I Like the Month of January
It’s the last day of January.
I sit in front of my computer, on my bed, kitties curled near, looking out through the window of my bedroom at the fresh dusting of snow in the surrounding enchanted forest, the squirrels commanding the bird feeder.
I’m in my bedroom and not in my office upstairs, for 2 reasons. The first is because it’s a rarity to have both of my kitties curled close. They are not fully fond of each other, so I take it as a mystical sign when they tolerate one another to attach to me. The other reason is I’m cheap. My office upstairs is as cold as a refrigerator. We consolidate into one heating zone as much as possible in the deep heart of the winter cold.
Like the month of January, my bedroom feels like a safe womb. I’ve really come to love January, in a way that my younger, more social Self couldn’t muster. The quietude, the dark womb-ing of January comforts me, allowing me to go within, no call to parties, or productivity.
My mind can meander.
This morning, I did something strangely metaphoric, so unexpectedly symbolic. I threw away a pair of underwear, old, tattered, dingy. It was the last pair of underwear that I’d received as a gift from my Mother.
When I was in my first year in college, my Mother started giving me underwear as my “stocking stuffer” Christmas gift. This went on until her last Christmas in 2005. For the 100 years between my first year in college and her last Christmas on earth, I received 3 pairs of underwear. That’s a lot of panties.
It wasn’t just any old underwear, and it certainly wasn’t the motherly kind. It was sexy and lacey, the stuff of seduction. I always thought it was her way of giving me her approval, because we couldn’t speak of it openly, of my sexual and sensual explorations.
When I got married, she gave me a slinky silk night gown and matching lingerie. When I opened the box, I think I blushed.
When she died in 2006, one of the things I thought of in the meandering swirl of my cavernous grief was that she would never buy me underwear again. How was I going to buy underwear without her?
Grief is another womb.
I’ve been able to hold onto my Mother-Daughter Underwear ritual for another 18 years. I had begun to think of this ritual as our unspoken, secret language that went far beyond her seeming approval of my sexual expression. It was an intimate, vulnerable way for her to express to me how she truly saw me, as a unique and strong woman. And my way of being in the world that she couldn’t quite be, and yet I was hers, and doing it for her.
The day after my Mother died, I was standing on the beach near my parents home at that time. A gust of wind gathered, and I had this overwhelming feeling, despite my fierce love and Olympic level grief, that I was free to be my own Self, the subtle, psychic bonds of living her (somewhat unlived) life had been severed.
This January morning, as I drop my undergarment onto a mound of coffee grounds and broken eggshells in the kitchen garbage can, I remember that moment.
And I think about wombs. About how her dreams and DNA were transferred to me in a womb.
I wonder if her mother gave her undergarments as a gift. And I ruminate upon the fact that despite enjoying the utilization of many of those sexy undergarments, it never came to be that I carried a daughter in my womb. There is no continued epigenetics.
I think about the lineage of wombs from which I am a living dream.
I like the month of January.
