naptime awakening

i don't know what the right method is; I've pored through books and listened to all my mommy friends, parents and neighbors, day care providers and super nannies offerings but none of them are there each day at 12;30 pm when i try to put my boy down. i often wonder if it's not his natural hour to rest, but this is the time of day care and the routine he needs to set his internal clock to, though it's nothing but the fiercest resistance to the whole set-up.

today was much the usual, in fact, when i sat down to write this post my hands were not on fire with the pulse of living as they are now. i can actually feel the aliveness, if you will, rushing out past the keys in a furious attempt to express the transformation that has come upon me.
i can feel my hands, i can hear the words of the lullabies, i can feel my son and his lovely doe skin that feels exactly the same as the day he entered this world and i first held him.

i feel it. i am so grateful to be alive to wake up to the internal struggle of the nap time battle. in a rush of flooding images i saw the last few years of my life, sped up on fast forward while i vainly attempted to comfort Diego to sleep. i realized how crazy and stressed I've been and what insane pressure I've felt and just unloaded it for one moment to actually feel myself rocking Diego and i felt my hands in every fiber of their aliveness. i realized how seldom in my life I've just enjoyed being where i am at that second. it's almost like i don't want to try to express this but i want to record and remember this feeling as it happened to me. i was just soothing him, but trying to really be there and suddenly i felt a heat throughout my arms and shooting out of each finger. i just really felt every bit of my body at once and then succumbed to just oozing the feeling of being there, soaking it up in waves washing over me and surrendering the control of everything to just be with it. and as i did that, he finally surrendered to the place i so desperately wanted him to go, dreamland.

this started yesterday with this crazy recollection i had of an experience I'd call mystic, a moment that slowed down and felt almost as a scene acted again and again and i remember feeling that I'd known my friends and self for centuries, which was then referred to in a book i was reading on the playground while sitting next to a still for the moment Diego. i started looking at everyone in my life as a sort of archetype and a player in a grand opera--or soap opera-- I'd call my life up til now. that's all. not that anything has changed, i can just feel my hands.

i looked at my feet and my feet were new, looked at my shoes and they were too. ---ray Charles

i looked at my hands and they looked new, looked at my feet and they did too. started to walk, i had a brand new walk, started to talk i had a brand new talk
started to sing i had a brand new song, and everyone was wondering what went wrong.---gospel song, variation sung by Ella Jenkins

it feels like that sort of thing, an out of the wilderness type moment where i just wake up, as i finally soothe my child, now really being comforted by fingers that feel every morsel of delight and shame at once, holding him and rocking him as a primal mother rather than Stacy, worn out old soul that sees her old hands in her new body that she hardly even knows or appreciates.

just feeling it all instead of flogging myself with it, for once. really embody the spirit, instead of reading the books or seeking the perfect place to open myself to something that is there all along. all the time I've wasted looking and looking in every corner of the globe, ironically, I've been dead to each moment. i only saw in flashes, when i wrote poetry for example or maybe while doing certain types of art. I've felt it in passing moments of being engrossed in my work, whether outside in the sun, or with children. I've felt it in the arms of a lover, but often that led to grasping at things that i thought would make this or that experience, lead me somewhere, anywhere, but here is where I've wanted to be all along. just wakening to the moment is heady and humbling at once.
the only reason i am writing the words is to hold on to the feeling and analyse it so i never forget. these electric threads connecting me like a mass of wires to the outer world, tethering me into an ancient but modern role in the world, aren't just trudging on the path with heavy pockets.
Christ, imagine never looking up to feel the warmth in the sun but always cursing the scorch of it's heat. I've been heaping up resentments and blames the way my mom collects clothes and my sister drinks coffee. i watch while drama unfolds before me, in my own family, in my extended relationships, and my searching. there it is, hotly smoking and mirrored world outside me, in Israel and Palestine, in Iraq and the USA, in Beijing and Tibet, in Obama and McCain. reflected and reflecting, like the moment of truth in Mexico with the energy of the ruins, and the push pull of the moment, in china again without self looking for self, which could happen over and over again. it could hit me over the head like carrie did big in the new sex and the city movie, with the flowers, the petals flying and her saying i knew you would do this to me. it's the drama of evermore over and i recognize it, i want to shout to carrie, i knew it, too. and the moment in ancient times that overlaps with the moment of now. we are my blood and i am theirs, and yours, Diego here now, too in the mix of it. i want to love every last one of the people connected to this child. if not for myself alone, for his sake the trials and dramas must come to a close.
i have known all along that there is more, but have been so busy looking that as they say here it is. i wanted to bring him in to my world so that it would never be empty. not having him in the world at all could have been my mistake. these aren't the best reasons to have a child. people should be seriously trained in the art of rearing children rather than being let loose to procreate like the wild things that we are. i know that he didn't ask to be here. i had no freaking clue it would get so limitless and so personal all at once. my god, every moment i've lost through the lens of looking for the next one or focusing on the one that just went by. having a child brought me to my senses, over and over again but even so i have stubbornly resisted and rubbed salt in many old wounds.

he's been a load to me, too. and he's felt that from within me, from the moment he was latched on to my uterine wall. now i need to guide him in this crazy world. sometimes it ain't pretty. i feel as i force him to comply with the rules of the day, like meal times or nap schedules. i feel the pressure from outside forces to do things with this child i would never want to force upon an enemy, yet i know so well why i and he both need the nap to continue. it's been awful struggling up til now. i wonder if i were more present, would he respond in kind. within just a few moments of my being really focused on every single sensation, of being there fully, allowed him to surrender in a true slumber that has been hell-worn to try and bring on by casting all the images of what should work. lack of feeling it, of stepping in to the role and doing it timelessly and gracefully, with gratitude for the chance at all, has been bitterly frustrating and hard won. I've been in a fog of unfeeling-ness. not even a word, but i don't care. my shift key isn't working in case anyone but me reads this stuff and notices that i never use the correct punctuation or capitalize things properly anymore. i apologize for the confusion.

now i am seeing the vast connections to the outer world both created and reflected, and falling into a place rather than worrying through it, and feeling the fiber of being rather than hoping to feel it or working toward it or feeling helpless in the face of it.
there are many cycles to be broken and changed. directions are shifting in the wind of the future, but nothing can be there before it arrives. or at least it sounds good to me. all i know is, i feel bone-through alive and lit with love rather than scorched down with the fear of every last blamed thing.
and my sweet, heaven-sent lesson of love and duty, blessed treasure of a boy as dear as the coursing blood in my fingertips, is finally sound asleep and dreaming.