Beyond the keep

Beyond the keep.

The phrase popped up in a novel I'm reading about a woman pilot in WWII. She savored the thought first when she was in bomber flight training. Now she was in a Nazi prison.

The story is one thing. The phrase is another.

Don't you just soar when you break free of the keep of convention, culture, education, church, family, friends, neighborhoods, sometimes even yourself. You are out there without restrictions of any kind.

Its like the dream of flying - I mean by flapping your arms and flying high above buildings. I don't get it often, but I am ecstatic when it happens because the sensation is so overwhelming.

Being kept is a good thing most of the time. But those moments of breaking free are ether.

rosie, you go girl!

did I remember to take my pills? (is the bathroom glass wet?)

why did I climb three flights of stairs? (go back, go back, go back)

what have you read lately that you loved? (er, duh, er, duh....)

aging.

it ain't pretty.

years ago, I could juggle 100 mental balls at once and remember each journey clearly.

100 years ago.

now, if I have a grade A thought in my head, the noting of all other involuntary  lesser actions fall by the wayside - sometimes to be easily retrieved, other times irreversibly lost.

I mourn that.

but last night I saw on the news Rosie the Riveter still riveting at age 93 and thought, hmmmmm.

I gotta shape up!

breakfast with four friends

around the table
over bacon and eggs,
we discovered 
we had lived in
France,
England,
South Africa,
Southeast Asia,
England.
Newfoundland,
and more.

we had survived
cancer,
serious illness,
divorce,
deaths,
heartache;

yet

sunshine and
sisterhood
bound us

and all the oceans
slipped away.

Labor

I was pregnant with our first son at the tender age of 28 and I eagerly read all the current literature on childbirth. La Leche and Lamaze were very big in the 70’s. One passage read “labor is so-called because it’s really just hard work, not pain.” And so I proceeded, smug in my knowledge and preparation. Months later, when that first tsunami contraction hit, I would have happily strangled with my bare sweaty hands the writer of that passage! I was grateful for all the breathing techniques I had practiced and clung to them like a drowning person through the zig-zag of intense pain. It was not the elegant give and take I had envisioned.

 

So, though I know that’s not what this day is all about, it’s what I’m celebrating. To all the mothers who have passed through the hallowed channels of birth-giving, I salute your labor, your hard work, your intense pain, your overwhelming joy for what followed immediately after the physical battering.

 Forty-two years later I'm still saying thank-you.