God, I’m going through menopause/2010

God, I’m going through menopause. You see my skin drenched at 2 in the morning. I wake up to lower the thermostat to 60, as I pile more blankets on Emma, but there is so much sweat collected on my top lip. I haven’t had a period in months. Forget about ever having another child. Didn’t you hear me I haven’t had a period in over four months?

Earlier today he called. You know the old man with the cat hairs on his sweater. Brouwer turned 78 two days ago. God, you know I hate the smell of his car. It smells like stale earth is that possible? Death, dying or mold, like that lost potato when it rots, and you can’t find it, but you can smell it.

God do You and I argue? I speak to you in the bathroom, in tongues, and with my arms full of scratches, and then I throw the razor. What happened to us Lord? What happened to the dreams in my head, and the visions I thought were from you. Then my thoughts attack me, “Cut some more, who gives a shit.”

I just came home from church, and the communion wafer melted on my tongue. I thought we were close, when I wept during mass. I thought you heard my prayers for Emma. “That she would lose weight, and that she would go to school, and that she would stop cutting.”

“It’s been years, the alphabet soup of meds, Abilify, Depakote, Effexor, Geodon, Haldol, Lithium, Lamictal, Prozac, Respiridol, Seroquel, Tegretol…..

Lord, what happened? The Cross fell heavily across my shoulders. I look at the fingers on my left hand with no tan lines, the scars across my arms, faded and straight. The intense thought then, that lied to me, the truth that disfigured me.

God, I’m lost inside the rooms of this apartment. Only five rooms and I am swallowed by the failure of my life. I suck on the plastic of the diet Pepsi only to discover it is flat and lukewarm. My reflection aged. The woman in the mirror is in her 40’s. But she hasn’t married yet. How could she have aged so quickly?

Dear Lord, it’s me again. I missed my parents being together. They haven’t been together in over 20 years. But I miss them being together.

Remember the brown impala? How I trusted my daddy would keep the vows he made to my momma?

He watered the grass so vigilantly, so faithfully. Do we care more about the things in our lives that have no real value? Those nicely trimmed lawns, and the track homes, with those broken lives inside, the cops whose jack boots trampled the flowers.

I hated being 9 and looking out the window to see them take daddy away in hand cuffs. Remember how I begged him not to start yelling at mom. Then he took the handkerchief off the table and whipped it across her face. I didn’t want to stare.

Then daddy broke Scotty’s leg with the croquet stake, Scotty stayed in that dog house for months daddy had built for him. But Scotty hated him after that.

We used to watch Sonny and Cher, and they’d sing that song that made me believe we were a family. “All I ever need is you.” And I used to pray to God to make us stick like glue. Then Emma’s father left me too.

Remember my mucous filled prayers, my rounded belly on the ground like a snake’s? This time it would be different. I would look out of different windows this time and see what I wanted. The splinters and fragments I stayed with when the grenade he threw went off inside me.

The prayers I make to You, over her sleeping body. “She’s Our Daughter.” With the lines that now live on my face with the smiles that have come and gone, and the tears that have washed over me. Let her path not be so indelicate or the concrete be so uneven. If she could put her own razors down, and stop relying on food the way she does. If there would be someone to put a tan line around her finger, and mean it. If the words he promised would make their children be whole if we could stop taking pills Lord. There is an empty world, unswallowed sighs, open eyes that long to be closed, lists of prayers in my heart, unresolved revelations that live on the edges of remembrance.

I kiss Emma’s unlined face, her perfect pink cheeks seem to glow, there are the moments in my reflection that touch the corners of grace, when thoughts are not bullets of confusion, God touches the rough places, and kisses my lined face, maybe He thinks more of the wounded memories I carved into scars, and I can finally forgive the many years between midnight and dawn.

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