st johns wort

Starting to suspect that this strange lethargy and brain fog and overwhelm can be mostly chalked up to low vitamin D, I dug out my st johns wort tincture that I made this summer, a year's worth. A plant had established itself in my garden for the first time and it was a pleasure picking from it daily as new buds appeared. It was a vodka bottle's worth of tincure. And it was gone. The pot bellied jar empty, one of those old jars with red rubber seal and the metal snap. Strangely my first thought was that it had somehow evaporated, then thought, no...can't be hamish. This again? I mentioned the evaporation theory and he simply said, no, it's that you have an alcoholic husband and he drank it all up. Time to find hiding spots for all the other tinctures in the pantry. Woke at 4 am and couldn't sleep. I dug out my last journal from a few years ago and read all the entries from that time. Shit was wild. I was terrified of him. The extent to which I masked just to keep the peace. And how even then Felix was not relaxed around him. Those times are past, the door breaking times, the pots flying around times, the being called a cunt and caustic bitch times, getting spat at, but everything else, sadly, still the same. Stuck in patterns. I also read through notes from councelling sessions and that helped immensely. If you feel you're a crocodile and your teeth are out, wait 24 hours and then respond. No one is listening when you're reactive. you become the problem. It's everyone's job equally to create peace for Felix. being bitter that I'm providing the frontal lobe for my partner and my child. German brain = be better, be stronger. Ayla be gentle, hamish be accountable. radical acceptance is not fighting reality.

