are you my mother?

i looked over at the woman to the mat on my right and thought i was looking at my mother. it had been a long time. she had the short, curly hair. the feminine, true woman look. she had the physique. she had the smile, the face. but she could not have been my mother. i needed her today.

my posture toward her, for less than an hour, became that of a daughter. she was less practiced than me, and i wanted to show her respect. she was a woman. she looked like my mother. i wanted her to take me out to coffee and model a life for me. i wanted her to model a perspective. but this woman, truly not my mother, would have no perspective on my situation. she may have hers. but who could she possibly be besides someone with an eerily similar appearance? my mom would be 61. but she didn't make it to 35.

i remember going to aerobics with my mom. i don't know that she ever made it to yoga. she would do her work-out, and i would do ballet and tap. it was mother/daughter time of some sort. that and going to the pool. we had four years of some of this stuff. of course i will never forget her. of course i still look for her, but it has been so long since the likes of her has caught my attention.

taking the bus from bellevue to omaha every day to go to my christian elementary school, i would look out the window into the windows of cars to see if my mom was out there. i wanted her to be out there. i dreamed about her and what i imagined could be her new husband. sometimes they lived in a castle. sometimes they lived in the pacific northwest. i wondered if she would ever send for me. later, i wanted to see the pictures of her, when they found her dead, but my dad begged me to never see those. he hadn't. he wanted us to remember her the way she was.

but it was so hard for me to remember anything besides a prickly leg, a stick of orange trident gum. i remember her encouraging me to eat plums not sugary cereal, wash my face like it was the most important thing i would ever do. i kept asking how many more years until i can drive?

my dad used to always tell me how my mom could do back-bends. "she could do the bridge and reach over to the floor with her mouth and pick up a hankerchief." he was clearly thrilled by her flexibility.

growing up, i would look at pictures of her and think she was so beautiful. how could she have been my mother? who was this woman? i was jealous of her perfect body, thinking maybe i had that in me somewhere, wondering when i would have the stamina to stick to a diet and exercise routine that would get me there.

when i started yoga again in lincoln, i began to remember that i had always been flexible. i remembered my brother kyle telling me not to sit with my legs bent backwards, that it was bad for my knees. but it didn't hurt. why would it be bad for me?

the first time i ever did yoga was in berkeley. it brought me great happiness. i would come home and get stoned with amy and monique, and all i would want to do was those poses. there was something amazing about seeing my body like that, my self like that, not just sitting behind some desk but engaged in something that seemed true to me.

at five willows, i began to see my body re-form in the mirror and saw my mom's body. it was the one thing i had of hers. i don't have her face, though we may share some characteristics. i don't have her voice, though sometimes it might be similar. i am not her in any way i can identify except my body. the fitter i get, the more i see her.

today, sitting beside the woman i revered as my mother, i wished i could go back and tell my mother she was beautiful. influenced by barbies, i wished she had long hair when i was little. i didn't get her short, curly hairstyle. when my dad started dating again (right away), i thought i'd put in my request: date someone with long hair. it was shallow. i was four.

roxana, the yoga teacher, came by today and suddenly wanted me to do the bridge. i was in shoulderstand, one of my specialties, and she wanted me to try some new moves she just learned in spain. there i was thinking of my mom, and roxana is asking me to do the bridge. only me. i did. it was easy. i was confident. i was my mother's daughter.

in shivasana, roxana had us imagine a color that would bring us safety. i needed it. i visualized myself in purple, my favorite color since i knew what colors were. my mom's favorite color was yellow. i hated yellow growing up. everything was yellow. our carpet, our wallpaper, our house. a psychiatrist came over to our house once and said yellow is the favorite color of the depressed. it's kind of like false hope. i've thought about this numerous times re-reading charlotte perkins gilman's "yellow wallpaper." on the only acid trip i ever took at 16, i started to tear down the yellow wallpaper in my room. i'd always wanted it down. i would rather have torn wallpaper, beige walls, than have to keep looking at this stuff i'd hated, that had no relationship to my own aesthetic.

when i came home from visiting my aunt jan in arizona when i was 7, my dad had a new bed for me. i had been begging for a canopy bed with a purple ruffle and a purple bedspread for years. every time i saw the sears catalog at my grandma's house, i would rip out the purple bedding and show my dad i wanted it. i came home to a canopy. he had ordered a white canopy, a white bedspread. i couldn't understand it. he thought it looked best. he was having a party at our house for people from the museum. it had inspired him to shop.

when i woke up from shivasana, body filled in purple, i was slow to move to my side, to raise again into lotus position. when i looked to my right, the woman who was not my mother was gone. she is always gone.

