And I See Losing Love is Like a Window in Your Heart

Today on my blog I'm fulfilling two assignments and posting some more recycled photos. The first one is the Saturday Scavenger Hunt. Mrs. Big Hairy Woman chose the word, which, not surprisingly, was hairy. There's a lot you can do with that, but I'm taking it literally. I've used this pic before, but nothing illustrates the extent of my hairy issues at such an early age like it. So, here's my family looking like its own version of the Village People when we lived in Phoenix, before the Village People existed. I'm the five year old white girl with dreadlocks, wearing the blue and white cowgirl outfit (probably for the fourth day in a row). See why my roommate in college diagnosed me with acute hair phobia? I'm sure I'd be tidy and well-adjusted, if only I had nice straight hair that didn't get all frizzy and messy looking.

Here's my oldest sister with one of my parents artsy/beatnicky friends in Chicago in the sixties.

My other assignment was given to me by Dana at My Gorgeous Somewhere blog. As I'm sure I've said before, I don't really trust or understand poetry. I love it, but I have no idea what makes a poem good, I just know that imagery in certain poems, can make me want to write prose. I also feel a little betrayed by poetry. All that counting of syllables, is like math disguised as language and you know how much I hate math. It's also why poetry would be an excellent discipline for my messy, cluttered brain, if only I weren't so damn lazy.

I mentioned to Dana that reading her writing, makes me want to write and that was one of the biggest compliments I could ever give a writer. So, Dana being wonderfully Dana, gave me an assignment to write an American Sentence about whatever her poems inspired in me. If you are like I was, and don't know what an American Sentence is, you can go here. Basically, it was a form invented by Allen Ginsberg as an American answer to the haiku - a sentence made up of 17 syllables.

Here is a line that Dana wrote that made me think about the whole child/parent guilt thing:

We make coffee
for ourselves but
not for our children.

At first, I thought it sounded selfish, but then coffee isn't good for children, so then it seemed sensible, if not protective. It made me think about that weird parent guilt that you feel when you do something for yourself that doesn't include your children. Then I extended it to the guilt children(and when I say children, I mean me) feel about being a pain in the ass, and complicating their parents' lives. Since my mom didn't live long enough for me to thank her or make things up to her after I became an adult, I still have a lot of remorse.

Here is another recycled photo of my mom at a party before she had children.

So, here's my American Sentence:

My mom had more fun and nicer legs before I was born - is that my fault?