old western

It’s been a rough go the past couple weeks and I cant help but wonder whether its a little st johns wort and Vitamin D I need, though when I went to look for my tincture I made this summer, I found the jar empty. This has happened before, when hamish would take a swig of my tinctures on an evening, but he doesn’t really have much opportunity anymore, so maybe it evaporated out? But then also found my stashed bottle of red wine in the pantry empty; did I finish it one day and not put it in the recycling straight away? That would be strange of me. I feel like I’m having mild mini panic attacks throughout the day, for over a week. During hour or longer massage treatments, I find myself overthinking while I’m working, I lose my grounding and spin out into strange worst case scenario situations, I lose sense of who I (think I) am and what’s good and true. I walk away from a day of work writhing in feelings of fraud - these people paid how much for my massage? I don’t know what I’m doing! I couldn’t get that pelvis back into neutral, I have no idea why her mobile leg feels like crippling achilles tendonitis, I don’t know why her whole right side is in lockdown spasm, I think she was hating the craniosacral. I am wearing so many hats. Felix’s social life is of high importance but so is having nothing planned home days on the farm, plus three trips to town already for work. There was a horse here for half a week and I got out to pet him two times. I’m staying up late looking up tcm cooling foods so that I can have a somewhat normal body during day and night. I cheated and drank three ounces of my blackberry brandy last night and my face is swollen and sinuses drippy and soggy. It’s off to the garden for me as soon as I’m done typing, I’ll pick fresh dandelion by headlamp. It’s my magic superfood. I’m learning fingerplays and movement songs and opening and closing verses for circle time. I’m writing down lyrics for old germanic songs about autumn, I’m planning a lantern building workshop. Felix has started wanting to write, which wasn’t supposed to be in the curriculum till next year but I follow Felix, so I’m busting open the two inch thick homeschool book for waldorf grade 1…in my spare time. The garlic needs to be planted at…full moon, new moon? I have had no desire to be in the garden since apple pressing time. The need just dries up. I can barely move in the pantry because of all the unprocessed dried herbs in bags and basins and hanging from racks, but outside the tomato vines still hang neglected from their bamboo stakes and the giant dahlia just keeps on blooming. The marshmallow needs digging up and so does the ashwaghanda and the parsnips and carrots. All the beds need to be mulched with straw I hayed by hand, carted over the pasture in wheelbarrow loads. More kale needs to be planted to keep up with my high steamed greens requirements. I’m doing a hakomi workshop this weekend. Instead of having a home day, or seeing my new friend Mirona at second beach. But I can’t not go. There was an open door in answer to my calling out to the cosmos for guidance and growth. All my critiscism of and my needs from others sound like hypocrisy, sound like advice I need to take myself. I feel insecure in how I am in all of my relationships right now. I can’t quite tell if I’m being ok or being a jerk or narcissistic or a vampire. I am lacking that objectivity - it just all feels fuzzy and mildly anxiety producing. Hamish and I can barely even greet each other these days before the conversation goes off the rails - it takes about two and a half minutes for me to feel flooded and sound like I just swallowed bitter medicine. Felix immediately looks at me like, mama, keep it together dude. And Felix’s care? I’m seeing that internally rotated right leg and his weak glutes and pronated foot and the terrible balance and his hamstrings that just don’t lengthen. They’re dramatically short. He aged out of the free local physio and anything else is on the Island. Or long computer evenings putting my mind to learning something outside of my wheelhouse. I can’t stand the thought of what it’s all doing to his pelvis and low back and interroception and core firing. And I’d love to get him to a kid therapist - he has some coping methods that seem off, some interesting triggers, some behaviours that are unsocial and I don’t know where to start. I don’t have the money, mostly. Raising a human on one’s own…how do I not turn him into me? So much consciousness is needed. Constant being in grace and presence. Being calm. How does one do this? Having a healthy homelife helps. A healthy marriage and family dynamic and healthy body and healthy movement routines, not a mama who's absolutely lost and adrift. It’s such a jarring moment when my mother thinks I have it all figured out and gets almost aggressive with me in response to my faltering and uncertainty. I go to her on my knees, needing some sort of help, begging and she doesnt’ see it. I think it shakes her up to think I may not have full control of everything and she says as much. She comes at me with such hardness in those times, I experience this full regression to being a very young child experiencing a safety crisis. Emotionally it knocks me out. I’m breathless the rest of the day, my mind veers around the experience and throws a veil over it so I can’t even quite remember what was said. She has always needed me to be strong and unshakeable and I’m seeing more and more the effect that’s had over the years. I needed her and still do. I don’t have anyone close who I can lean on with absolute certainty, knowing they can handle it, and whom I don’t have to take care of in a parent way. My father is in hospital since Monday. I'm relieved actually, since he’s in a place where he can’t mess up his meds, or fall against his plant stand when he gets light headed, or smoke, or drive. But as the days go on and I hear that he’s spinning out, he’s spiralling, he’s freaking out like a trapped animal, I am having a hard time being here and not there. He’s alarmed everyone with his constant talk of shooting himself, and I do wonder how his talk with the psychiatrist went. I haven’t spoken with a doctor yet - they called my half sister instead of me to do a cognitive assessment, which made my ego feel very uncomfortable. It’s becoming apparent that he can’t live in his apartment alone anymore, and a seniors residence is the logical answer. I had a ball of anxiety in my core last night at this thought -I am so against shuffling seniors off to these institutions, but the situation here does not support me taking care of another human. I’d need a different vehicle, I’d not be able to work as much, would we all bunk upstairs, stairs are a problem, he’d need a level of independence that I cannot give and a level of care I want to give but do not have the bandwidth for. Maybe I could stop work and get paid a benefit for taking care of an elderly parent. I love my work. I had grand visions of Mike living at Joyce’s in Salmon Arm but I think he needs more care than that. That would have been an option 5 - 10 years ago. He would have had independent supportive living in the real community. Would he move to Germany to be with his sister? He’d be a foreigner and not have any medical coverage. They would be able to take care of him though. This is the ping ponging that is happening all day and night. I can’t seem to make it work in my mind how I could go spend time with him now - Felix is attached to me day and night and has never and wouldn’t yet sleep without me. Oma wouldn’t sleep out here at the farm, but probably wouldn’t be able to handle child care 24/7 for multiple days. And hamish of course, the other member of our little trip team, he’s out of commission since his parents flew back to nz days ago, he’s holed up in his cobbage. He’s been drinking hard liquor again and the need for a breathalyzer is becoming imperative. I can’t go to Edmonton on my own. I would love for the functioning healthy hamish to come with me - then he’s the man to have at your side for coming up with ideas on the spot, solving problems of logistics in a big city, for navigating and pivoting and traveling lightly. He shines, sometimes. But it’s never guaranteed and doing this mission with a surly drinker in victim mode who becomes mean and childish when in uncomfortable situations (someone else’s apartment, not having one’s own vehicle, taking care of someone else, managing ones emotions) would be worse than going without him. Going with Oma might be similiar. I don’t know when she’ll be brilliant and flexible and solutions oriented or when she’ll crumple and need me to solve all her and my problems of logistics and smelly hotel rooms and a different bed and a kinked neck and not being able to cook her own food. Going with Felix alone doesn’t work either. He’s six. The only way would be to lobotomize him with a screen. And I’m not about to do that. I want to be out there to calm my father down. I want to talk to his team. I want to watch an old western with him on a laptop in his hotel bed and read out loud to him. Bring him some good salami and a shiny apple, some yogurt.

