I won't have far to go when I go crazy

Everyone who feels lots of pain regarding their mothers should bring a teddy bear to Logan Square, right there by the eagle. And then we should wail on those teddy bears with all our might. Like Dr. Phil making those wives beat their chair/husbands. How fucked up would that be?

I came up with a continuum about mother pain the other night. It had been a rough, rough week. I get to a place where it is all understanding and love, compassion for my hurt, hurt mama, and then she does some petty ass thing and I could destroy her, I have to go in my room sobbing and hash it out with God and demons.

I was thinking about how there are people who have never doubted, and do not doubt to this day, that their mothers love them. And then there are people who know that their mothers love them, sort of, but they also know that most of the time they didn't feel loved. This feeling loved is the real continuum. On the other end are those that did not feel loved and have to face that maybe they weren't loved. This is tricky. This is where being loved and feeling loved skip tracks and get all mangled up and there I am, dazed, thrown from the wreck and crying like an Oscar winner. Keening like an Armenian woman at a funeral. Hurt.

I was also thinking about trees and all we can learn from tree rings. And thinking that I have little bubbles or cavities interspersed in my rings that map those times that I felt truly and deeply unloved. Scaring times that I moved through but I think they remain and every once and awhile some jab--from my mother, myself, anyone--snags and I get wrecked for a bit. On a scale from 1 to 10 of feeling loved, 10 being all loved, 1 not so much, I have been a 2, but now I am an 8. That seems right. 10 is just greedy, and would probably involve sex.

And many of the kids I work with are stuck at 2 or 3, long term, and they have burdens and memories that are breathtaking in their emptiness. My tiny ripples of hurt fully acknowledge their puniness in comparison.

For some reason I was also thinking that I want a concrete answer about this mother stuff. I want the world to stop, everyone to close their eyes, and answer from 1 to 10 how loved they feel by their mothers. I know it doesn't correlate to anything--absolutely nothing correlates, there will be no answers--but I just want to know. And it isn't just mothers, it's all things, love comes from everywhere, but right now I am thinking about mothers all the time. My grandmother and my mother and I, and they women I work with and the motherless children, everything keeps this in my mind and in my heart.

Not that I don't think about other things, including: Project Runway, am I going to have to declare bankruptcy, how loved I feel by God, how maybe there is no God, are all my principals a way to keep myself hobbled and meek, I ate too much, I miss my cousins, is the car going to make it, I love this song, I love this kid, this kid is going to make me pinch him, or bite him.