Experiment in the Essay #8: It's All Yight-- #52Essays2017

My toddler points at bright morning sunlight splashing onto the living room wall and over his sprawling toys: "Yights! Yight! Yight, Mommy!"

No verb is quite going to capture what the sun does, and my toddler knows not to try but only to yelp. This spilled yellow silk we can't measure. The stuff poets rely on.

I'm sipping my harshly floral jasmine tea, Mommy-tea-notforbabies; he's chasing the mercurial sunshine along the floorboard. I throw a dirty dinner napkin over the pile of IRS adjustments and insurance notifications and subpoenas so I'm not tempted to deal, and instead I open myself to my toddler's way of seeing.

There is a lot that is not Yight afoot, my husband's ex dragging us back into court sure we've got thousands stuffed under the mattress. Her empty claims have eerie confidence, Make My Bank Account Great Again! For the sake of the children, she cries! Ass! Hole!

Or maybe just hole...

The hardest mornings are the ones when I wake before 5, my husband's breathing louder than the noise-maker, and the toddler at perpendicular angle in the bed. His ex has taken custody of my dream-space, where I often tenderly care for her weird neediness. When I'm not dreaming of her, apocalyptic themes take over, car hoods bursting into flames, and I must make snap decisions about which child I will save.

Wake up. Trump is sitting smugly behind a desk of the Oval Office, when he can bear to be away from his lucrative Resort. Reporters try to grill him on the basics, just for reality checks, but reality gets checked at the door: Mr Prez, Do you know how the Oval Office got its name? Because it's an Oval. DT: Ah, But I say it's a square. And anyone who doesn't think this is a square has been conned by years of media coverage. It's like that.

I keep thinking he must be photoshopped into those pictures, behind the apron of the American flag. I don't want to tell my toddler that his job is to run a country; run it into the ground.

In that office, where many odd men have sat, his ass alone desecrates the chair; he makes his deranged, only-to-self-evident proclamations. For the sake of my bank account, he cries! Spacious Skies darkened by what looks like untreated personality disorder: His cabinet of horrors leaning in to watch him get off on the narcissistic spike of writing his signature. 

My toddler throws a little red car at the light. It doesn't respond. He throws his purple stuffed hippo. No response, except to cover the aggressors in itself.

At what point does being an asshole blur into a true illness? Even my toddler is occasionally a bit of an asshole-- but the difference is he recognizes it and makes repairs. After he clocks me in the head with his toy on purpose, he throws his arms around me, and asks for milk, and says, "No no, Not so hard. Not Mommy head."

But the Trump just excoriates the media, and looks down a woman's shirt to refresh his mind.

This is the stuff worth turning away from. Sometimes it's better to notice what the toddlers notice with the same joy and exuberance they see it with. Rather than the crap that is hitting the fan all around us, why not take a moment to really see the light hitting on your living room? MOMMY, YIGHTS!

And honestly, this rare bold winter light is such a big flirt, slinking along, making everything look just a little more alive and attractive. It's buttering up our piles of (toys, books, bills, laundry) crap right now, and my toddler knows awesome when he sees it, and he's not quiet about it. Like they say on the subway: IF YOU SEE SOMETHING SAY SOMETHING.

To think-- Here I was, ruminating about destructive forces, getting "my panties all in a bunch" (or so chides my husband's ex, when he asks her to please not discuss the custody schedule with my young stepsons) about the death of democracy. Those supremacist marauders in the white house-- my nightmares couldn't even create such character sketches-- chopping up the body politic limb by limb and stowing it sloppily down the sort-of-president's pants. All to make his dick look bigger, as he looks more and more clueless in every other category of leadership. He's all dick, just a dick with a big bank roll. So those who want to stay on his good side-- and there are too many of them-- must prop up the gilded lily of his unhinged ego.

See? It doesn't take much to go the low road. I don't like the word dick. I like dick-ish people even less. My thoughts stoop to his level of crass incompetence. Elite Ivy education at least gives your syntax a leg-up, no? But your vocabulary can still go down a black hole.

I wonder if it is possible to have compassion for someone who intentionally causes harm. To stay heart connected and aware that they are suffering, too, though they might lack the awareness to know it. They say the Narcissist doesn't actually suffer-- and so can't be treated. His self-esteem is so low as to be unsalvageable.

I dream all the time about my husband's ex, that she is just a bumbling clueless child-like person, who goes about trying to connect the wrong way. Is her dark behavior forgivable if her brain is a hot mess of chemicals? Is it forgivable that she tries to turn the children against their father's character? No. I don't know. The edges of my heart stretch. The heart has a special kind of lactic acid when its capacity is being strained. It burns with thousands of micro-tears.