rat queen

You know you got to figure your shit out when you're crying so hard sitting in your car in a parking lot that a passerby gets so concerned that she knocks on your window. She offered me a hug, and asked whether she could pray for me, placed her hand on my shoulder through the open window, spoke quickly and fervently to Father and Son, in a long breathless run on sentence, the kind of prayer familiar from my church childhood. I did feel a warm and a softening go through me, the way it goes when a healer does bodywork on me. I am attached (in multiple ways) to this weak man. And it causes no end of grief. I feel at a loss as to what to do, but the other day, in a moment of exquisite despair, I received an answer. "get clean. get clear. straighten out your own shit." Basically what I've been asking of hamish for years. Take your own advice girlie. And instead of alcohol, I'm addicted to unhelpful habits, being bitter, being contemptuous. I gotta clear out this baggage before it takes me out. The energetic shift from our trip to kamloops and return here, they're still reverbing, change is happening. I finally have all my clothes out of cardboard boxes meant for frozen chicken breasts. After 6 years. As a 40 year old woman. I am going through belongings, deep shelves, hidden corners, critically and emphatically. I got frozen shoulder this past week but the fascial tension and unwinding that accompanied it was intense, my jaw and collarbone clicking and sitbone aching and hand trembling. It ebbed and then worsened after massaging again, a whole body tension. I'm sitting here in the sun, in a rare moment, dressed up as a fantasy rat queen, or something. Felix is the little ratling. I'm all yellow and white with orange and red and silver embroidery, a velvet vest with fur trim. Felix is a black and grey with aluminum eyes in the shape of stars. The energetic toll of motherhood - spending 6 hours straight building a costume and baking cookies and teaching fingerknitting, but spending ten minutes outside in total in that day, and that at dusk.

spear and snaggle tooth

One minute they're a squishy little peanut, next they're a gap toothed 6 year old with an elf hat and a homemade spear, jogging away down the driveway to go whittling. He stirred, woke, rolled over towards me today, looked puzzled, then spat out his left front tooth. He looks a little insane when he smiles now. Or very hillbilly. We went to the pub together to catch the qathet fiddlers jam session, shared a bowl of fries. The waitress gave him a plastic cup of water instead of glass. He does an incredible dance to insane in the membrane. We listen to the chrinicles narnia on audiobook in the car, he had me read him archeology journal articles instead of a kids book at bedtime. A lost Alexander the Great battle site in Albania, an ancient turkish port town with submerged breakwaters dating back to the neolithic.

dream

a dream: a group of men, older and middle aged, winter time, blue collar workers, recruited for fulltime sex work. They seemed resigned but congenial and not fussed. I was in some sort of admin position for them and was trying to bargain for shorter days saying that 8 straight hours would be too exhausting. Then there was Matt, but his cheerful busyness was hamish, and I was lounging in his truck waiting for a kiss, while he unpacked it. I got the kiss and it was perfectly firm but lush. I wanted more. I was open and trusting. His energy was a blue collar working man. Then we were in a modular home (definite matt, prince george, ayla's formative years vibe) and I was on the toilet and removing a menstrual cup but something more was coming out, and I had instant dread at having to pull something out of me and I was already calling out for that man as I looked down and saw that it was a dead fetus' blue hand and arm, up to the elbow, and I was calling Papa! over and over as loud as I could (reminiscent of instances of stomal prolapse with felix in the early years). I woke up after that to morning. I had woken to blood earlier in the night. I wake once a night with a dripping wet sternum.

