35 candles, one belly

The beautiful thing is, life goes on. And today, my friends, is my birthday.

I was having a bit of trouble with this one, with turning 35. It's one of those unsettling mid-marks that begins the slide toward another new decade. I was taking that all very seriously until I remembered yesterday that I was having the same trouble turning 25.

Looking back on that, looking back on myself with my flippy denim skirt and combat boots, silver hoops stacked up my ear and a shiny new belly piercing, it all seems quite silly. I was so young then and I took for granted how beautiful my belly looked, newly adorned with a perfectly-centered sterling ring.

I was in Oregon, immersed in graduate school and teaching and learning and protests and publishing an anthology.  My good friends surprised me by taking me to have the piercing placed in my naked navel. I was terrified. And thrilled.

My friends stood just beyond the curtained cubicle while I held the ring I chose from a large glass case in my hand. A big, gruff-looking bearded man stood silently over me with the tools. Placing a gentle hand over the curve of my stomach, he said softly, "The round bellies are the best for piercing" and then swiftly pushed a needle through my skin and eased the ring in.

It was painful, but no more so than the years of body-cursing I'd been putting myself through.  And it was beautiful, so I let the piercing become my passage into empowerment, into loving this one round bit of my not-enough body.

Ten years later, I miss that belly. It is a little bit rounder now and marked by the pull of a pregnancy and a surprise surgery. 

I no longer lace up my big black boots to walk confidently but I do stand taller in my snakeskin heels and in my bare feet planted on my yoga mat.

My ears are no longer adorned with seven earrings but I my boy lights up when he sees me put two in most mornings with an "Oooh! Mommy, you're so fancy!"

I no longer look to my belly to find empowerment but I find it in my writing, in my connections with people, in quiet meditation, in laughing with my husband and knowing that together we created a life that grew deep beneath the shiny ring that held (and still holds) so much meaning.

I thought about embellishing an old tattoo or even getting a new and much tinier piercing in my nose to mark this half-decade birthday. I'm not sure if that thought was an attempt to recapture a bit of same twentysomething spirit or to mark who I am today on the body that I wear now.

I'm not sure whether the 25-year old alterna-grrrl will emerge in the 35-year old alterna-mommy, inked or pierced or just reminiscent of that birthday, of that body, of that life. Of that hand, rested on a quivering belly. Of that surge of beauty and power just in being as fully me as I could be at 25. Now 35, now scarred and evolving and amazed at all that ten years has brought, both shiny and ordinary, momentary and lasting, surprising and inevitable, perfectly centered and continually round.

[photo credit: p. ovenden]

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Oh, Virginia.

The photos of college students, children really, are flashing across my television screen as names of those killed are read, little tidbits of their lives revealed and emailed prayers shared. My heart is aching.

When I see these students, earnest and emotional, victims and survivors, I relate to them. I remember what it felt like to be so young and feel so worldly, to have so much potential and feel like there was all the time in the world to realize every single dream. I sat in classrooms, doodling and daydreaming, absorbing French and just trying to make it through a term of geometry. I walked confidently across my campus, making my home in classrooms and student newsrooms, in buildings that housed generations before me and in the close quarters of my apartments and dorm rooms. I couldn't wait for summer break and I made plans to be a camp counselor and an intern, and I couldn't bear the thought of saying good-bye to my friends until the next fall. I was always in love with someone rather undeserving of or uninterested in my bundles of attention and I was incurably busy in all corners of campus and in organizations and groups that met the many parts of my ever-evolving personality and passions. I was like them.

Like them, but without a cell phone or the terror. I had my own complex existence on a campus where violence happened behind doors but I was fortunate that the trauma was not in the hallways, in the classroom next door, hanging from the windows on one very unsuspecting spring morning.

Like them, the hardest moments, the most blind-siding trauma of my life took place in Virginia. Five years later, I fight the feelings I have for the entirety of a state that almost claimed the life of my brother when he made a simple mistake on a motorcycle that sent him off a country road and into a deep and troubling coma. We were lucky and he is OK, and when I visit him in Virginia, my heart pulls tight inside my chest to be so close to that specific pain. I imagine there are students and professors and maintenance workers and cafeteria attendants and strangers across the country who feel a sadness in this state that I hate to understand.

I can't help but go to that place and to find myself -- even for a moment -- in their faces. Those college hopes and mistakes and laughs and living really wasn't that long ago and there is this deep need to connect. Through familiar ways of being. In college, in life, in a national sadness for horrifying moments when the world goes all wrong. Through prayer, through grief, through fear, through politics and rage, through all the explanations and why why whys.

I see so much in those university students, so in their lives, and my heart aches for them. My heart aches with them.

With each photo of each smiling person now dead, I can't help but to see them as a child of some grieving family. And I can't help but to see a pause in my dreams for my own child, for the boy I dream will discover himself and a great big, wonderful world of possibility that begins opening in a music hall, on a basketball court, in an engineering lab, in an art studio or wherever his gifts and curiosities take him. I pause to hold tight to the hope that he will be safe from jolts of uncontrollable violence, that he will find sanctuary in his education. Not fear. Please, God, not fear.

My mother has said many times that we all have small moments in our lives that cause us to step over the line from child to adult. Holding my boy close to my body, close enough that I can hear both of our hearts, I am grateful for the normality of just another day in his childhood. I grieve for those students who've unwillingly, courageously crossed the line and for those who've died on the way.

Oh, Virginia. Just a day ago, we were so naive to how much it could hurt, for how much it could make us hold tight to what we have.

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Strollerderby me

I am doing my very best not to giggle like a grrrl on prom night. But this is better than a strapless dress, a balloon arch and date with the quarterback.*

Here's the eeeeeeee-inducing news: I'm now blogging over at Strollerderby. My first snarky post goes up this afternoon. If you haven't stopped by already, trust me. You'll be adding this to your blog reader straightaway.

When you see the fabulous company I'm in -- writing alongside CityMama, MetroDad and CrankMama, just to name a few -- you'll understand why geeky me is feeling a bit jumpy and prom-ish.

Give a working mama some love. Oh, and any numbers for good daycare in OIP you're hording.


* Who am I kidding? I so would have chosen the lead geek of the senior play over the football player. Well, probably.

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