Category: Poetry

She Forgets the Year But Not the Grief

Reading Time: 2 minutes

She does not always know what year it is.

I have stopped correcting her on the year. The year is not the point anymore. The year is information she does not need for the life she is living, and correcting her on it was something I was doing for myself, to confirm that I could still reach her through the fog, and I have accepted that some corrections are more for the person doing the correcting than the person being corrected.

But she knows the grief.

She knows it the way the body knows things that the mind has lost the narrative for. She knows the grief of her sister’s death without knowing how many years ago it was. She knows the grief of a marriage that was hard in ways she could only name in her seventies after years of not having the language for it. She knows the grief of her own mother, who has been gone for forty years, the way you know an old wound, not as a fresh thing but as a presence, as a shape in the body that has become part of the body.

Memory, I am learning, is not chronological.

What she is losing is the filing system. The dates and the sequences and the names that go with the faces. What she is not losing, what I do not think she will lose until she loses everything, is the feeling underneath the filing. The love and the sorrow and the longing and the specific texture of her own history as it lives in her body. She cannot tell you when things happened. She can tell you that they mattered. She knows, precisely, that they mattered.

I sit with her and we talk about her sister and she does not know the year and she knows exactly how much she misses her and those two things exist at the same time and I am learning to sit in that, to not reach for the correction, to let the grief be the real thing even when the facts around it have gone soft.

She is teaching me, I think, even now, even here.

She is teaching me that what we carry in the body outlasts what we carry in the mind, that love is the last thing, that the grief that lives beside the love is also the last thing, and that none of it needs a year attached to it to be true.

She Called Me By My Childhood Name

Reading Time: 2 minutes

My mother called me by the name she gave me when I was small.

Not my name. The other one. The one that only she uses, the one that belongs to a version of me that no professional document has ever recorded, that no student has ever said, that lives only in her mouth and in my chest when I hear it, a small landing, a small return to something I had not known I was away from.

I am fifty-something years old and when my mother calls me by that name I am briefly four again.

Not in the sentimental way. In the bodily way. In the way that some words bypass the adult entirely and go straight to the older architecture underneath, the part of you that was built before you knew you were being built, before you understood that the love being given to you was shaping you into a particular kind of person, a person who would spend the next five decades working out what to do with what was given in those early years.

She was having a hard day.

She called because she was confused and the confusion frightened her and she needed to hear my voice more than she needed any practical help I could offer. And she said my childhood name and I said I am here and that was the whole of what was needed, the whole of the medicine, the knowing that I was here and would pick up and would say I am here in the voice she knows, the voice that also has its roots in those early years, the voice she made.

I sat on the phone with her for forty minutes.

We did not talk about anything important. We talked the way people talk when they are not talking about what they are actually talking about, which was: I am still here. You are still here. The line between us is still open. Whatever else is changing, whatever the age is taking and the fog is softening, this is still intact. You know my voice. I know yours. We are still, after everything, each other’s.

She Doesn’t Eat Much Anymore

Reading Time: 2 minutes

This is how it starts, I was told.

The appetite going first, or going small, the body beginning its own accounting of what it still needs and revising the number downward, the way old systems eventually simplify themselves, reducing to the essential, releasing the rest. I was told this and I understood it intellectually and the understanding did not prepare me at all for sitting across from her at the table and watching her push things around the plate and knowing the pushing was not about the food.

I make the things she likes.

Or the things she used to like, the distinction blurring now because what she liked at seventy is not always what she likes at eighty and the updating of the list is a moving target and some days I arrive with the thing I was certain would be welcome and it lands wrong, the interest not quite there, the hunger not quite reachable. I do not take it personally. I take it as information. I adjust. I come back with something smaller, something simpler, something that asks less of a body that is asking less of itself.

She ate half a bowl of soup last Tuesday and said: that was lovely.

It was the soup. Her soup, the imperfect inheritance, the version I make that is close but not the same. She said it was lovely and I believe she meant it, that in the half bowl there was enough to constitute a meal by her current reckoning, and I am trying to recalibrate my own reckoning accordingly, to stop measuring by the old portions, to understand that less is not a diminishment of what is happening between us at the table but a different kind of the same thing, a smaller ceremony of the same fundamental act, which is: I made this for you, and: you are here to receive it, and: both of us are here, together, at this table, for as long as we are.

I am here. She is here.

The soup is warm. The half bowl is enough. I am practising believing that. Some days I actually do.

She Apologized for Being Sick

Reading Time: 2 minutes

She was sixty-five and she had the flu and she called to tell me she was sorry.

Not about the flu. She was sorry about the inconvenience of the flu. She was sorry about what it meant for the people who needed her to not have the flu. Her partner’s drive. Her grandchildren’s Christmas. The part-time job at the shop that had not said directly but implied through the particular way that some employers imply things that her sick days were a problem, that her body was not entitled to need what it needed without consequence.

