i will not crush her/his heart

I just drank a couple of beers and ate a super cheesy veggie burger at one of our smoky watering holes.

kk and i had a nice time sitting there talking to one another and sitting there staring at one another and sitting there listening to the not so delightful open mic in the other room.

my dinner came out with a mini-bag of better maid potato chips in the red plastic basket that held my veg burger. better maids always throw me back to my childhood. no matter what, i get sent down that rabbit hole of littleness. my ma ate the things by the handful. for the first years of my life (up until age 7), she lived on better maids, coca cola, and marlboro reds. yes, my mama was an avid smoker. she weighed all of 110 pounds and ran around like a chicken with her head cut off.

she was and is an excellent mother and grandmother. and i really fear getting into some of the sad parts of my past here in public, but there is a connection to the present.

and those damn better maids fueled this important conversation about childrearing over at the bar tonight.

my parents believed it was okay to hit their kids (they no longer believe this, but it is a little too late for me). so, one of the hard pieces connected to me really coming to the decision to have a kid with kk was the fact that i was raised getting smacked around by both of my parents, and sometimes that smacking did get out of hand.

couple the legacy of a childrearing style that i am deeply opposed to (that is the smacking and whipping and hitting of kids to keep them in line)with my huge-ass temper that was (i believe) birthed out of the violence i was exposed to (and subsequently inflicted on my sister, Eone,--we fought physically like angry wind up boxing dolls) and well...

while i know i could never raise a hand to a child, it is the raising of my voice and the brutality of the words that are capable of coming out of my mouth that have me still, to this day, concerned.

i have intense mood swings. kk is more than kind and puts up with the fierceness that piles up in my heart and then spills like toxic waste out of my mouth (and sometimes just my eyes or my body language). I go to dark places--places that only a few people, closest to me, see or know about or maybe even recognize. over the years these bouts of intense anger and depression have lessened, but still they do come on and kk asked me today," you will not crush our kid's heart with your words will you?"

and i promised, "i will not crush her/his heart."

and i do promise that. and i work everyday on lessening the legacy of the wounds of simply being alive among people who also were exposed to harshness and dysfunction as children, my parents. i hate to even use the word dysfunction cause all in all i believe that life itself is chaotic and many things are out of the path of reason and human understanding, but my parents did the best with what they knew and were exposed to and they loved me in spite of their anger and fragility.

and i will do the best with what i know and who i am and the support i have encircling me. no crushing here. i know this to be true, cause even though my heart may have been pinned down at times by my parents (this is true as a child and by the hurtfulness connected to their reaction and resistance to the revelation of my queerness), my heart has never been crushed. however, it has been tempered and tarnished, polished and pressed and now it pumps harder for what is right and good than it ever has before.