I stay awake too late reading up about this, trying to find wisdom texts that will reframe for me. All I find is articles listing the latest Trump regime travesties, the urge to not-normalize the extremist affronts; one psychologist scolds the danger of armchair diagnosis of mental illness (oops, guilty). My exhales are shabby. The Buddha would not give me a standing ovation.

So I hold the phone just inches above my racing heart, looking for someone spiritually smarter than me to offer another way-- and then there's my baby's hand resting like a phone in its cradle on my sternum. I found that person. He's been on me all night, and for the last 21 months, and almost 10 incubating months before that--

But honestly, how can anyone look at that puffed up man and not say, "Honey, you're not well. Let me just take you somewhere quiet, somewhere with good light, good food, white walls, a big navel you can gaze at, compliments miked in from hidden speakers, an echo chamber where you can bathe in your own words and the words of those who pretend to love you....Honey, let me take you somewhere else, I get it it's hard being a toddler, I get it..."

I look away from my cell phone news feed because I have a kid and my kid needs me. He prances with excitement at just about everything. He has no idea who is president, or what a president is, or why we'd need one, though he knows when my anxiety spikes. His diaper looks like a duck-tail, and as he squiggles about chasing shadows, he farts and smiles at me-- because, gals, it's funny to emit wind. It breaks up the gloomy weather.

Also, I figured something out. The Sorta President doesn't want you or me or anyone to know this, but I'm going to lay it on you here: DT's got really bad gas, guys. I heard it on Facebook, but I deduced it anyway from the wincing look on his face. Leaders of other great, semi-great, and not-so-great nations won't come meet with him because they reject his unsound policies, but also, he's got the farts. He's fact-ose intolerant.

Stop joking about this! Or-- Joke about this like your life depends on it.

I am down to the bottom of my tea, and I'm still not sure if I have a sense of humor. My husband urges me to keep a sense of humor, and to keep hoping for some good to come of something. Is a laugh at this point just healthy, or just desperate?

"Yights, Mommy! Toys! Wall! Yights, the yight!" My toddler grows more animate and declarative the less tuned in I am. He knows he's my valve of love, some days my only reminder that, actually, life is incredibly simple under its symptoms. We-- it-- require touch, connection, and positive stimulation. I keep sipping on my Bittersweet tea to meet a bittersweet reality, and my toddler shouts, "I awake! I wake up!" and throws his arms around my neck, and I am back.

Ro's got this light to his personality. Now I feel that stretching in my chest again, an "aperture" my teacher calls it, and another teacher recommends imagining you have nostrils there, and can breathe directly into the smartest organ.

But can it really hold? Does it ever just reach capacity? Is this when activism will fail? Is this why the Civil Rights leaders prayed, first?

Don't turn away from the light.

I am trying to imagine the president just taking a minute to contemplate morning light. I fail.

I am trying to imagine my husband's ex wife allowing herself to get some help, even a peephole of light in the dark.

Now it's like tea steeping, the light saturating the walls and the floor and the toddler and his mommy.

They say when you're dying it's like this: the tunnel vision, the light beckoning you, a rampant inner toddler doing a happy dance because, honestly, it's really all good now. No one is bullshitting you. You have only one place to go, and you are going there.

"Yights, Mommy!" He's got me. Completely. He pulls on my hand with his little but weirdly strong one. We look at the light-splayed wall like it's the best thing that has ever happened to us, because it is.

You can get these live-in-the-moment hits from your toddler without having to do the hard work of reaching enlightenment on the meditation cushion. Your physiology naturally softens. It's like a second-hand high, where your lungs catch a break but your brain gets the loosening benefit. For the sake of the child! The heart cries. And the little one in each of us tilts her head toward the light, a heliotrope.

Less ass, more hole.

It's actually totally beautiful, what the sun is doing for us all the time. If resistance means doing whatever it takes not to normalize, then I refuse also to normalize the light. It's too particular. Too damn pristine. I understand why myths claim the gods come down to us, looking for a little bit of ass, or a connection with someone slightly less omni-potent, or perhaps even to conceive a child in our morass-- as these gold rays.

I stand with my toddler, point with him, and he's all the more elated for being joined. "Mommy gellup!", he cries! For the sake of the sake of! And the light just stays there, being gorgeous, forgiving all our trespasses, our weak attention spans, our crushing needs-- in advance.