You are not a hot mess.

but you sure are hot.

You Are Not A Hot Mess. 

A love letter to my neurodiverse mothers (and everyone else whose systems work gorgeously, and painfully, weird, too)

[[[a few disclaimers: I don’t like the idea of a medical/diagnostic terminology like ADHD or whatever and at the same time I love naming things (and yes I have an official diagnosis)  I don’t care how one “gets it”— or if it even exists. I don’t care if we don’t really know what it is, or think nobody has it or that everyone has it.  I don’t care to debate if it comes from trauma, or is genetic, or made up, or whatever. I don’t care if you think it’s magic or misery. Or if drugs work or not. Or herbs work or not. What I care to do is hold us in the complexity of whatever this is and if you get me you get me. I what I do care about is this: nobody knows anything about it basically at all. This is why art is born. And why science is always moving and growing.

We are vibrating beings of nerve endings and stars falling from our cells and fire that needs rekindling in our guts. If you are a person responsible for the wellbeing of others, the lives of others, like children, it’s hard to navigate with a spectral system. And the normative world, which barely exists, who is “normal”— so let me rephrase— the narrative of the normative world— doesn’t like you very much, they think you are lazy or flaky or aggressive or crazy.  And you feel like shit often about who you are in this world, because you have to be in it because, especially if you are a parent, you are in it. Like in the mud bog soup of this world that makes no sense to you and demands things of you that are impossible and wants you to be/do things that your brain just cannot figure out.

The other disclaimer or note I want to make is: this writing was a soft and intense experience for me. It was a release and I gave myself with lots of water and rest and tears afterwards. I was not sure if it was something to even share. Then I realized, we aren’t separate, like not really, and my strands become your strands, and somehow under the earth the rhizomes move us all through to the source. And writing is connective tissue, between you and me, between each other. Maybe this love letter, this holy prayer to the being that I am, will awaken the love within you for you, for each other. Maybe things will sense with you. And maybe you can even write your own.

Another disclaimer: I could not bring myself to re-read through this much. There are errors, typos, mistakes. I am ok with that. I hope you are too. If you are interested in line-editing my work, in exchange for a paid membership here, please let me know!

The final note I have: I am writing and publishing this a few weeks before the memorial for my nephew, whose life ended this year, who was another weirdo, brilliant mind, who looked like a hot mess from the outside, but from the inside was mapped for a different kind of world that the one he landed in. And this one was too painful for him to stay. He was a star being, here on terra. He was a strange and vibrant tree, a wild wave, a numerical discovery, an unknown nebula. And I hold him close, as close as I can, as I write this. From here, to wherever he is, he is so very loved.

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You aren’t a hot mess.

You've been called it. Over and over again. 

You have lost the keys. And lost your shit. You have lost friends. Lovers. Trust of others. You have lost so much, and you notice it all, every last drop and detail of what is no longer there. Your father’s star sapphire ring.

Your nonna’s white silk scarf from the old country. 

Your grandmother-in-laws wedding band from 1919. 

Jobs. Opportunities. Grades. Lost. 

You bring your kids to school consistently late or or not at all.

You never knew how to teach them how to “get ready” in the morning. 

You still put your eyeliner on before your face oil. The completely opposite way to do it.

You are not sure why there is no milk in the fridge. 

You pretend you have the essentials in your purse. 

A bag full of preparation. Abundance. Snacks. Salve. 

But all you have are crumbs. A half eaten Hershey bar. And a debit card with a negative balance. Keys to an old house long forgotten. But not the keys to your current residence. Those fell out of your pocket in the forest on a walk, when you hopped off trail to take a piss and then when you got to your car, they were gone. 

You call your husband, because somebody needs to bring you spare keys, and hear the same sign, that sigh you have heard so many times that says not again. And then of course your phone dies before you can tell him where you are. Because your phone is never charged. 

But, let’s remember some things.

Let’s sit with them,

Let’s  go back to the beginning. 

Let’s trace this like our fingers love to trace the time on red cedar bark, or pet the soft mullein leaf or gently brush over the tops of the grass, when we lay for hours outside, held, by land, like we always needed, like the one place that makes us feel ok, just like when we were kids.

Let’s trace ourselves back, our little ones, let’s land in a classroom, sitting at a desk. Maybe we are 7 or maybe even 6.  I don’t know whose body likes to sit at a desk for hours anyway, but your body hates it. Makes you itch. Your knees ache. You  twist and turn your neck to crack it, it feels stiff all the time. Grind your teeth. You tap tap tap the pencil tap tapp on the side of the metal desk. You think of pencils scraping on metal screens or pencils scraping against a chalkboard and you cannot escape the horrible thought of the sensations— you get chills, rolling chills. A toxic bloody metal taste in your mouth. 