a bumpy return

Kamloops in the fall, Spallumcheen at harvest time. The Ranch, fuzzy horses, buckets of windfall apples, garbage burning day, coyotes and the moon, yellow leafed aspens. I helped feed out fields which I haven't done in a decade, but did plenty of about fifteen years ago. I'd like all our Thompson Okanagan visits to happen in the fall now, two weeks next time. I couldn't get enough of the colours, and breathable air was a bonus. Finally got Felix out to Tranquille, learned that that name was what the early fur traders called the local chief, a chill dude. Learned that under the old sanatorium out there is a native village that dates back 7,000 years, on a gravel benchland by the river, Mara Mountain behind, where young men would go on vision quests. Learned that it is one of the richest archaeological areas in canada outside of the great lakes. An investment company wants to make an agriculture resort out of the old farm. Felix and I walked down a trail a little, and I've wanted to show Felix this area since ever, places where I spent so much time exploring with John, where I learned to scramble on shitty volcanic rock no less. We found agates, we found bighorn sheep pellets, found a pink plaster buddha sitting at the base of some sagebrush, overlooking a memorial plaque in the ground, Felix learned about descending trails in cowboy boots, the loose rock like ball bearings over hardpacked clay. As we were leaving the coast, I was constipated, nauseous, my ears full and pulsing and slowly within a couple days, my symptoms fell away, each day I felt better and better. Within 24 hours of being back in this little creekside cedar forest cabin, I feel alarmingly unwell. Nauseous almost to the point of vomiting, itchy ears, dizzy standing, dizzy laying down, walking like I'm drunk, my right eye draining all night so I couldn't even open it in the morning, palpitations, headaches after eating, anxiety attack. Right now I feel drunk or delerious, still, after eating ricecakes with sesame in them 14 hours ago. Going from dry interior sagebrush to mountain summit to river delta farmlands to coastal temperate rainforest, travelling much too fast for all of me to keep up, walked into my cabin late at night after being gone, and had a moment of not being in it, of having some clarity and distance and onjectivity. Thought, huh, this is where I live now? Is this who I am? Does this still fit? What is keeping me here? The place felt cute, but small. It IS small, it's basically a tiny home, but also small as in, I have outgrown it maybe. It was a hidy hole for some tough years with Felix's health. I am turning 40 and my clothes storage is still cardboard boxes. The renovations haven't been completely done, I look around and see slapped together 2x4 and woodslab furniture and make do curtains and I am bursting at the seams of this place, it feels immature somehow, it seems obvious suddenly that this is not a long term home. It's literally a caretaker's cottage. I was in the home of a new friend on Sunday, and it was like walking through a portal into my Pinterest saved images. It was a dream. A heritage home, dusty pink walls, mustard green wooden doors, sparse rooms, kids watercolours hanging from a single tack on the wall, a few old tasteful wooden tables on a kilim rug in an otherwise bare room. A woman who declared she feels great with life! She didn't complain or sigh or roll her eyes or state anything negative. I had the anxiety attack after that visit. I feel incredibly frumpy around her, she's effortless and graceful and I have deep fluid bags under my red eyes, I am under the gun each day trying to get through my lists, I complain as a form of conversation, I am reactive, my body tissues are reactive. I feel threatened always, my body echoes this, I'm living off steamed greens and millet, because I have a huge inflammatory response to anything else, except a few days ago, im Kamloops, and in the summer. I also saw my eroded boundaries with hamish. I see that I am in charge of those and I am scared of enforcing them. I feel my body tense whenever he knocks on the door, I am filled with sour and bitter inside like I'm a human sized green vessel and immediately all this toxic fluid rises up and chokes me out, blocks all sound and thought and breath, my skin prickles whenever he walks by and my words, my tone, my language, it's painted that bitter that toxic that scared and angry colour. Felix looks at me, puts a hand on my arm, a reminder to come back and regroup when my tone rises and I'm immediately triggered by hamish. I don't know which form of healer to see, western, eastern, osteopathic, talk, movement, psychic. I was awake at midnight reading through diets, antihistamine, autoimmune, paleo, low fodmap, they overlap. I was reading about mast cell activation in response to black mold, something I've always been susceptible to, which I think is what's going on in my bedroom. Thought of moving the bed, radically rearranging, but I don't have the imagination for it and find it hard to work with hamish right now, though he DOES have the imagination for it. It's a weird shaped room up here, all slanted ceilings with a chimney through the middle, and the creekside wall, perfect for the bed and clothes, is certainly the mold side. I can't be afraid of change. I am fairly calm through all this, anxiety attack aside, I'm reading Dr Shu; soul of my immune system, please heal me, I love you. Thank you thank you thank you. I'm heartened by the fact that my body bounces back each summer, and even after a few days away. Bodies always strive towards health and balance. I've pulled Felix out of school. I won't get those hours and days alone after 6 years of attached at the hip. Another sacrifice for the journey of mother. It sounded too extravagant to be true anyway, and also didn't feel right. Too much time apart. I'd dearly love two times three hours a week though. That doesn't sound like too much to ask, and I'll keep my intentions for it clear. For now, I wake at 6, in the dark, and get going on chores for an hour, stain treating the laundry, stripping the whole summer worth of herbs laid out on window screens, month end accounting. I relish supporting felix with tricky zippers and knots in his shoelaces now, after seeing how public school educators do not. He is still my focus, he is the point.