She was apologizing for being sick.

I heard it on the phone and something in me went quiet in a particular way, the way you go quiet when you recognize something, when you are listening to someone else and hearing yourself from the outside for the first time. I have done this. I have lain in beds where I should have been resting and instead made lists of what the being-in-bed was costing everyone else. I have turned my illness into an accounting. I have treated my body’s needs as a debt I was running up against everyone around me.

My mother learned this before me. She learned it from women before her who learned it from the world that told them their worth was the work they produced and the care they gave and the smoothness with which the household ran, and illness interrupted all of that, illness said I need something now, illness was selfish in a way a woman was not supposed to be.

I said: Mum. Stop. You are sick. You are allowed to be sick. You do not have to apologize for having a body that needs things.

She said: I know, I know. I just feel bad.

I know she knows. That is the thing about these lessons. You can know them and still not be free of them. You can understand that your worth is not your utility and still feel, in your chest, the guilt of the body that has stopped producing. The knowing and the feeling are not the same country. Moving between them takes a long time. Some women never fully make the crossing.

I wanted to tell her: you have worked every day of your adult life. You are sixty-five and you have a fever and the only thing you should be doing is lying on the couch under a blanket watching whatever you want and letting someone bring you soup if someone is willing to bring it, and if no one brings it, ordering it, and if you cannot order it, I will drive it, I will drive two hours and bring it myself. You do not have to have earned it. You just have to need it. That is enough.

I am not sure she heard me.

I am not sure I have fully heard myself.

Permission

Reading Time: 2 minutes

This time the rest is not because I collapsed.

That is the difference. That is the whole strange difference. Before, the rest came after. It came as consequence, as recovery, as the body finally winning an argument it had been making for years and being forced to make loudly enough that I could not pretend not to hear it. Before, the rest was proof that something had gone wrong. The rest was the evidence of a breakdown I had been trying to prevent and had not been able to prevent and now here was the rest, which felt less like relief and more like defeat.

This time I chose it before anything broke.

And the guilt is still there. I want to be honest about that. The guilt does not know the difference between collapsing and choosing. The guilt has no interest in the distinction. The guilt says: you are not sick. You have not earned this. There are people who cannot stop. There are people who would give anything for a Tuesday with nowhere to be and you are sitting in the sun on your own porch in the middle of a weekday as if that is a thing you are allowed to do.

I am practising saying: I am allowed to do this.

Not because I suffered enough first. Not because I finally earned it. But because rest is not a reward. Rest is not a treatment. Rest is not the thing that comes after the injury. Rest is a right, and I have spent most of my life treating it like a gift I had to qualify for, and I am trying, now, at this point in my life, in this body that has carried so much for so long, to treat it like something I was always allowed to have.

The sea is there if I want it.

The porch is there.

The Tuesday is mine.

I am learning to take it without apology. Some days I almost manage it.

Reading Her Old Letters

Reading Time: 2 minutes

She wrote in a particular hand.

The cursive that her generation learned as a standard, as a required skill, as the way a person communicated on paper before the world changed its mind about what communication on paper required. The loops and the connections, the way the letters lean slightly forward as though hurrying toward something, which is characteristic of her in all her forms, the forward lean of a woman who has places to be and things to accomplish and does not see the point of delay.

I found a box of her letters in the things she gave me.

Not her letters to me. Her letters from other people, kept, the way she kept things, in the careful understanding that correspondence was evidence, was the record of a relationship at a particular moment in time, was something you did not throw away because the moment had passed and would not come again and the letter was what remained of it. Her sister’s letters. Her mother’s letters. One from a friend I have never heard her mention, written in 1971, which is the year before I was born, which means the person writing was writing to a version of my mother I have never met, a version of herself she has only described to me in fragments, the before-me version.

I read slowly.

Not all of them. Some of them felt like hers in a way I did not have permission for, in a way that the reading would have been an entry into the private territory of a woman who has a right to her private territory even now, even when she cannot always remember what the territory contains. I read the ones that felt like they could be read, that had the quality of things she would have shared eventually, and I held the others and put them back.

Her sister’s handwriting is similar to hers.

I did not know that. I have no other sample of it, no other way to know, and here in this letter from 1983 is the evidence that the hand was in the family, that the forward lean was shared, that there were two women writing toward things with the same inherited urgency. Two women I come from. Both of them leaning forward. Both of them in me, in the way I write, in the way I move through a room, in the way I am in a hurry toward the things that matter and have been my whole life without knowing the lean was inherited.

I come from women who wrote letters.