The hard little chair connects to the desk, you can’t move it around, it is unadjustable, fixed in place, just like you are supposed to be but you don’t know how to be. Fixed in place. When you want to roll around on the floor. There was no room for your legs. You shake them. Non stop. Up and down. You reach in your pocket. You stole a bristle block from the kindergarten room. The kind with little brushes on it. You rub it. It calms you. You know, even in that small body, what your body needs. Rolling on ground and bristle blocks. Inside your desk, an apple is rotting. Your favorite pink marker is capless, dried out.  Flowers you picked on the way to school. A spider crawls from the bud, a tiny white spider. It’s lost  in your desk now. You fixate and obsess about the spider. Thinking about the spider and where it went, where it will go, is it between the pages of the spelling book? Your legs shake up and down, jittery, worried about the spider. The girl next to you tells you to stop because you are shaking her desk along with your own (the desks were pushed together into 4s, like a square).

You move on from spider to tree. You look out the window. Notice how the willow, long slender eaves become elegant, dancing creatures. Ballerinas. Suddenly, you hear “your name here”. You are called on. But you don’t know why. You look at the teacher. You cannot answer. You did not hear the question. You don’t know anything about anything that anyone was talking about. Maybe it was about the 32nd president. Or maybe it was about how to use a ruler. Your teacher tells you to pay attention, and she smiles at you. You don’t cause a raucous, so she’s kind to you, you are a sweet little girl, so she’s nice,  but she doesn't really  know you have no idea what she’s talking about.  The boy across from you that smells like worms and dirt and cheetos and has greasy hair laughs at you, calls you stupid. You want to kick him under the desk, and you wish you could but really, you are a good girl, a good kid, whose only fault is looking out the window and not hearing questions. You don’t cause trouble.  You don’t act the way you feel inside. You learn to be polite, be quiet, not really knowing what’s going on. 

You go back to the window. It’s much more interesting than addition or anything else that is coming out of the teacher’s mouth; blahblahblah. Now it’s the clouds. They become fruit. Fruits that you love of course. Not bananas, they are like mush and the mush gives your body a shudder. But the clouds become like blueberries, round and perfect, and strawberries, with their softness, and a watermelon, the beloved summertime memory, but only when it doesn’t drip down your shirt, because then you must, desperately, urgently, need to change. And certainly like grapes, grapes always make you think of god. You don’t know why but I can tell you now, it’s because they drink wine at church and wine is the blood of christ and they tell you that christ is god — so wine, which are grapes, are god. You connect things fast, without knowing how, why. You understand the larger visions. Sometimes the details don’t matter to you. You will do this your whole life. You will eventually fall in love with Dionysus and it all makes perfect sense. Without any of it making sense at all.

And then the cars. You count the red ones. You know the exact number and then forget it immediately. Red cars. You wish your dad had a red car. His car is blue. Long. Velvet interior, crushed velvet, sky blue. Smells like cigarette smoke. Someday, you don’t know this now, but you will get into red cars with boys, and lie about where you are going, and go to many places you probably shouldn't be, because: dopamine hits. You did not know this now, because you are so young, but one time a decade later, you gave that horrible boy from a neighboring school head in his red car. In a very small town. And everyone knew. Somehow, everyone knew. By the river. And you never lived that down. There was so much shame. You didn’t even like him. Quite honestly he made you sick.

And then suddenly, or it feels like it, a jolt to your system, Mrs. Anderson asks you to answer her and she asks again and she says, “Honey, stop daydreaming out the window” —  and you  hang your head low and you whisper I don’t know. 

But, you do know. You do. You know so much and the brilliant thing about knowing is that you know you don’t really know and you know that knowing isn’t that important. The place between knowing and having no idea, is where you dwell and find genius. You own the edge between wisdom and mystery. You own the edge between here and there. You know so much that it’s hard to even say it, describe it, words cannot become it, it’s a pulsing through the body that is a different time zone, ecosystem, astrology, than the rest of the world (or the rest of the world pretends to be).  And this, this is why I love you. I love you. 

Let’s trace forward because we know time, though it exists, or they tell us it does, we have an impossible task tracking ourselves inside this thing called time that was created for us, so let’s trace ahead. Finger on redwood bark. Hand gracing over milky oat tops. 