apple pressing

the annual apple pressing party, this year not on my wedding anniversary. I'll be out of town for it this year, which is a blessing. Such an awkward day. About a half hour before everyone arrived, Hamish built a long table out of sawhorses and planks, felix countersank the screw holes his brace, patched pants and red gumboots, straight blonde hair, gap toothed smile. The usual friends showed up, the little boys disappeared for most of the day, making random appearances, carrying either buckets, trowels, pruners, toy tractors, a muffin, rocks. Towards the end of the day, they started wheeling each other around with the dolly. Hamish put on a great playlist to keep us motivated as we spent half a day chopping apples, the wheelbarrows filling with cores and rotten bits, to be brought to the bears in the bush. After the pressing was done, the women kept going, immediately starting to prep dinner for seven and canning the first round of jars of juice, clean up after the hard labour was done and the men played with tractors and fire. Felix's tooth, bottom row, front left, had been holding on by the slimmest of margins all day, flopping around in his mouth. When we were resting around the fire at the end of evening, Felix shimmied under the garden gate, pulled up half a dozen carrots and brought them back to us, proud, chest puffed up. That's when we realized, in the light of the fire, that the tooth had finally left him. We're going back to the thompson okanagan at the end of this week. I am more than happy to pull F out of school for a few days, it's stressful for me when he's there in attendance. It doesn't sit well with me and it was a rough first week. There's a spot in the base of my spine that squirms when I leave him there. Institution. Institutionalized. I knew what to expect but it still knocked the wind out of me. And how did I know realize that suddenly he'd be spending more time at school, away, than at home? He's gone all the time now. Except for the last two days of this past week, when he immediately got sick after a few days of school and I gleefully kept him home. He loves school though, so far. I showed up at his lunch break on the first full day, a little worried, only to see him from half the playground away, in loud and full command of a small gang, yelling directions in a game they made up, strutting like a rooster. We're going to the ranch again, in fall this time. Blue skies and yellow fields, cold nights. We'll stroll through kamloops this time. It's usually too hot when we visit in the summer. I'll meet with an old mentor, now she's a tibetan buddhist. I've reached out to an estranged friend, offered an olive branch after six years of nothing. I'm in a blur of processing the garden harvest before I go, an avalanche of tomatoes on the windowsill, baskets of beans and chard and kale and basil. The time away will give me time to think of what to do about my kid's schooling. There's been some major soul searching happening. I need the time alone and I so looked forward to it, but I can't ignore the institutionalizing that's happening to my beautiful son, can't ignore the warning signs and yellow flags, my and my mother's gut feelings.

