Here I am awake at 2:46 am because my brain has consistently been pinging at this time of night. Now is it my brain, or my bladder -- probably both. But I wake up and sleep becomes elusive.
Also contributing to my no sleep are two almost microscopic cuts on my left index finger and my right thumb respectively. Both small incursions into my flesh are products of my own loss of focus and inattentiveness over the past while. It might be a bad health sign that these small damages have been stealing my peace for almost 2 weeks, or it may just be a function of their locations. But whatever it is, they are currently throbbing for attention. Wrapping them tightly in small bandages turns the howl of a fresh painfully angry wound into something more persistently nagging.
Pagan has chosen to keep me company during this morning's awakeness. She is curled up to my left with her head on my knee. Her purr is a steady hum in rhythm to her breathes. I feel more than see small green eyes pondering me. Cheering me on perhaps? Has she come into my life as my muse? My night-time guardian?
The recent realization that my brain has likely occupied a spot on the autism spectrum continues to unravel me on more than one level. The Ah Hah moments play out more as Holy Shit hours. Growing up I now realize I was some type of an alien in my community. It was more than being a nonMormon. More than living a home with no Father, no padre familias. More than living what I now recognize as poverty, although at the time it was just home. I really did see the world significantly differently than my friends. The Mormon love-bombing that surrounded me first as a small child and then again as I entered adolescence had no effect on me because my eyes saw something different in the stories I was told. There was no measurable difference between the fables contained in the pages of the Bible and even more so the BoM. They were just as cautionary and fantastical as the Just So Stories and the Wizard of Oz. They were words on a page written long before I arrived on planet Earth. Even now it seems incredulous to me that anyone would consider them some type of capital T Truth.
Mom helped with this mindset exposing me to ideas larger than world boundaried by 7th street on the west, Highway 2 or First Avenue on the North, ?? to the East, and ?? framing the south. I was allowed to sit with the adults as they talked about, well, talked about the stuff of adult conversations. Relationships that were failing or starting. Friends and family who were in need of some type of help -- help to leave a failing marriage or stay in one. Mom was of the generation where marriage was . . . well . . . you got what you got. For better or worse were not just words from a tradition hundreds of years old. [find out about origin of modern marriage vows] For better or worse was what life became your life. I can almost hear Mom talking to Helen Bowden as they sat at the dining room table drinking coffee in the winter and beer in the summer. Both of them had lived a marriage that seemed to provide an inordinate amount of Worse - for mother in the form of early widowhood and for Helen something else that I now recognize as likely physical abuse from a husband who took his bad luck out on her.
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