You hear boys you date call you crazy. Call you out of control or overactive or over-RE-active. But fuck them. They are just boring. You think. But you also think, and hold on to for a long time, that they are right. That you are crazy. That there is something wrong with you. That you are not lovable or even bearable. That when they break up with you because you are too much, you will vacillate between thinking you are too much and nothing at all for many, many years.

But this is not true. Listen to me now: they just didn’t know how to listen to, be with, magic. They just didn’t know how to hold you, not a hot mess, just hot and brilliant, a beautiful mother volcano in training, with all your elders lost. You can’t blame them of course, because nobody told them. Nobody said to them, she’s a strangelove to embrace because you might not ever get it again. Nobody told them Empire was trying to kill this mother volcano in us all. They were just confused, because, and as we know, plates broke. And curses flew out like darts. Records were snapped in half. Once a Dr. Pepper plastic bottle was thrown across the room and that was the last straw for what you thought was the love of your life. Cars slammed on brakes and you got out to walk home hours alone in the dark. And once, or maybe twice, you drove to where they lived on a hallucinogenic. And once, or maybe twice, you hiked hip deep after a snowstorm in Idaho, in the middle of the night, with no coat on, and maybe even no pants on, to convince them you weren’t crazy. That you were not a hot mess. That you could be loved. 

I love you. What an intense passion you have for life, for love. You should have been met, held, and celebrated for it. I celebrate you. I love you. 

Tracing backwards again, time is liminal, time is illusion, but for you, you can jump time. So, let’s get fingertips against river rock. Let’s go back farther. When you were not you and you were your nonna and she knew a language and her language was part of developing her brain, and then one day, she had to leave her language behind, or practice not using it.  She had to make sure her figlie didn’t speak the language, and when they did, the nuns took a ruler and hit them, your father among them.  For speaking language, words and memory, vibration of sound, create pathways in brains. This is what pathed you, before you were you. And this moment in time, when you were just a small floating saucer inside your mother, something changed, a new path forged. Not with consent.  What happens with the brain when you cannot speak the tongues of grandmothers?

Maybe your brain is trying to repair from losing the song of sound that had been spoken for hundreds if not thousands of years within your cells. 

Let’s move forward again. 

Do you remember when you were twelve and things were maybe exploding at home and maybe even a parent was also crazy, because this kind of crazy is hereditary. This kind of crazy involves hustling and jails and phone taps? That this parent also had a brain that did weird things, and a nervous system that was like a volcano. It is embedded in DNA like the river rock is embedded in the banks of the water’s edge and a good flow of water smoothes them out.  Because generation after generation of loss, assimilation, people who were anchored in land relations, were uprooted, ripped from, traded in, forgotten. And this, maybe, possibly, can rewire the brain. No, not possibly, definitely. And this re-wiring might as well be a possession. And this possession can become trauma. So you forgive your crazy parent, who is also not a hot mess, but a neurodivergent old man now, infused with magic, with layers of history, who speaks out in his sleep in ancestral dialect, trying to remember who he was, before he was even him. Trying to remember that at one time — we didn’t need to remember who we were—  we just were. 

When you were 12, there was no soft spot to land, no safety net, surely no diagnosis or support systems for little you wearing a shy,  good-girl mask on— with chaos inside—, so you failed Social Studies, Math and Earth Science. Because adolescents and neurodivergence is a perfect storm— (you hear this later on in life, when your own child needs support).  And you write in your journal 100 times: I want to die. And your father finds it  (because your mother shows him because she’s always reading your journal and you swear you will never ever do that to your kid someday)  and so he takes you on a drive in his long blue car to get ice cream and to see the peacocks and cries in front of you, tears running down his reddish, oliveish face, and asks you why? And you just lick the ice cream cone and shrug. And he licks his. Maybe it was because of Earth Science, you think, maybe that is why you want to die?  Because you failed, but you love Earth, and science was magic, so what is this anyway? You have always known we are earth and we are science and we are rocks and rocks are people and people have no idea that they are also earth. This is who you are and what you know. We don’t need a book for it. A test?  But you wanted to be “normal” so badly. You wanted to be smart. The grades told you that you were dumb as shit. You must be dumb as shit. But let me remind you.

But you are not. Ohmyfuckinggod. You are not. You just don’t remember things that don't interest you. That’s all. You cannot hold in your brain what doesn’t not serve your being. You are earth. What a glorious, brilliant, genius being to be of, with, from, and as. 

