Month: November 2021

Hard Hitting

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Taking a pause (Santa Claus) from Bette, Bobby, Davey, and Em today because of my reality.

Today we are safe
Today we are healthy
Today we know love 
Today we have access to clean water
Today we have access to good food
Today we have a comfortable home
Today we have access to health care
Today we have reliable transportation
Today our bills are paid
Today we have access to education
Today we have access to the internets
Today we have plans with friends

We are okay. Luck/Blessings are abundant. We are okay today.

Yesterday SonHerisme got punched in the face at school. No lingering physical effects – redness on his cheek without bruising because he was turning his head away towards something else, when the kid jumped up and punched him. He is hurt, angry and confused.

Attending a small Montessori school, and SonHerisme being who he is, this is unexpected. He says he hasn’t felt safe around this other kid for a while because he has seen him punch and knock people to the ground at school this year, and then the kid lies about it. The other kid has been suspended at least once already this year. The other kid’s older brother was a menace when he was at the school and the dad has massive creeper vibes. Pre-COVID, I saw the dad trying to take covert upskirt photos at the grocery store cafe until I pushed my cart over, stood in front of him, blocking the rest of the cafe. He left. Man, my heart hurts for whatever abusive machismo environment those boys have been raised in and for any of their future partners.

My heart hurts more for my SonHerisme.

He is constantly being asked to rise above it all, to be resilient, to be brave, to be better than… I want him to have more moments of not building resilience, bravery, maturity above and beyond crappy adults. He is worn out y’all. At 13 my baby is wearing out and building a skin so thick I’m not sure anyone will ever be able to break through and he will not be able to break out of it.

He has always been big for his age which brings the expectation that he behave more maturely than his peers with harsher consequences when he developmentally appropriately did not. “You’re bigger, you should’ve known you would hurt them when you pushed them out of the way or beat them every time in the race or jumped higher and got all of the monopoly money…” Guilty here as I probably have said those things too in context of, “I know it isn’t fair buddy, but you will be blamed when something goes wrong with the physical play because you are a boy and you are the biggest boy.”

I did tell him about MrexH being moved to a facility. MrexH is going to a place where he will not have access to electronics for some undetermined amount of time. This means that SonHerisme is not required to try and meet his father on RoBlox, or plan on any parenting coordinator psychologist facilitated phone calls, until further notice. I was told, but did not share with SonHerisme, that MrexH expressed concern that he will ever receive access to his electronics. My friend believes that MrexH will not be going home from this place, whatever it is. If I think about the situation MrexH is in, I am going to break down into a spiral I’m not sure I can get back out of. I’m hoping by popping it out here, I can get it out of me enough to avoid that.

I do not know what kind of “treatment facility,” MrexH is going to. I do know that the facility is closer to us than where he has been living and makes us accessible by bus/car where before he would have needed to board an airplane.

I suspect it is not voluntary, based on the electronic access issue.

It’s it all too much and I am having to type almost every single word 2-to-3 times because my brain-to-finger function is not operating correctly. Everything everywhere is hitting everyone so very hard.

My forehead is numb.

Throughout the day I will remind myself 

Today we are safe 
Today we are healthy 
Today we know love  
Today we have access to clean water 
Today we have access to good food 
Today we have a comfortable home 
Today we have access to health care 
Today we have reliable transportation 
Today our bills are paid 
Today we have access to education 
Today we have access to the internets 
Today we have plans with friends

We are okay. Luck/Blessings are abundant. We are okay today. I hope that you are okay as well. {{{hug}}} your loved ones if you can as you can.

Love, Ms. Herisme xoxo

ps I had the most vivid lucid dream last night with a person in it that I do not personally know and they were really struggling with themselves. I tried to change the dream, and was able to switch around some of the things so that I was less impacted by the person, but they continued to struggle. I hope that is not their case in real life, and I send them peace and comfort. It just occurs to me that maybe this was my dream life trying to make sense of my life… I don’t want to do this anymore.

bookswap at the park this afternoon and a day of laundry/helping MotherHerisme/all the things of being me

good luck us

i do this to show with as much honesty as I can, that as you struggle you are not alone in the hopes that I too am not alone with all of this

The Flo

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In September of 1846 after honeymooning in Paris and being disowned by Elizabeth’s father, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Robert Browning moved to Florence, Italy. 

late 1840's Florence, Italy saw:
itself being a part of the Hapsburg- Lorraine Dynasty
continued recovery from the 1844 floods
tourism as a significant industry 
premiere of Verde's opera MacBeth
Plato-Florence railway opens

As a late 20th century middle-schooler tourist girl, I fell in love with Florence. I loved walking the streets with the fanciest storefronts littered with tacky tourist dangling spots too. I loved being offered drinks because I looked much older than I was, and sneaking bits of wine. I loved the heavy humid smells of fragrant food, overheated people, and fishy water. I saw my own David (Michelangelo)! I learned about the Medici, Alighieri, Machiavelli, da Vinci, Dante*, Botticelli, the Ponte Vecchio, Fountain of Neptune, the Duomo, Raphael… and so much more. I used my own pocket money to purchase a gilded leather bookmark and snazzy baby blue ankle boots. The boots are long gone back to dust, but the bookmark is still in my keepsakes drawer, as pristine as ever. I was so proud of being able to buy beautiful things from Italy. I loved having this experience, and remember spots and images to this burgeoning old-lady-times day.

