Mother Cake

Why do our bodies prevent us from sleeping? I woke during the night, at 3.30am. The room is quiet and when I look around I desperately want there to be light. Everything becomes strange when there is no light. I imagine that is how the world will end.....all the light will disappear.

When I listened to a particular song last night I felt like I needed to cry (it said "how could I love a breaking thing?"). Partially as an expression of tiredness and alienation from my usualness, but also as a reaction to what has been happening (internally and externally) recently. Although I feel good, this is a huge upheaval and one I'm not always sure I am ready for. I don't want to be tentative, I want to throw myself away like a rotten thing and be consumed by the bin. I'm as dirty and messy as any tip face today, and yesterday, and for the past 2 weeks. In some way this is still about letting go, but it is about picking up too. I am having to explore things I have hated for 2 years, and this process of renewal, the newness and unsurity of it, is terrifying. And I feel as if I could fall out of myself. I don't think I have ever been entirely sure of what I have wanted. There have been times when I have almost been sure, but I am a stupid and fickle person, and overly zealous yet underly committed often. How horrible it is to know this about myself.

I can't concentrate. My parents are going to court today, to settle, which is ironic because more than ever, today they are stirring up 32 years of murky water. Water that 2 other human beings emerged from, somehow clean. I remember a certain point of total resignation post MP that made me feel ill. My mother is still clinging to half baked/boiled/fried answers that clang with a resounding stupidness that I find difficult to stomach. "Maybe men are just...." and I hate to be on the receiving end of it because despite how hard I work against it, there is always an element of indoctrination. She is my mother after all, and she gave birth to the world! But she spouts a dark and apocryphal tea that never quite convinces me of the spineless cruelty of men. Interpretation mother, you must try to read the world differently, and not that I necessarily want you to be like me, but I need you to see differently, and further, and wider, and more cleverly. I know there are extenuating circumstances, but they won't always exist. One day you might realise that you are bitter and old for no good reason.

Parents can never seem to understand that parenting goes beyond care and nurture, but that parenting means being perfect. When I think of the Virgin Mary, I imagine an aromatically intense pleasure - mother smell. What is a mother really? Is it a model of virtue and chasteness, as we imagine as children. Or is the mother allowed to really exist, dirtily in the world?

It is a luxury to look out this window, and to be here, on a bland Tuesday.