eve of school

harvest time, overload, abundance. the kitchen window sill is full of tomatoes, left to right, two layers deep. there are baskets and boxes of apples and plums on and under the counters and the dehydrater and slowcooker are both working around the clock. We've had a week of rain, a taste of what's to come, but no cold mornings yet. The freezer was found dripping and wet one day, having been unplugged somehow. It was a chance to make decisions about some long term residents in back corners, and I came face to face with the plastic bag full of snappis of my milk. I ended up, ironically, with a surplus a couple years ago, having found that my kid didn't like the taste of the lipase that is a result of freezing milk, and also because he weaned. It was sacred stuff though, and I didn't know what rite or ceremony was fitting for it's disposal. And then the freezer thawed and there it was and that night, it came to me that it needed to go in the creek. Down the creek and to the ocean. And so it did. I sent it on it's way, without telling anyone else, and cried a little, remembering the blood and sweat and fevers and medications and begging and sleep deprivation and tears that milk cost me. Loving that my body had made it, that I had made it through that time. Thinking of how often spilled milk actually IS cried over. I was saddened by the slowly peeling strips of painters tape alongside the milk containers, where I recorded the time and amount, in mills, of how much I had squeezed out of me with each hand pump session. There were some containers that were two thirds cream, thick and whitish yellow, superfood for developing brains. Off it went, down this little rainforest creek, among cedar roots and banks of moss, salmon berries and elders, off to join the next creek and then half a kilometer down, the Salish Sea, the Pacific Ocean. It's a fitting time to say goodbye to those last physical remnants of that time, of the first handful of years of my child's life, as he starts kindergarten this week. I am not more ready for or enthusiastic about public school than I ever have been but this is happening and as my dear neighbour mom friend reminds me, don't fret (it's what I do) and take it a day at a time. There are other options. For me and many others, that option would ideally be village life. Those that are apt, teach those that are young, a mixed age group. Outside, inside, math and skills through the work. Or, if not that, an option where felix's passions are supported, built upon, the restoration, the archaeology, the watches, the fine motor control. Where seasonality and natural rhythms are followed and natural products are used and music and mythology and storytelling are central and art is a big deal and tradition. Oh, right, that's waldorf. Will a gaggle of waldorf enthusiasts and teachers just move up here already?! I could be, 'should' be providing those things, but I am barely holding it all down as it is. My career, the garden, the property maintenance, the domestic work, the childcare, and trying to pursue some of my own passions. A horse ride, a fiddle jam, yoga in the mornings. If I had a real partner, if only, the things I could accomplish. If there were two adults here, both bursting with energy and motivation...; this is a frequent thought, the sky would be the limit. The potential is incredible. But my coparent shows up sometimes, somedays, sometimes all of him, sometimes just some parts are present. And sometimes just for a while before suddenly he's in the grip of something and speeds off, gravel flying, in truck or on motorbike. Felix says, papa shatters our peace. He says I can't let papa see me crying! He says, Papa is like the Earth, and the feelings he can control are like the thin Earth crust and the rest of him is hot molten magma and there are diggers on the crust and they're excavating sometimes and then lava explodes out.

cats and crickets

my kid fell asleep in the backseat on the drive home, long day, late bedtimes. I parked at home but left the headlights on and turned up the country station, always makes me maudlin. A single lamp on in the kitchen, and then the low headlights, there are horses in the pasture out there in the dark, the cats emerge into the light to greet me, then go back to hunting crickets and shrews and spiders under the stairs. I unload the car from a shopping trip the Island, from the dim house, through the dark, to the headlights of the car, following the country music, it makes me want to dance, drink, stay up late, climb roofs, show off my legs with boots, it gives me energy, wakes parts of me that have been shoved to the edge of extinction since before motherhood, since that previous life. But that's not the maudlin part; listening to country music, alone in the evening but honestly anywhere, anytime, brings up incredible sadness, mostly for Ham and I. It is so linked with those early days, early years and they were intense. All my bones want to two step, in the grass or a deck or a quiet kitchen, just on the edge of porchlight, headlight, kitchen lamp's glow, with crickets and cats in the dark edges and horses snorting and farting further out. I miss liking each other. We used to learn new dance moves together, practicing over and over, flips and spins, when we trusted each other, when we actually came into physical contact. We'd get compliments at fairs, rodeo dances, bars, parties. That previous life.