You Are

Fizzing tide over wet, packed charcoal sand. Egrets dipping beaks along the bay and patchouli drenched hippies on the plaza in Northern California where I grew up.

Poblano pepper skin bubbling up into paper-thin layers of dermis on the open stove flame in Mexico during my exchange student year, wet smell of masa in the air.

College a blur of identity shifts and thrift store visits, yet what I remember now is the rise and shimmer of a cicada summer in Ohio, gardening naked with a best friend, riding my bike toward Antioch’s campus feeling for once, free.

My first baby cries like a cat while the ecstasy that labor is now over will always be folded into the smell of amniotic fluid and bloody show, bleach and iron.

At the side of a birthing mother, I hold a leg back as she pushes against my palm and our eyes grind out a lengthy conversation. Birth assistance doesn’t pay the bills so I carry my second child on my back as I climb the steep Humboldt State University stairs to graduate level courses. On the day of commencement my psychotherapy path begins.

I fear that to write about self-acceptance and truth telling is boring and interminable and yet I return again. and again.. My hope is that by sharing these intricacies, you will in turn, dialogue with me.

Because after all, who is going to tell the stories of sweet potato spit-up on your ivory work blouse? What about those days people keep comparing depression to diabetes and you want to scream? Weeding in the corner of dirt on the patio and brushing mud off your wet knees? Who is going to sit up late and eat pizza and laugh at The Office? Who is going to write about these mundane moments?

You are.