Surprised by wandering through my old sketch book/journal, I found a couple more poems to share. I captured my life in poetry in all its nuances—the sentimental and the grieving heart.
Surprised by a sentimental heart
Now, I’m That Generation
April 17, 2002
I’m that generation now,
The Oldies Station
I hear “Crystal Blue Persuasion”
And am transported back
30 years or more!
Could it be—30 years!
An innocent teenager’s heart
Touched by this song,
Then and now
I wandered down life’s path,
Lost for so many years,
Then recently re-found
And the song has the same power.
My heart softens
I cave in and wish
For all that wasn’t!
I used to watch for all that could be!
A song evokes that for me,
Transportation back to the moment.
Surprised by my grieving heart
Ever since Dad died, I thought I hadn’t written a poem about him and his death, but I found this one, a treasure for sure! The memory I describe surprised me—yet I can feel the security I felt in his arms every night as he put me to bed.
I Knew Back Then
August 24, 2002
Every night as a child,
I clasped your neck,
Not wanting you to leave,
Desperate, frantic.
The lump that’s in my throat tonight
Has sat their deep in my throat
For nearly 50 years—
Blocking my air, my thought, my life!
I didn’t want you to go!
I knew back then
You’d leave.
Your slipping through my bedroom door
Would eventually be slipping out of my life.
I didn’t want you to go.
I knew back then
I’d be left.
The door that slam shut
The hollow slam of the door
with me inside and you gone.
I knew back then
I’d lose you.
That I’d grow up—
You’d grow old.
Then you’d be gone.
I didn’t want you to go.
But wanting didn’t stop it!
I lost you six years ago—
Death and cigarettes took you away,
Too early,
Too quickly!
I wanted to share today
with you,
The laughter with mom
My place I’ve created
DAR 2003 (Dance-A-Rama, 2003, square dance festival I chaired)
This story that is me
And you.
I didn’t want you to die.
I wanted to clasp your neck
And beg you to sleep
with me,
To protect me and
Hold me tight.
But you died,
And I have no one
to protect me
today—
but me!
Finally
These two poems surprised me today. Just by chance, I grabbed my old sketchbook/journal and thumbed through. Do you have any surprises lurking in forgotten notebooks? Do you dare be surprised? Let me know what you find, if you dare!
Visit my website to find out about my new book, Coronavirus Reflections: Bitter or Better? and my other five books and three cookbooks: https://laradasbooks.com
Waiting? For a dream to come true? Waiting a long time? No answer? The wrong answer? A reoccurring heartache in my younger life came up last week: waiting to get pregnant. After reading a Bible study program on waiting, back I went forty years ago.
I married my first husband in September 1973, and in December I stopped taking my birth control pills, hoping to get pregnant, and it happened easily. Around three months pregnant, I walked into see my gynecologist’s office pregnant, thinking I would hear the heart beat for the first time and walked out not pregnant. I had had something he called a “mis-abort.”
In Googling it, I found “A missed abortion is a miscarriage in which your fetus didn’t form or has died, but the placenta and embryonic tissues are still in your uterus. It’s known more commonly as a missed miscarriage. It’s also sometimes called a silent miscarriage.”
After that life-changing experience, I have no memory of how I drove home to southwest Denver from downtown. At 20 years old, I had my heart set on having a baby. My brother and his wife had a baby; my friends had children. I had been raised to get married and have children, so it was in my DNA.
Monthly, waiting for my period became torture. When my period came, I sobbed and spent the rest of the month longing for it to happen. It had happened so effortlessly once. Why not now?
After a few more unsuccessful years and frustration, we decided to seek out the help of a fertility specialist, and we found the best—Dr. Bradley who started the Bradley Method of childbirth. “The Bradley method of natural childbirth (also known as “husband-coached childbirth”) is a method of natural childbirth developed in 1947 by Robert A. Bradley, M.D. (1917–1998) and popularized by his book Husband-Coached Childbirth, first published in 1965. The Bradley method emphasizes that birth is a natural process: mothers are encouraged to trust their body and focus on diet and exercise throughout pregnancy; and it teaches couples to manage labor through deep breathing and the support of a partner or labor coach.”
At this time, I felt encouraged after our first appointment with Dr. Bradley, and he invited us to his house that evening where women who had just given birth to their children through the Bradley Method showed them off. I reveled in the possibility.
Then he started fertility testing on my ex-husband first, simply because a man’s test is much easier than a woman—a sperm sample. After this test, we received the bad news. He had a disorder called aspermia, “inability to produce or ejaculate semen.”
When Dr. Bradley relayed this information to us, he also told my ex-husband that the miscarriage I had earlier was caused by weak sperm—hard news for a man to hear! He offered alternatives: artificial insemination or adoption.
Broken hearted, we isolated individually and grieved over this major loss. I toyed with the idea of artificial insemination until I found out it would be from a donor and not my ex-husband. He basically refused.
