La Femme Accroupie

I am the Mother of a teenage girl. It’s a hard job. Hard like mining for rocks, hard. I wasn’t always that. Once upon a time, I was the mother of a little baby girl in an open fielded place, a drive through town called “Two Rock” a municipality of less than 450 people near the Oceanic Pacific Playground [OPP] on or around the 38th parallel North, and 112 degrees West. Minor details. My main job in this place was to raise a little female who arrived here by way of the milky way to my husband and Me. She, a cis-girl-baby who sang with a high pitched voice that recited adorable and loving things, sweet nothings, seeds of blessed golden rice spoken directly to me, words that only I could understand. We had our own language. When she rolled over for the first time, her Father and Me high fived. When she said her first word, “gato”, we opened the good wine. When she ate what piggy ate, we were happy as clams. When she said her second word, “hockey”, we were confused. When we realized it was “a qui” we started to plan her quinceanera. When she laughed, we laughed. When she finally slept, we cried with joy. When she was a baby, we congratulated ourselves all the time. There was so much to celebrate. Life. Our principessa contadina. Everything about my girl made me want to celebrate. Childhood is for crescendoing.

When my Mother was busy Mothering Me, there wasn’t as much celebration. I was raised by a Mother, an artist and teacher, and a Father, a skeptical engineer, citizen scientist, and part time philosopher. We heralded from a variety of Appalachian adjacent countryside, a forested rural slope of suburban, outer, Pittsburgh, Pa. [OPP]. The name of my town was “Export” (# population dwindle doomscroll foreshadowing). All of Me and all of my hyphens hail in some way shape or form, from Export, Pa. Me, who lived at the last school bus stop on a one lane road. My home, my place, my past, was a 30 minute bike ride to or from the Sunoco station on old route 22. It was a quick car ride to the barn where the horses and geese lived with my friend, Connie. Connie’s Mother was an artist hiding out as a farmer’s wife. Connie’s Mom worked extra hard. Export was home to 800 people, 4 of them being us, 7 of them being Connie's family, 789 of them being upper lower and lower middle class hard working families, company workers, lifers, their wives and their girls and boys and teenage troublemakers. All of the people in Export worked hard at something. My parents worked hard to build us a house and a Home all in one. My house was 12 miles to school, as the kestrel hawk flies. We served our memory making together, family style on a green tree-ed plot down the old highway, past the licensed Buster Brown cobbler, the Moose Hall and the fire department, a bit further on down, past the tool and die, across the one lane bridge and directly across the street from the last active strip mine. The land we built upon was at or around, the 40th parallel North and 79 degrees West of where they removed all that coal from the mountain, two rocks at a time. Miner details.

At the turn of the new century, the 21st, when I was first Mothering, I was also entrepreneuring which meant that I could not do either thing totally. And, that’s Ok. I was a 90 percenter which meant that I was working 180% of the time. Math was not my original jam but who cares about the numbers when love is the engine and you can go really fast, without looking, for a while. Connie’s Mother, for example, on that rural Western Pennsylvanian slope, she worked 270% of the day. She loved to paint sorrowful and lonely animal portraits, probably as a tonic for the first 90% that was raising five kids or to balance the second 90% of her time used to feed, tend, kill and cook the birds on the farm. It’s easy to make time when making things from love or necessity. Easy as pi.

My daughter loves birds too. She watches them, plays with them, draws the and writes songs about them. By the time my daughter turned five, the big seizures of her early years had subsided but the waking seizures were very much an everyday mystery. Me-d would sit and stare out the window, like an Alchemist molting copper into bronze. She looked like she was in prayer, like she was tranced by the patterns of the birds, like they were little floaties swimming around in the vitreous humour of her eye, molecules of nothing in her field of vision. Flying through the clouds. So, at first, the staring thing didn’t register as a thing to science about. These being my foggier pre-hypochondrial times and whatnot. But, the more she would quietly crouch and stare, not looking at anything I could see too, the more I started to look at her doing it. She was deepening into a place only she knew, slowly puzzling through the mystery, making her own Art. She had acquired the look of a very small queen, communing with her kingdom, her power and her glory all in an instant. With a loud noise from me, with a clap or a bang, I could snap her back. How rude of me.

I love birds too, who among us doesn’t dream about flying? When I was a kid, I liked to watch the birds. I loved to listen to them too. The hawks were exported to us seasonally. They came every year in migration to Western Pennsylvania. They were small, colonial sized and blue and grey, a mash up of union and confederate uniforms in keeping with the history of the area. They have white bellies and flanks of black barring and sometimes spots but always rust colored wings, Western Pennsylvania rust, Pittsburgh rust, a badge of environmental dishonor, a label matched by the Kestral’s seasonal cawing. The sounds of my childhood. I carved out my own roots in the woods of Export, phoneless, untethered from watchers, free to roam. Left to my own space and left alone to watch (only) nature in battle with herself. I observed and stared out into the woods. When that got boring, I went to Connie's house, which was a working farm. We worked on 4-H knowledge and achievements together. Spending time with Connie "doing 4-H" was another way to say that mostly, we did chores. We shoveled stuff, we scrubbed stuff, we made things to earn our pins. But, mostly, we talked to the animals while her Mother painted on paper with ink, in the background, in between dirty jobs. Both Connie and her Mother seldom spoke at all, they were quiet and serious gals who signed with their hands to explain things. Theirs was a physical language, seemingly custom made just for the two of them. I didn't know how to use my hands to contribute so mostly I would linger silently and narrate in my head. Sometimes I helped by holding the goose still. Sometimes I could not watch. Farms are dirty places. Cleaning them taught me how to be a warrior. As soon as you did a farm thing, you had to clean it up.

