what i would do, if i thought you wouldn’t mind,

is wrap you up in the cloying warmth of my love

snugly, tightly, confining.

wrap you in my arms, my legs, feeling my breath on your cheek.

i pray you don’t try to loosen my hold,

though the heat may cause discomfort,

though the force may shorten your breath.

stunt your growth, clip your wings that you may not leave me.

these flaws caused by my love please me.

it is a vandalism that, instead of disfiguring,

increases the pleasure i take in gazing upon you,

as if finding my name carved in an old desk

so that none can doubt the permanence of my possession.

Why is everything a constant struggle? Those who are philosophically-minded might say the purpose of the struggle is to ensure that we value that which we gain through the work. Personally, I just want a few things to work out nicely, after I put in a decent amount of effort. I’m not looking for worldwide fame or a Nobel prize. I want contentment, in at least ONE area of my life

I’ll start with family, because it seems to be dominating my current life, and because I believe many can relate. I graduate from the University of Delaware this past May with a degree in Psychology and minors in Education and Business Administration (I changed my major a couple times). With the economy in its slump, I have been unable to find a job that uses my degree and am living at home with my parents in northern New Jersey while I work part-time as a nanny. While I actually really like the kids and their folks and find the job fun, it is definitely NOT how I envisioned myself 4-ish years ago. More on that later.

My mom and I have a pretty intense relationship. To the casual observer who happens to see us walking into barnes and noble, or going to coldstone and getting ice cream as we did a couple nights ago, we must seem like we have the same relationship that Lorelai and Rory Gilmore have. We have a generally easy banter that we both enjoy, teasing each other in good fun, equally poking fun at ourselves in the process. We walk down the sidewalk with our ice cream cones, and our free arms looped together while we laugh. This is our relationship at its best, when we can both enjoy each other’s company and accept the light conversation at face-value.

The problem lies in those idle moments when our moods don’t seem to coincide. There may not even be a specific point of contention; it is a lingering soreness. Soreness at the sense of obligation to one another, which breed a resentment that we are both too ashamed of to bring up at any time other than an all-out battle. Her fear that she has outlived her usefulness as a mother, my indignation at her imagined criticism, and the pressure of putting on a united front to outsiders who would like to examine our cracks have us chafing, longing to escape from between the rock and hard place we find ourselves. We find it hard to maintain a comfortable medium, as though we are only passing through the zone as we swing from one extreme to the other, as regularly as a pendulum used to count the hours, minutes, and seconds.

Just writing that has made me emotionally exhausted. More to follow perhaps.

Brooklyn, NY 1992.

My mother always had fabulous shoes. That’s why she had to have surgery after Kevin was born. Added into the swelling that normally comes with pregnancies, Norma liked pointy, high-heeled shoes in various colors that caused her to grow a lovely pair of bunions. At the time we lived in the upstairs half of a two-family house near Ditmas and McDonald. I remember she didn’t get both feet done at the same time, so she was always wearing one of her shoes and on the other foot had an orthopedic sneaker.

Since she wasn’t wearing her heels, they were tucked into the back of the closet she shared with my dad. In this context, “shared” means she allowed him about a quarter of the closet for his suits and dress shirts for work. I can’t really remember what I was doing in the closet, although I do remember that I loved the smell of the closet. It smelled like Nana’s house at the beach, kind of salty. I still associate that smell with Nana and, I suppose by extension, Dad.

The shoes were red leather with green leather piping, a strappy pump with a bow on the vamp, very sexy for a stay-at-home-mom now that I think about it, and I assume they must have been what remained from my mom’s work clothes.

The next thing I can vividly remember, Mom is chasing me down the hallway while she yells, “THOSE ARE MY SHOES!” I have crammed my toes so far into the front of the peep toe that they are beginning to pop out the opening at the front, and just make it to the kitchen before I trip over the unwieldy bulk of the shoe.

I’ve been told later that Norma’s mom, my Avi, convinced her to give me the shoes to play dress-up with, since she was very clearly never going to wear them again after her surgery, and certainly not with two kids under the age of four. “No se luce, mija,” Avi said, convinced in her mind that it would be inappropriate for a mother of two to wear such sexy shoes to the park or grocery shopping, and what business could my mother possibly have doing anything else, anyways?

And so begins and long, often emotional, at times painful, and always surprising relationship involving gorgeous shoes, my mother, and myself.