During a Christmas holiday during this heart wrenching time, my larger family unit met together to have the holiday with my grandmother on my dad’s side. Toddlers and babies abounded, and one proud cousin strutted around the house and repeated often throughout the evening, “Aren’t we a fertile bunch!” He had no idea what we were going through, but I cringed every time he professed our family’s fertility.
Being in our twenties, we continued to be surrounded by friends and family members pregnant with families growing. I ached to join the ranks.
After much thought and prayer, our only alternative became adoption. We decided on the Lutheran Social Services as the adoption agency to use. They handled the process differently than other adoption agencies. Instead of doing the deep investigation into our backgrounds immediately, they waited until it was closer to our adoption date. They felt if you waited three years or more, you had nothing to hide.
From then on, we attended meetings and learned about the process. We saw other couples see their dreams come true, so we waited, feeling positive about our chances.
After waiting three years, we finally received notification that we would receive our baby in six months. Excitedly, I started knitting booties and baby afghans. My Mom and I bought baby clothes and blankets. So did my mother-in-law. Everyone joined in our excitement. I just couldn’t believe it.
But with the notification of the baby coming, the adoption agency would start the background checks, and my ex-husband knew that. I knew my husband had a drinking problem and had been unfaithful to me, but I loved him and looked away. What I didn’t know was he had much more to hide than I thought, so he left me.
At the same time, we divorced and had to cancel the adoption, and that ended my hopes of having a child.
Over the years, I have grieved repeatedly the barren state of my life. In 1995, I turned to poetry to express the pain:
Childless
The pain of being without child! Eternally alone!
No child has burst forth from my womb
nor sucked at my breast.
Empty cavity deep inside waiting to be filled with life.
Waiting, waiting, waiting!
I have no child to pass my stories on to,
my history,
our history,
how Grandad created our ranch,
how special Branson Christmas trees are
because we cut them down from our ranch, our land,
how to do the Jessie polka and waltz,
how I was almost named Jessie.
My name, Larada, that should be passed on to my granddaughter,
like my grandmother passed it on to me,
every other generation for 7 generations.
Cheated, robbed, failed!
Not woman,
not mom,
nothing!
Does a child define a woman?
Does the lack of them define me?
Names and faces dance in circles in my mind--
Lael Marie
Patrick Lawrence
Curly blond hair, blue inquisitive eyes.
Bright red hair, changeable hazel eyes.
A mixture of him and me.
I have no daughter that has my smile
nor a son with my Dad’s red hair.
No one to call me, “Mommy.”
The empty cavity waiting to be filled has grown larger
no longer just my womb,
but now my whole being,
my every thought,
ME!
Aching, lonely, pulsating to the beat of life
missing what never was!
In a way, it’s strange that this came up now; I’m 67 years old. God gave me lots of children in my classroom over the years. My brother and his wife shared their three children with me, and now they have shared their children, too. My cousin shared her three daughters, so God filled the void.
I ultimately believe my childless life speaks of God’s mercy and love. For many years after my first marriage, I had an unsettled life which would have been hard on a child. As I waited for the answer I wanted, God in his infinite mercy gave me different response to my prayer for a child and said, “No!” and I understand why today.
So, don’t take having children for granted. Many women’s hearts break every day for the lack of a baby suckling at their breast. If you have children, be grateful!
Did you have trouble getting pregnant? If, not, why are your children a blessing to you today?
~HAVE YOU ORDERED A PERSONALLY AUTOGRAPHED COPY OF THE FLIPPO BIOGRAPHY? AVAILABLE NOW! Go to the homepage on my website & pay for it there: https://www.laradasbooks.com
~Here’s Christmas greetings from Flippo & Neeca, featuring his song, “When Its Christmas Time in Texas”:https://youtu.be/mpJCUGffU3A
ALL FOUR E-BOOK FORMATS OF FLIPPO’S BIOGRAPHY AVAILABLE NOW:
The numbers increase daily. Today, Sunday, April 26, 2020, at 10:58 pm MST, the world has identified 2,994,349 coronavirus cases! Nearing three million!
One month ago, today, I did what I do when facing a problem in my world—I started writing poetry to defuse the feelings—to get a perspective. Also like during other tragedies I’ve faced in my life, I didn’t start immediately. I needed time to identify and process the feelings before I could look at a blank sheet of paper and commence! When the words came, again like so many times before, they tumbled out effortlessly, so I thought I’d share them with you.
I wrote the poem below two and a half weeks after returning home from Madrid, Spain and deciding to self-quarantine for two weeks, a month from today. We left Spain on March 8th, and the coronavirus exploded there on the 9th, so Lin and I felt uneasy about the possibilities of our exposure. If exposed, we wanted to be sure not to spread it.
Those two weeks, I didn’t write poetry, but I worked on my current book project. I focused and used this time provided to do various tasks I needed to do to finish the book. But I didn’t capture my feelings in words through poetry—I couldn’t yet. My world was spinning! A friend spoke the word “Fear.” I looked deep inside and realized, “Yeah, that’s it!” In stressful times, I do—whatever needs to be done, then I feel. Yes, I recognized fear as it coursed through my veins. My hands shook; my stomach hurt. My restless sleep left me tired and the repeated dark space during sleep I fell into each night didn’t refresh me. Yes, I dreamed, but no detail remained the next morning—only a feeling of despair and darkness.
