💌 Signing Off With Love

Scratch That: Parenting & ReParenting Off Script

Hi, friends! Happy Monday💛

As Caitlin prepares to to welcome their new little human into the world, we are sending you a little signing off episode with a found poem that emerged from all of the conversations we've gathered since we kicked this thing off last year.

Thank you for being along for the ride!

A Scratch That Poem

*Note: Every line from this poem is linked to the Scratch That episode from which it originally sprouted.

Hello, little butterbean, Sweet silly goose. little anxious heart. Dear listener, the freaks, other weirdos my sister Laura

Come sit with me.

we can't believe you're here

your presence feels like a miraculous little sparkle lighting up the dark sky.

What I hear us talking about is

becoming was a pretty disorienting, lonely experience.

Like we were gonna be lawyers and doctors and like be wearing suits or something.

I have literally gashed the control panel of the passenger side door out with my wheelchair as I transferred in and out of this car for the last 15 years. And if anybody sits in the passenger seat, it does look like I'm trying to kidnap them

oh, this is, this is very different than I thought what almost 40 was gonna look like.

I doubt myself all the time

I shrunk from the eye of the storm

I don't know what the hell I'm doing.

oh, dear Lord.

I am so quick to feel like, oh, you are ruining this. And if you could just get it right

We were at the pool. I didn't bring a towel. I didn't bring a towel to the pool. Can we use your towels? Oh, my God. Like, what. What is that?

the moment when you show up and you feel like the child in a room full of adults.

this little duck that looks really peaceful on top of the water, but underneath, I'm just paddling, like, furiously.

and I couldn't let anyone know it

This is the dirty secret. And nobody can know that, actually, I'm like, I shouldn't be doing this, and I need to keep pretending like I can.

the failure of not matching

when we immediately think like, oh, I should know

what the fuck is that?

It was like grief. It was shame.

it is feeling like a lot of doing and grasping and, like, white knuckling.

I can never stop working relentlessly and fearfully to get it right, get it right, get it right.

nose to the grindstone

I don't think I'm capable of feeling easy breezy

It feels all tangled and kind of ugly.

Tell me if I'm wrong. Did others feel this way?

As I'm understanding it right now in the very middle of it

Yep.

I'm raising my hand here,

Was everyone just pretending to be okay, or was I broken?

oh, no. No. No. No.

I just don't buy it.

There was also this

There was a way that you were trying to help yourself survive even in that fumbling

I'm holding myself together with harshness and rigidity and why I oughta.

oh, the speed and rush and flurry and chaos and check, check, check. Because so many times it felt like my body was not mine.

oh, like I'm actually in much more pain than I'm letting myself admit.

and and how do we, like, not keep our bodies rigid

What if your most important job was to notice, to witness breath, tears, goosebumps, heartbeats? Look!

just, like, stop to look at a trail of ants in a sidewalk crack.

Listen to the gasp from the back seat at the sight of a sunrise. Mama, take a picture.

oh, there's my breath. Oh, there I am in there.

You feel it, right?

Yes, dear Lord I have goosebumps up to my cheeks

Mhmm. I mean, you know it in your body probably.

One breath at a time.

watch me Breathe in and out.

a lot of us out here don't match the pictures we've been given

I don't see through your eyes, you don't see through my eyes. We're all seeing things differently.

We are learning

we are recalibrating

in flux

reorienting, and it is dizzying.

The hints come in little bread crumbs, and I think you can trust it.

horses don't have an ability to lie to humans

grab the reins and trust that gut feeling

That is the thing we have control over, trying to show up, trying to show up again. We don't have control over the outcome.

It is all going to happen.

One day at a time, baby.

it will be glorious and unbearable

And yes, it was funny because we made it so.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay.

we can use goals as playgrounds.

The timelines that are presented to us are so narrow. And that is not what life is like. It's just not.

Julia Child didn't start cooking until she was 45 or whatever.

Yes. Yes. Oh my gosh. Now I'm going yes.

like, paying attention to what is alive in you.

You can just shift the question.

What are the things you're moving towards versus just what you're going against?

how can you rearrange what's in the box?

what is it that you're resisting in yourself?

what are we to do but imagine better futures?

this off script, kind of like, scrappy, build it yourself way, I'm like, oh, yeah,

Like, we can just start asking different questions

That's freaking sick, bro.

That's freaking metal.

I think a new answer is emerging in me and I don't know what it is yet.

but I do know that my body responded

I'm paying attention to how my body feels right now.

my heart has not stopped pounding

so many tears coming up

I feel like this tingling of excitement

my face is already hurting from all the smiling

And, also

right now, I'm just like a hot jellyfish mess. You know?

It's, like, so uncomfortable and hard to let things be messy

And I think it has been messier than I expected, but

But that messy middle was so important.

grappling with the real limitations of my body.

Wouldn't it be lovely, if you could grow wings and fly?

Of course there's grief. There's loss.

but two things can be true at the same time.

The pain and the beauty, they're usually, like, intertwined and pushed right up next to each other.

Notice the strength and the toll. There is so much pain and fear and loss bleeding across this planet. Notice the question, how are we still breathing?

Notice the blooms of survival.

It is what happens in between you and the person across from you and in that space, the divine comes in. However you think of the divine

Like, this is beautiful and complicated. This is the juicy part. This is the rough part.

you are a speck of spectacular dust here for one quick gasp of holy shit, I'm here.

oh, yeah. It's probably supposed to be strange because it's inherently a weird thing

to change and evolve and grow

you will always be you, you will never stop changing.

It is so strange to put a part of yourself into the world

This little pocket of conversation that we're having

this time capsule.

this one peak into one moment of time.

Holy shit we just circled so many different things.

And did we land at exactly the place that we started? Maybe.

So thank you for being here.

and thank you. Thank you for this.

thank you for giving me this space

thank you for staying in the exploration

Thank you for digging in and winding through this path with us.

I have so many more questions

Mentioned In This Episode:

Our collaborative Scratch That Spotify playlist "Songs That Have Held Us"

As Always:

Check out Caitlin and Rebekah's Book Shop! Here you can find every book mentioned in our episodes, as well as a few additional faves.

Use this link to get a 25% discount on a PokPok subcription! And if you haven't listened yet, check out our interview with PokPok creators, Esther and Melissa.

We would love to hear from you! Are there moments from the last year of episodes that you would add to a Scratch That poem?

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