from a letter to a dear friend who lives in two cities, travels regularly to exotic locales and is on the doorstep of becoming a beautiful bride to the man of her dreams....Six days!? Wow. I have NO idea, I'm realizing, what your wedding plans are. Private family only affair? City hall? Restaurant? Bar? Big blow out?
You'll look smashing in your suit with gardenias; a bride from another era, think of the wonderful film It Happened One Night. (If you've not seen that, put it in your Netflix queue straight away!!)
I most certainly would love watching the [flower] buds grow with you. Then again, I'm an odd duck, it is true. Once upon another lifetime, a beau told me I made for a really good young boy or a very old woman; I was all of about 19 or 20 years old at that time.
Please DO send me photos of what you look like as a bride. And let me tell you: marriage is VERY different than living with someone. It's hard, too, but worthwhile and deep. I wish you and Dave a lifetime of getting to know one another and making your own little family life a part of the whole.
Attached are a couple recent photos of my life.
I must off to swap out laundry, make a phone call or two, pay bills and pack up me and the wee bairn, as we must head over to the west side town. I keep another baby once a week or so at her home, as ours is quite small.
I imagine my mama life seems dull and repetitious and exhausting from the outside, and in some ways it is, in fact, all of those things. It is also precisely what I feel I was born to do. The world of women and children fascinates me even with its familiarity, as it's a place I've inhabited nearly always. There is depth here, spiritually speaking. As my dear friend Kaki the Reverend explained to me a couple nights ago (she kept my child when my man and I went on our first date since Ziggy's birth-- to see David Sedaris read (wonderful!!)), from a theological standpoint, a child's concept of faith and of God comes from the mother, from having the needs met, from their collective ebb and flow and her return from absence; the Village upholds this concept, emboldens it and supports the child's faith.
Perhaps this is why I felt so frustrated that last evening my Mister didn't call me immediately at Stitch 'N Bitch when my child began to sign for milk and cry for "NiNi," which he uses interchangably for nurse and for mama. Or, perhaps I felt myself to be inadequte, a failure for my inability to relax enough when running late in the day to pump enough to leave for my brief interlude in the world sans my twenty some odd pound appendage. I love my child so. And it truly is quite like an organ outside my very body when I part from him-- it's downright painful. But too, of late, I have needed to reclaim myself a little bit, lest I become more like the cagey tiger needing to run. It wounded me terribly though, to have Ziggy's father choose not to call me, and then to assert that I chose my own needs over my baby's.
Oh, this life. It is sweet and hard and sometimes I am a bit too crispy on the outside of of my gooey soft center.
Certainly, I do wish there were more romance and rock & roll, and maybe tomorrow, there will be.
love,
paige
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