My story was told wrong

"You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert,

repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your 

body

love what it loves.

~ Mary Oliver

I read almost every night now,
again,
to my kids

I feel like Ursula
rising huge in purple painted laughter
confident
triumphant

Redrawn the way we redid Maleficent

Because I would never take the
fins
or wings
or voice
from anyone

My story was told wrong

Death and grief restructure you
and still, I never would have done that

Your armor, if you embrace it right
moves with you
flexible as pine branches
twirling and whipping in hurricanical winds
bending, unlikely to break
Growing as you grow
bending with the healing of your heart at each stage

We tango with holding what we love, cheek to cheek
passionate, quick, deliberate
doing a deep dip slowly, looking longingly into each other's eyes
and see the beauty of letting go
at last
when the boundary has been slashed

and the gray storm of a Pixar spell
envelops you
swirls around you in a cloud-like stole
and the vapors
cloud your eyes
choke you

My story was told wrong

Life is not a series of struggles
leading to exalted, exaggerations of joy
after perfectly structured
tales of adventure, issues, and ends...

the stages are real
they exist
they swirl and sneak around your spine
and structure everything

but they do not end
not until you do

and if you slow down
like when you were little
laying in the golden majesty of that evergreen grove
sacred in its mist of nothing special
and everything that ever mattered

perhaps your vision might clear so that you can see
that the imperfection of every moment
is where the beauty lives
the dimpled brown dents in pure white striated daisy petals

The evil queen
the bedeviled bitch
the nasty women
the feminazis

Those
    who know what they want
and ask for it
    who know when they feel insulted
and say so
    who refuse to be belittled
and push back
    who live deeply in a way that SINGS that they are loveable
and will never.  Ever. Listen when you say they are not

Maybe we aren't what you painted us to be

And maybe the good men aren't gone.
Maybe we need to stop scaring them away
from holding tight
to their emotions and the pine trees
and clarity and honesty and tears.

Let them have their tears back.

Perhaps the tears will wash clean all our hearts
so the goodness can find a way back.

My story was told wrong.

I always thought I would read to my kids every night
No matter what

At least I'm back at it
again.

Paint over it, around it, and make it your own.
I'm not done living yet.
And I am still saying "yes" to the things
upon my path

"You never know ahead of time what something's really going to be like."

~Katherine Patterson