Category: A Woman’s Plight

“Is keeping me up.

Help me sleep, please love.

Help me sleep.”

“Another wave of insecurities…

I deserve to have protection and support.”

They say that the holidays must be
Celebrated and attended to lovingly

And because of ingrained expectations
It is hard to avoid pain when they’re not

But I am used to having to self tend alone
Though I miss collaboration there’s peace

Where fighting over control yields nothing
Though I want to build sharing connection

In these opportunities for symbolic events
Where can display our love’s trust proudly

I had to cut down part of a sapling
Growing from roots of the greater

Its thickness two the three inches
Measuring time we have been here

It had grown through a fence panel
At first had been spindly as fragile

It along with another root sibling
Provided the cats shading variety

This year it’d shot up tall and straight
Was loaded with budding magistrate

A potentiality’s splendor to behold
In its overarcing promised canopy

But I had no time to wait any further
Needing to protect pampas rootings

It would have held onto one panel
Poised in the yard as industrial art

Its fronding wips smacked at my eyes
As I snipped smaller pieces for pick up

They seemed to say see, breathe, be me
All that you could ever dream of with me

Nature loves and responds to us
Giving back hope we long to see

She drew him closer
Softly more steadily

She wanted the tides with him
She was definitely riding lows

She didn’t want them to crash into burnout
She worked to have their love ebb into flow

“I want to sleeeep more…”

“Often guides me into leaving others and their lack of it far behind me.”

I don’t know why I write them down.

Easier on a phone to capture in passing, but if wrote in a notebook could seem pure madness.

With automatic search applications involving AI now, the quest for number meaning has become blended into a generality of many being the same.

So maybe I do it to track time.

Or to hinge on many “perfect” moments where maybe for that second I feel aligned.

Or maybe I am searching for something, and by writing down time’s supposed numbers in passing, I am opening a doorway into my own mind.

It could be also said that I am OCD-ing – but who cares if this is also part of the reason?

It’s something that I do that helps me keep feeling reinforced in my efforts of vying.

To live, to breathe, to flex, to love.

Without it, one feels caged.

Poverty lies about it.

Garden shuffling, trimming dogs’ nails, and asking around for a cat stroller.

They had snap pea seedlings and viola flower six packs now at some of the stores, and she could feel the tantalizing crinkle of Spring’s rebirthing arrival tickling at her senses with the flowers’ perfume awakening things too long dormant within her.

But she didn’t have the funds to get any of them, and next week would be too busy for her to consistently water and tend to them.

Maybe she could plant some seeds, water to dampen the soil around them, and during that time they would germinate?

The grind of difficult effort seemed to leave little room for joy to infiltrate.

If she could find an inexpensive cat stroller, maybe she could harness the dogs to it and the four of them could all amble along, slowly and carefully, for occasional walks.

She didn’t know what he looked like.

She didn’t know where to find him.

She had not been given permission.

Like rain.

Because she had woken up from deep sleep to use the bathroom, she then heard the wolf’s sharp request intermittent barks, and got up again to let her out, give her dogs more water, and turn the fan toward the heavy-coated wolf so that the wolf could cool down from the fire that the hound always loved to cozy up in front of.

She reached fingers through the small cattery cage to carress her sweet tiger who brushed up against the bars in loving greeting while she waited for the two dogs to be ready to come back inside.

She realized then in the early morning quiet like those past settled evenings when the four of them had gathered in front of the fire to support their last previous cat’s winding down passing that it wasn’t that her animals were too much for her to manage.

No, they were her loving team, still there, patiently waiting for her.

It was that her house had become crowded full of others’ lives recallibrating in ways that seemed to have very little room for and not much to do with her own being able to function – although there were some other healing benefits of the reuniting.

And she had been bombarded by extreme overwhelm from the injuries, poverty struggles, and fighting to hold herself together to provide them all with stability when she had no longer felt any herself.

Because she had managed to straighten up the house some yesterday in that morning’s too early ‘wake up call,’ for a moment in these early hours today she could briefly see her own space and critter unit reflected in its own clarity.

Her posse was in a holding pattern…

And as she observed, the hound nibbled at her hind flank, apparently chasing a flea, so therefore needed flea treatment.

She rubbed the hound where she’d itched, and in that moment’s caring exchange, the hound turned back to look at her with deep, soulful eyes as if to ask, “is this really the end between us?”

She needed more care.

The four of them needed more care and space of their own again to reclaim their natural rhythms together.

She didn’t know what to do about this, as she hadn’t felt capable for far too long on so many levels, and had been so worried about and limited by extreme lack of finances.

A great imagination.

For all of the years that she had tolerated her neighbor’s barking dogs, now it was her turn to have her family receive extended grace.

She dreamed that she was qualifying for schooling of some type – but then was rejected from the program due to her clothing, which they said was too rich.

She was like, “Whaaaaaaaat?”

Wearing the same kind of clothes nearly every day, and anything thing ‘nice’ being due to finds from the local thrift store?

When she thought of their getting to hold each other.

Down her face without crying.