i wondered why it was my destiny to always have her gone. to always be alone. to always wonder why. to never have her. to always want her. to never have that feeling of someone older to look up to. to never feel like i was walking in some kind of shadow i could re-shape or understand.

the only shadow i walk in is suicide. it is not life. that is something i keep creating for myself. there have been a few periods where it felt easy. where it felt like i was in the right place with the right people at the right time. recently it felt more right than ever. my spirit was happy. my spirit could reach through walls.

i wonder where my mom is. if there is some part of her inside me. pulling back my purple bedspread at night, i have recently been more thankful for the sacrifices and the pain that brought me to be.

if my mom truly loved my dad, she must have suffered so much when he went back to his wife. once, when i told my dad i can't handle my situation, he said my mom said that to him, too. he was reminiscing. he was still in those moments. 26 years since she is gone, he still lives in those moments so often. they had 12 years.

this morning at 6am, when i hadn't slept because of the partying neighbors once again and had gone online to find other apartments, my dad promised to help me move anywhere i needed to move. he doesn't want me to feel unsafe. he doesn't want me up all night. he said start shopping. he has never broken a promise to me. i really haven't realized before how, aside from replaying his tape over and over and over again about law school, he wants what is best for me. there is a love that reaches across the telephone. sometimes his canopy has been white when i needed purple.

and what about getting what we need? is there a place for that? what about getting life's one due? my mom broke the promise she made to me that she wouldn't die after my grandpa did. she found herself obsessed by empty garages. i wondered today why she didn't just drive through a stoplight? wouldn't it have been quicker? but then she could have hurt someone in the other car.

i guess a kindness of hers is that she didn't take me with her. my dad told me inappropriately as i was growing up that she had threatened to do that. i guess that's how he made it as as single parent. he was glad she didn't take me with her.

the garage that she ended up choosing belonged to a jerk. his name is phil godawa. he lived in a fancy fontenelle hills apartment with his wife joanne. years later, they moved in down the street from me, across from the artist, sue, and joanne told me that my mom had been parked in phil's garage. phil was not a very nice man. though i think he did feel sorry for me. i'm not sure if he found my mom. i wouldn't want to ask him. all i remember is a police officer named russell.

she died in a grey buick riviera. while we were in corpse pose today, roxana told us that some yogis can get their heartbeat so slow in corpse pose that if you hooked them up to life-detecting machines, they would technically be declared dead.

i wondered if my mom had a chance to move and then to die just a little bit every day, like i do in yoga, if she would have made it. could yoga have saved her?

i used to wonder if she had been more academically successful in high school, if she hadn't had a reading disability, could she have made it? but her body, like mine, would have thrived in yoga. she could have taught it. she would have had something to teach me, although she believed she never did.

i don't know where to end this or how. that is the big question during times like this.

i moved to lincoln because brad was here. because i needed to be near my best friend. we never hung out here. he had moved on. i ran into him one time in andrews hall, and he was shocked that i had cut off all my hair. he visited me once a couple years later in lincoln, when i was married to clint. he came to our house, saw our dog, we went to the mill.

everything in life, mine anyway, though, changes. not my love for people. never that. yesterday kelly and i were talking about how we didn't expect these places in our paths. she is 9 weeks pregnant. we started talking about if we would ever be pregnant 7 years ago, before either of us were married. four years later, three months apart, we were both married, at each others' weddings. my marriage did not last. her love with christophe, beautiful, did. i always thought they should have a baby. they were too good together, too beautiful and similar, not to. i cried when i read on email that she was pregnant. she's not there yet. her body is growing.

on our last walk a couple months ago, she told me about the benefits of the rhythm method. she had read a book. she knew the secrets. she told me not to get on the pill. i joked about this yesterday on our walk. kelly has always been saddened by the way that women she knows seemed to be reduced only to mothers, only talking about diapers, bottles. she wants to keep talking about art and culture. she wants to work full-time. keep working on her phd. she will create with christophe what she needs. she believes in that.

i look forward to small things right now. i look forward to seeing my dad again. going to see "happy-go-lucky" with kelly. i try to look forward to christmas eve. people at yoga are saying hi to me, speaking to me. i keep being surprised when this happens. i feel gone. i am looking for myself, for the deeper part of me, for the wholeness, out the window on the bus. i am looking through windows to find myself, to find my happiness, to find that stirring again.

i don't know if when i wake up, where she will be? i drink a latte with a shot of mint from meadowlark. i wait for my soon-to-be wusband (new term i heard on the radio) to help me figure out cable. i look for viewing content, reading content, that will soothe my soul. i remind myself i don't have to do much. i lower my expectations. i wait.
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