Let me tell you now, in this letter of love for you: 

Everyone needs more of what we have, failing grades and all, what we have is this: we can listen to mud and rocks and slate and we can hear tectonic plates shift before they do and we can sense when the earth is crying, and when she needs a song. We can remember somethings that are never even spoken of, that are pulsing through time|space— even when we fail the examination, we still know to go sit under the chestnut tree to keep the daytime nightmares away. And I don’t mean more people need to suffer, because at times, this has been suffering. But, in general, as we know, if the world would recognize that 90% of us are spiraling or spiral-ers, all masking to stay alive, maybe it wouldn’t be so odd to be you. Plus, you got A’s in writing.  Because art was the one place you felt at home. Remember that. A’s despite not knowing spelling and having the syntax and grammar of an old nonna with English as a second language.

Let’s go back. Trace the western sunset. Trace the edge of the pacific where it meets the white sand. Trace the canyons full of brush and fire danger. Trace the grid of the city streets with the bottoms of your wooden heeled feet. Trace the lines you smashed up and snorted. Trace the smoke of all you packed in and inhaled. Trace wonderment of getting lost in another reality. Prescriptions for whatever was going on within your brain and body were wonderful at parties. Were great taken in tiny dust forms up the nose. And then other things were good too. You got skinny finally. You could produce. You could go to a job (sometimes). You could find grandiose in pretty average, boring love. This all only lasted a while, but it also landed you in jail once. How horrible you felt. What a shameful being you were. But you weren’t sweet, kind, powerful twenty year old that you were. It was nobody’s fault, but you had no elders to guide you out of home and into the wildness of the world. And you survived. And you are here. And that is a huge deal.

Let’s trace forward. Finger on the old chestnut tree. This is the biggie. You had babies. BABIES. You became a mother. Because something tugged you forever and now you think, what the fuck was I thinking. Maybe the tug was that “be normal” and what’s more normal than “mother”—? You were sensing things though, the crows that visited, and dreaming of bears and moons making love together, and one single saw-whet owl that visited you every day before you conceived. And the ocean’s pull. And strange beings that kept pushing against you, through the window, at night, over your bed, wanting it. Desiring it. Fucking through you.

You felt so at home in the body, maybe for the first time ever— pregnancy and labor and postpartum— all altered states you could understand. They ran on spiralic time. When time was no time. And waiting was this memory keeper. As odd as it got growing a human creature inside you and watching them hiccup from the outside, you got it, you deeply got it. And what the hormones did to the brain were outrageous, but at the same time, the body did not fight it. It softened, and widened, and slowed and moaned and groaned. It became fertile mud. The baby’s nervous system lended a hand to your nervous system, and together they soothed.  And birth; the dopamine hits, the oxytocin, the web of existence, the time travel, the being water, and fire. The wind as midwife. The salt air as doula. The desert monsoon as birth shaman. The splitting in two. Yeah all that. Nothing was ever going to make sense again, not after the practice of birth. And you were, are, forever grateful. 

And a small babies do not think you are a hot mess!  Not yet at least, (when they are teens they will)— they think you are God. But you are not god. You are meant to just be a portal for god, but you buy into the god thing, and you give them everything, and you get exhausted (eventually).  But always, you were loved. Seen for who you were, exactly as you were, full of nectar and stinky armpits. And in the time after birth, when there is no time, and time is warped, maybe you did kinda ok? Because you didn’t need to do anything but keep someone alive (God thing again). Which did drive us to a new kind of tiredness. Depleted our already in-need brains, dysregulation dysfunction, not to mention dehydration. But really, the rest of the world didn’t matter so much. Nobody could take you out of this altered reality. Everything that existed was in (milk) or attached (a small person) to your body. Except when you left the house without wipes. Or you forgot their little baby hat. Or you ran out of gas while out on an errand with them and you call the father and he sighs that sigh (not again) and you get so mad and you yell because he does not know the weight of this. And how dare he sigh that sigh, again. He does, of course, know the weight but not your weight. What it’s like to keep tiny people alive. Gas in the car. Doctor appointments. Laundry that doesn’t smell musty. Naps that don’t happen unless they are held. Going into the market and being as wildly distracted as your two year old is and coming out without groceries and a chocolate lava cake. Forgetting toilet paper. Getting lost on the way home even though you have driven the route 100 times. People call you to check in but you never call back because what would you even say? Then their are the three unfinished books on the computer that will never be finished. Paint all over the kitchen floor and walls because why teach them how to make art neatly because you don’t understand art as neat. And the impossible ability to ever work for someone other than these children or yourself again, sinks in. You are not wired for this. You will never really be human again. Or maybe you never were. But becoming a mother has evolved you into something else.

And then slowly moments come, when your brain feels like fire. And your nerves seem to be working outside of the body, electric currents, and your vision blurs. And you aren’t sure where you are. Or where hours have gone. You don’t know about boxes and bins and files to keep organized. But the thing is, and was, the outside world didn’t need, or want you. And you were fine contained within this space, a mess, confused, but nobody else mattered.