When Me-d grew past her onesies and started walking and talking she slipped away into the patterned surface of the lake more regularly. Little did we know, she was actually in training. But, we didn’t see through to that then. We were too busy playing twenty questions; animal, vegetable, mineral or fuzzy ipad case. We wanted to keep her busy. When she was alone, her proximity to the mystery was simply experienced as a threat to both her father and Me. She didn’t take us with her when she left. She liked the space in between the doing. She was too young to go somewhere so far away all alone, or so I thought. And, yet she tripped through the days of her fifth and sixth year with songs in her own language, she hinted at what she connected to there, behind the stare, underneath her made up music and deeply intuitive reach. My little violent femme. Somewhere in between the granite mountain and the sculpture lies the battleground of the artist. She was a crouching tiger. She had deja vu-d with the hidden dragon and she spoke frequently to her in autonomous sensory meridian responses. ASMR whispers. She flew around the sun and through her own innerspace with the wingspan of a phoenix. We watched and waited and finally her somnambulance was diagnosed. But, we did not follow through with the medicine. We left it alone.

Much later after all the frontal lobe tonic-clonics were long gone. We took her to a dojo for outside warrior training. The sensei was a hard mistress, a black magic woman. She was a Gyrfalcon, a predator hawk. A Jade Fox. She decapitated our little gyrl like a raptor diving on a pullet, swift and merciless. Week after weak, my little daughter sat on the tatami mat, curled up in defensiveness. I witnessed my child for the first time in her short life, take the protective position, la petite femme accroupie, one that is not taken from contemplative strategies for how to be at war with the human body internally, but for strategic defense in war with others. She was being schooled in how to disarm the other. AKA, how to win at war. Except, there is no winning at war. War is not the answer. Run Lola run.

When I was a teenager, I was a Connie. I did my chores because they were mine, not because I was cadjolded or bribed, maybe because I'd be punished. But, also because, you know, honor thy Mother and Father so that I may live long on the land. I want to give my daughter some of that motivation. But, motivation cannot be given, it only appears when it is earned. I want to steal some space now to find my knife and when I have purchased, for free, time by myself, I will see all that area for energy where the nagging and pleading was. Now I am free to deja vu behind my own eyes, slip into some bright light auras. My menopausal wipe outs look like two rocks, one is a tiny baby bird pecking to get out of her egg and the other maybe a statue trying to break free. It’s hard to tell now that I am old and my sight is secondary to my imagination and I am alone with it, without a sensai to teach me where to strike.

Sometimes, I imagine myself as a chameleon. Sometimes I fancy myself as very french. Never have I called myself an artist. But, in the thick if it I could see myself as a Camille. Camille Claudel. That one was an artist who sculpted beautiful bodies of bronze that outlasted her own. The story of this french Camille is not known widely like the story of her sensei, the one who nearly ruined her but not before she exported some of herself into her art through granite and marble. I am besotted by the story of Camille Claudel because it carries human frailty and beauty together in the forward space of watching someone else's Art be the line to God. Her Art illuminates that path in a way that it is able to cushion all the pain that she chiseled into the forever after so the viewer can take a sliver of it in just by looking. No doing required. It's a little thank you that she offered to strangers and the future even though she never had that favor returned while she did battle on the Earth. She froze the sensuality of anguish and lust and fear and spite and ecstasy and death and war and love in her art for bystanders all the while she carried it in her own body. All women do that in one way or another. Most of us just don’t know how to use the knife to write it down. #Camillestrong

We have a hawk. He is a big fat albino monster who comes around every three months. He swoops down like an old timey Manchurian ninja warrior, a scarred and forgetful but brutish bruteo. I saw him decapitate one of our hens. My daughter watched him carry off with a standard size chicken in his talons (ironically our chicken named “Hawk” # retarded retrospect). It is scary to see battle up close, even in nature. It is an irreversible tattoo to see battle upclose with humans. I might be sorry that I took my daughter to aikido lessons, it wasn’t for her. Sorry, not sorry. #Insurrectionday. My teenage self is Sorry that I did not have a Jade Fox to trick me, to drill me, to steal my talents and sharpen them for a greater power. I wish I had had my own sensei. Maybe that’s why I keep trying to transfer that onto my original/copy. I could have used one to fight off the predator hawks then.

Women are works of art in progress, right up until the very next beginning which is always just around the next corner somewhere near the equator ; zero degrees latitude. Oi-Zuki details. The teenage years are the live drawing classes to prepare you for getting some of yourself on paper. Exploring the human form in all its sensualities and shapes. Looking without touching just to see how it fits together. Naturally. The trick, is to be in the room with the model. Actually being there. Not a photograph. Not an avatar. A human. A life. A form. The key is to show up and be with yourself without a phone. Don’t be afraid to be a Camille, daughter, the world may be trying to absorb you into the meta but bronze is forever. Bronze is a rock.