I followed my mother to the states to see what she gets up to over here. As it turns out, I still don’t really know. She tends to take off and leaves me to figure things out on my own. I think she is a magician of sorts, always disappearing and getting people to swoon over her. I think maybe sometimes I am jealous of my mother. She is everything. Mostly fire I guess, but air and earth and sometimes water too. She is able to reach out and touch everyone and everything in a way I won’t even attempt, not that I'd want to either I guess. We met up for lunch, which turned out to be a memorable experience.
Mother: Did you eat that wild mushroom soup I made?
Me: No. You said you cooked it with chicken broth.
Mother: Oh, it's ok! The chickens just swim through it.
Me: Mommm...
Mother: What is it you're doing with your life again? Why aren't you in med school yet? You should listen to me. You’ll be a terrible nurse. You have no patience at all.
Me: We’re not having this conversation again. You just want to be the mother of a doctor. Maybe I want to be a hobo. Then what would you do? You are a mysterious mother. But not me, I just want to live in a cottage somewhere and grow my own vegetables.
Mother: Lady, here I am [She is speaking to another driver on the road]. Say, we should open a café together.
Me: That’s a terrible idea. I’m annoyed with people who can’t help themselves.
Mother: Mmm... I can see you snapping at customers to get their own coffee while you read a newspaper in the corner. Sometimes you are not very nice. We could call it Persnickety after your nature.
Me: I'm not persnickety. I'm nice to my friends.
Mother: Oh yeah. All two of them.
Me: Do you even know what persnickety means? I'm googling it right now. 'A snotty little scion of a degenerate family.'"
[We explode into laughter.]
She insisted on going to this horrendous Mexican restaurant, insisted it would be fun. But it wasn’t fun. It was awful. A Mariachi band serenaded us, shouted at us strangely, the entirety of our lunch, which comprised of wildly large dishes of deep fried cheese, rice with cheese, beans with cheese, tortillas with cheese. I didn’t eat very much. My mother charmed the Mexicans with their musical uniforms and violins and big voices. She is good at charming people, except when we’re screaming at each other. Good Lord. She is always the center of attention, which I don’t mind when I can sit back and watch and maybe leave. The ring leader of the singers got into a deep discussion with my mother on the qualities or the nature or the appreciation they have for Summer and Autumn and Winter and whatnot, I don’t know. I wasn’t in the mood for it.
“Can we go home?" I asked my mother wearily.
"Why can we never seem to get along?!"
"It's not that," I tried assuring her. "Everything's fine..." But the truth was that I'd just been hit with a wave of inexplicable exhaustion and nausea.
“No, you’re not! You’re just trying to spare my feelings.'
“No --” I was about to counter, but stopped as my spine began to prickle strangely. I got up and walked out of the restaurant, my mother trailing behind me, waving and shrugging her shoulders at the mariachi singers.
My spine grew hotter by the second, and I felt beads of sweat form on my forehead. For about three months I had been frequenting chiropractors due to a yoga-related back injury, and had just been given a rather aggressive treatment a few hours earlier.
And then it began. In waves my back became searing hot and spasmed, and then I was afraid, never having felt anything like this in my life. My back was in traction. My mother was helping me to sit in the car and I was pushing her away and then she was sitting next to me while I laid my head between my knees. I was crying -- I can’t even remember the last time I cried from pain -- and she was stroking my neck.
I got out of the car and standing up, folded my body in half, letting my head hang freely towards the Earth, feeling the large tears slide up the corners of my face into my hair, allowing my back and neck to stretch out long and loose. I could feel my muscles contracting uncontrollably and shaking in my body, and I became aware of what I could do to relax. I was in the rain, a part of the warm electric air before the storm, putting distance between myself and the pain. I found that I wasn't thinking about the situation at hand, but my frequent longing to be alone, my mind prone to anxiety, my desire to be simple, and I thought of my teacher Ryan.
I came back from this strange, rainy day fraught with emotional and physical hardship, knowing this: every minute there is a death in me and a re-birth that I'm just not admitting. I scoff at so much that I experience and dance around in circles, telling myself I'm not a child though at times this seems all a game.
Maybe I have learned something after all, I think to myself, warm and safe at home.
I wrote to my teacher Ryan:
A storm has been brewing in the air lately, the last few days, so it's been very warm and electric. Last night just before it became dark I saw a cat in the garden, but it wasn't mine and it was shy. I wanted it to come over and say hi so I could pet it, but it wouldn't come. So I floated up into a handstand because I thought the cat would like that and I held the pose for a while, for the first time ever! and then I fell right over and forgot all about the cat because I'd sunk onto my back and there was the great warm sky above me. And the beautiful clouds. And the soft grass beneath me. I laughed and felt so free and happy as if life had stopped, as if I didn't have a story. I felt so good just laying there. I want to become expansive. I want to experience what it is to be without time. I want my body to become so in tune with my mind that I get to become a part of everything. I think for me this is why I do yoga.
It could have been the storm outside finally tempting the glass of the windows, calling my name to the night, tossing around the flower pots when I wrote this, hoping they wouldn't break, though hoping they would just as much, dirt and flowers and shards strewn about the lawn, feeling strangely at peace as though everything, even my sore body, wasn't in pieces just yet.
Listen here -- Sprawl II and The Suburbs (continued) by Arcade Fire