Fear, okay, and what else? It took time for me to arrive at other feelings: faith, devastation, panic, empathy, and grief. As you can see, what a mixture I felt scattered wildly, but isn’t that being human? As complicated feeling human beings, we have the capacity to feel a wide range of feelings, and all at the same time!
So, in the coming weeks, I’m going to share my poetry with you. You may be saying to yourself, “Oh, no! I don’t do poetry!” Let me share a suggestion—look for the feeling conveyed then see if it resonates with you. Maybe yes, maybe no, but if you give just a chance, it just might get you!
Coronavirus Scares Me!
March 26, 2020
I sit here
In quiet solitude
A peaceful spring scene
Out my window
And the world falls apart!
500,000 cases of the
coronavirus now!
Jesse, my elderly cat, snuggles close
Nothing has changed
He eats, he pees, poos and
sleeps
And the world falls apart!
Deaths—
100’s of them
faces of pain fill my thoughts
faces of grief flood my heart
Losses too sizeable to count!
A world turned upside down
No, I haven’t lost someone
Yet!
Will I?
Who might it be?
An elderly dancer?
A young friend?
A relative?
Me?
We all stand at the door
Of this possibility
Who will it be?
I dread that first!
How do you process stressful situations? Create a space place in your world? Share your remedies! Is it poetry? Walking? Artwork? Dancing? What do you do to deal?
~ RELEASE PARTY of Flippo’s biography streamed on Facebook Live — TBA! Be ready! Door Prizes, the inside story, Flippo song bytes & interview clips and more!
~Whitey & Gladys Puerling, playful friends of Flippo’s, created a Fan Club. I thought it would be fun to recreate this group. Would you like to join the Marshall Flippo Fan Club Facebook page? Read interesting posts about Flippo’s life. https://www.facebook.com/groups/328325644382769/
~DO YOU WANT AN AUTOGRAPHED COPY OF THE FLIPPO BIOGRAPHY? I HAVE 234 PRE-ORDERS! Release date: mid-May! You, too, can pre-order this amazing story! You can select which paper format or e-book format you would like. Go here to order the version you want. Monthly SWAG Giveaways! https://goo.gl/forms/4D4hwbHdme1fvJc42
Do you have repeated Christmas traditions in your family? We did—my Mom, Dad and I! During my lifetime, I often helped Dad shopped for Mom’s Christmas gift over the years, but this one was special.
Mom & Me in the mid-1980’s
In the mid-1980’s, Dad asked me to pick out a dress alike for Mom and me and started a tradition that continued while he was alive and after he died for seventeen years until Mom’s death.
Any time we wore of outfits alike with Dad, his chest swelled, and he smiled a lot and made a point of letting everyone around him know the history of this tradition—he was so proud!
When Dad died, Mom whispered to me in her grief, “You don’t have to buy our look-alike outfits for Christmas anymore.” We both sobbed. I shook my head, and I never wavered. I continued this heartfelt idea.
Our first outfit was a dress, then during the years Dad was alive I bought us dresses. After he died, I bought us a variety of outfits: slacks and sweaters, warm-up suits and dresses. One problem I faced when I bought slacks was my Mom’s height. She was short; I’m short, too, but she was shorter. So, I always had to buy her petite size slacks so she didn’t have to cut them off. Often that forced me to have to look hard for outfits in two different departments or I would buy petite for me and just deal with shorter slacks than I preferred!
So, we wore
our outfits together proudly and often explained why we were dressed alike. We always
gave Dad the credit for starting this tradition.
When Mom passed away, getting rid of our look-alike outfits broke my heart! I couldn’t imagine seeing them on someone else. Then I had a brainstorm! I shipped them off to a girlfriend in Virginia, wanting her to have them, and I didn’t have to see them again. In fact, those outfits were the first of Mom’s clothes to go!
I did continue wearing mine, celebrating the connection to Mom. This tradition blessed my heart for many years. Do you have anything like it in your family? Share yours with me!
~ NEW Christmas Chapbook—A
Colorado Country Christmas—Full color paperback chapbook or
digital version. Visit my Etsy Shop, Larada’s Reading Loft to purchase: https://www.etsy.com/shop/LaradasReadingLoft
~Whitey & Gladys Puerling were playful
friends of Flippo’s who created a Fan Club. I thought it would be fun to
recreate this group. Would you like to join the Marshall Flippo Fan Club
Facebook page? Read interesting posts about Flippo’s life. https://www.facebook.com/groups/328325644382769/
~I HAVE OVER 200 PRE-ORDERS FOR THE MARSHALL FLIPPO
BIOGRAPHY! You, too, can pre-order this amazing story? You can select
which paper format or e-book format you would like. Go here to order the
version you want. Monthly SWAG Giveaways! https://goo.gl/forms/4D4hwbHdme1fvJc42
