagine her not being there in my kitchen.
What a great letter. Thanks for sending me back to another time tonight.
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Aw shucks mamas, thanks...I haven't heard from her yet, but I sent her a blog link. We shall see. She was a very good friend, and we have been trying to reconnect lately. Our mom's were very close, and my mother is gone now, so we lost touch some what. Hearing from her recently mad me kind of reevaluate things from the point of view of how my high school self would have felt about me and the decisions I make in life now. Interesting, I always think that people who knew me then would be totally horrified and dissapointed by my life now, but perhaps not. It's funny, adult frienships are so different. I remember how my high school girlfriends and I would catch the giggles for no reason at all. I don't really have that any more as an adult.
Perhaps I have let myself get to serious these days.