I did not know about the history of the Barrett-Brownings (or a shit ton of other stuff, which I still do not know anything much about anything much and the more I think I am about to know, the less I see that I actually know – you know?). If I had known, I would have been one even more day-dreamy love moony middle school girl meandering the streets of Florence with whispers in my (then) curly blonde head of:

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
(E.B.B. Sonnets From the Portuguese #43)

By then I had felt the full force of my first major crush. An older boy, natch, with thick wavy dark hair and happy eye smiles. He said I’d grown up a lot over the summer and looked fantastic. I think I melted to the floor because I was not aware he even knew my name. Which is a ridiculous thing for me to think since there were probably a total of 150 kids from middle through high school and we all shared the same classrooms and teachers. Then again, I probably only spoke to a handful of people because that’s how I roll(ed). I was (am) of the awkwards.

I miss the clear fond voices, which, being drawn and reconciled into the music of Heaven's undefiled, call me no longer. 
(E.B.B. Sonnets From the Portuguese #33)

The ebb and flow of all of the things.

Love, Ms. Herisme xoxo

ps I believe I have found our Miss Emily Bond Anderson and Mr. David Stewart! To be continued…

*I KNOW that Dante and Alighieri are the same person… brain blip blamed on enthusiasm and lingering real work awaiting my attentzione

The EBB

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It is believed that sometime between 1845-1846 Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote a collection of 44 sonnets. These sonnets eventually came to be published in 1850 under the title Sonnets From the Portuguese at the encouragement of her husband, the poet playwright Robert Browning. Elizabeth is known for wanting to keep these love sonnets private, since they were written only for her husband’s eyes. Robert claimed her sonnets comparable to Shakespeare and pushed Elizabeth into publishing them. Elizabeth agreed as long as they were published with the deceptive title Sonnets From the Portuguese, which were never written by a Portuguese person or translated from Portuguese. “My little Portuguese,” is a pet name Bobby used for Ba, or Bette (pronounced bet-TEA for reasons). Or so the story of the Barrett Browning couple goes…

A Taurus born 6 March 1806, Elizabeth's world saw:
 
Anglo-Spanish and Napoleonic Wars
transatlantic slave trade about to be outlawed from anywhere in the British Empire 
Lewis and Clark on their journey home after reaching the Pacific Ocean
Georgiana Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire's death
the Holy Roman Empire collapse after almost a millennium 
Webster publish his first dictionary 
the birth of the man who was later to create the concord grape (Ephraim Wales Bull)
and George III (yes, THAT George III) as king
At age 39/40, Elizabeth's world saw:

her first meeting with Robert Browning
Edgar Allen Poe publishes The Raven
the United States annexes Texas
cholera pandemic
the Great famine in Ireland
Wagner's Tannhäuser opera debut
first Anglo-Sikh war
the saxophone is patented by Adolphe Sax
Victoria is queen
Elizabeth and Robert marry on September 12, 1846
At age 44, Elizabeth's world saw:

the Britannia Bridge open across the Menai Straights in Wales
a hippopotamus arrive to the London Zoo (not seen in England since Roman times)
Taiping Rebellion
Rudolf Clausius publishes the basic ideas of second law of thermodynamics
Great Famine in Ireland begins to subside
British Raj transfer monies to Persian Shia Islamic holy cities
historic Pacific Highway begins development in Washington State
Cesár Ritz born
William Wordsworth's death
her little boy, Pen, turn 1-year-old
Sonnets from the Portuguese published

82 years later, in 1932, Grosset & Dunlap (now part of Penguin Random House) of New York City published a Cameo Classics edition of Sonnets from the Portuguese. The Cameo Classics books, according to an unattributed faculty blog from Ohio Weslyan University, this series of books started out being sold for $.69 each (about $14 value today). The Cameo Classics edition measures 8.5×5.5inches, 110 pages with silhouette illustrations. The book is hard-bound in blue fabric with gold gilt lettering on the spine and a Guttenberg medal inset on the front cover. The black slipcase for the book has a blue printed graphic glued to the front showcasing an illustration from the book, with an alligator skin treatment to the back of the case.

Sometime between 1932 and 1936, David Stewart purchased this book and gifted it to Emily Bond Anderson with “Best Wishes for Valentine’s Day.”

On Wednesday, August 12, 1936 at 1:00am, “In the Country,” David penned a “Series to E.” titled: Meditations. This took David 5 pages to write in precise 30 paragraphed flowing handwriting, finishing with the word, “END.” David has used some red pen for emphasis on the words, “TO,” “FROM,” “WITH,” and underlining a few phrases on page 14 of the book.

85 years later, on a sweet Montessori Mafia at the park playground afternoon, I picked up the Cameo Classics 1932 edition of Sonnets from The Portuguese at our little community bookswap on the worn picnic table underneath the green topped timber-pitched shelter. I found this copy from David to Emily with David’s 5 page note tucked inside. Nobody at the park knows who David or Emily are.

What I know so far is that the book looks to have been moved about multiple times with wearing on the spine and book case as if it’s been pulled on and off of many shelves many, many times with a careless coffee/teacup stain on the case illustration. But the book inside appears to have hardly been opened or read at all. There are no creases. The gluing and spine are intact like a new book. The 5 page note from David to E. also appears to have never been opened or read.

It feels like… magic

Love, Ms Herisme xoxo

to be continued…