At night, you pulled them close, and you sang to them, and they breathed you inside their dreams and you entered easily, as if you were already there, and you dreamed together, always. 

Your ability to dream is outstanding. And as a mother, it’s even more true. All day and all night long, they dreamed into you. Magic lived with you.

Let's run your fingers along your skin, your skin, now. A little more saggy. Parched. Less hair where you want it, more where you don’t. Drag your hands up your legs, feel those hips, wide, soft, then to your belly, to your heart, to now. Now.

Your kids tell you they haven;t been to the dentist in two years. You tell them you don’t understand the new insurance. They roll their eyes at you. They whisper under their breath “neglect”— you call their father, he sighs, he figures it out in five minutes. 

One needs a drivers license. One needs a neurological assessment. One needs a tutor. One needs a job. One needs vaccine updates. One needs a well woman appointment. One has teeth overlapping each other and begs for braces. The other has acne. Needs a dermatologist. They all need different schooling. Someone needs new underwear. Why is there never milk in the fridge? Or toilet paper? And then you move, again, again, again. Because somehow, on top of the entirety of this cultural hardship, you can’t seem to find home. They hate you for this. And somewhere inside them you can hear them think “why did I end up with a crazy mom?” And you think, please please don’t let them want to go to college because someone else will have to figure out all that paperwork for you. And you think, what a horrible, failing mother you are. Nothing you have done has ever been like the mothers on TV.

But.

You love them exquisitely. You held them forever. You never left them alone to cry. You look at them with wonder and awe and still sing them songs at night, from your own bed, while they are asleep and you have insomnia, and you send them on the dreamscape so they land against their pillows. You make sure they live among candles, plants to love and know and burn, salt baths, dance parties, and fried food from the old country. You make sure they know how much they are adored.

Trace a little deeper, a little more compassionately to the now, the real now: and one of them, one of them, one of your kids — is just like you. And you are scared for them. And feel so guilty to pass this on.

But look at you. And look at why they chose you. And remember this: you get it. Soften. Become mud again. Become the ocean. Become rosemary. Embrace the volcano. Let her know she is not alone. She is smart and wild and a spiral. Hold her in her desire to “be normal” but pray to the ancestors every day that she recognizes the deep magic in her blood.

Trace back, wander the spine of a lady fern, and into the forest, and into the yurt, where you lived for that year or so, when they were little but school-aged. You decided: let’s homeschool. Fuck school. Let them unschool. Let them be free. Because that is all you wanted, too. But, as much as you hate structure, structure is the only thing that reminds you to do what you want and need to do. But you don’t get structure, it makes your brain explode when you sit down and try so hard to map it all out. You failed miserably at it. You feel like a failure. Your partner works so much. It was just you and them. So they did run wild, barefoot, in the forest, around a yurt home.

They made stores atop fallen trees, they reenacted the Wolf Riders from their dad’s old comic books from the 70s. They made potions and teas and tacos from bark and berries. They knew to get quiet around the devil's club. They could identify cottonwood, huckleberries, hemlock. They were outside in rain and snow and fog and PNW style sun. This doesn’t sound so bad. But later on, like now, they will tell you this is the reason they do not know math. And you know, you know, but someday you hope they know, too. When they trace their life, with their own fingers.

Trace back now. All the way back. All the way over your body, over your mother’s body, touching her belly, and noticing how you were born. A loud yes into this world, a smack down of a blizzard, coming on a day that is between days, between the moon and the sun. And edge walker. We were all born from a threshold, and so if our brain is a threshold, too, how wonderful. Come one, how can it not be?

Trace further back, beyond your mother, into the other mother, the dark soil. Let your fingers move through time, against rhizome, over mycellia, and underground, through caverns with oceans and red coral made from Medusa blood, and all the way to the bottom, the source, the fire pit, of a volcano. 

Do people think of a volcano as stupid or bad because they know how to beautifully, potently, erupt when there is too much pressure inside? You are the volcano. And you are beautifully hot, and yes, a mess, because lava looks messy but it makes everything fertile. And does anyone look at rosemary, and think, you are full of too much fire? You are tangled and such a mess? No. Because it’s fire brings laser focus clarity. And its tangledness is the wisdom of an old crone. You are the rosemary. Tangled, full of fire, growing against the rocks along the sea. Trace yourself here, anytime you need. And you will find all the love and acceptance you need.

I could go one forever. And probably have. And all this is for you. And me too.