I am writing poems. It is the same thing. It is the reaching across distance toward a person who needs to hear something from you. It is the leaning forward. It is the refusal to let what matters go unsaid.

Parenting in Both Directions

Reading Time: 2 minutes

On Tuesday I helped my mother with her medication and on Saturday my daughter called to ask about hers.

Different medications, different needs, different directions of care flowing through the same woman in the same week, which is what the researchers call the sandwich generation in language that makes it sound like a structural observation rather than what it actually is, which is Tuesday and Saturday, which is the specific weight of being the middle person, the one through whom the caring flows both ways, the one who receives from neither direction in quite the amount she is giving in both.

I do not say this as complaint.

I say it as testimony, as the plain record of what this particular season of a woman’s life looks like from inside it, without the softening, without the affirmation that it is all a gift, which some of it is, and without the martyrdom, which helps no one and which I have tried to refuse as a mode since I understood that performing suffering is not the same as naming it. What I am doing is naming it. The naming is not the same as drowning in it.

My mother does not know she is in the sandwich.

She knows I come and she is glad. She knows the medication is sorted and the appointment was kept and the coat was held and she is loved. She does not know the Tuesday also contained the Saturday and the work call and the errand and the thing I did not do for myself because there was not a slot for it, because my slot was full, because the middle person’s slot is constitutionally harder to protect than the slots at either end.

I am learning to protect the slot.

Not perfectly. Not without guilt. But I am learning that a woman who gives from an empty vessel gives badly, gives with a thinness and an exhaustion that the people she is giving to can feel even if they cannot name it. I am learning that the slot for myself is not the indulgence. The slot for myself is the infrastructure. The rest of it runs on the slot I protect for the woman in the middle, which is me, which is the one who makes Tuesday and Saturday possible, and she deserves a Wednesday too. She deserves a morning at the water. She deserves the coffee while it is still hot.

I am fighting for Wednesday.

I am getting better at it. I am not done yet.

Now I Cook for One

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I still buy too much.

The hand reaches for two because two is what the hand learned. The hand learned two at the beginning and added more as the years added more and now the subtracting is proving harder than the adding was, because the adding happened slowly over time and the subtracting happened all at once, in August, in a parking lot, in a hug that lasted a little longer than the ordinary hugs.

I halve the recipes and the recipes do not always cooperate.

Half a can of tomatoes. Half a cup of rice. The arithmetic of a smaller life, and I know that is not the right word for it, smaller is not the right word, the life is not smaller it is different, it is a different shape, but standing in the kitchen at six o’clock on a Wednesday measuring half a cup of rice, smaller is the word that comes.

I eat at the counter sometimes.

I do not set the table when it is just me. The table still exists. It is there. We ate at that table every night for years, we fought at it and laughed at it and did homework on it and had the conversations you have nowhere else, the conversations that happen because you are in the same room and the food is in front of you and the ordinary evening has given you permission to say the true things. I ate at that table three times a day for sixteen years of being someone’s mother in the full-time daily sense. I do not know how to eat there alone. The table knows too much about the other version.

I am not complaining. I want to be clear that I am not complaining.

I am just saying that nobody told me the grief would live in the kitchen. In the half-cups and the single place setting and the leftovers that go bad because I forgot I was only cooking for one. In the tomatoes. In the rice.

I am learning. I buy less now. I set the table when I feel like it and eat at the counter when I don’t and I am trying to understand that both of those things are allowed, that choosing what you need is not the same as being lost, that cooking for one is just cooking, that the one it is for deserves a good meal.

On Turning Sixty

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I did not expect to feel proud.

Surprised, maybe. Relieved, in the way you are relieved when something large has passed and you are on the other side of it, intact, still recognizably yourself. Possibly philosophical, because sixty is the kind of number that arrives with the expectation of philosophy, that asks you to take stock, to sit with the mathematics of a life and determine whether the addition outweighs the subtraction, whether what you have become is worth what it cost to become it.

But proud. That one surprised me.

Not proud of the accomplishments, though I have some, not proud of the career or the credentials or the things that appear in the official record. Proud of the surviving. Proud of the getting back up, year after year, from things that knocked me down, from the contract years and the burnout and the grief and the relationships that hurt and the versions of myself I had to outgrow and the mourning of each of those versions, which is its own kind of grief, the grief of the self that had to be left in order for the next self to arrive.

Sixty years.

Sixty years in this particular body, this body that has its opinions about stairs and wakes at three and has been through the fire and come out warm rather than burned. Sixty years in this particular life, which was not the life I planned when I was twenty and did not know yet that unplanned lives are often better than planned ones, that the detours are usually where the real things happen, that the gap between what you intended and what you got is where the person you actually are was built.

I had a small party. Just the people I actually wanted to be in a room with.

That was new. That is something I know at sixty that I did not know at thirty, the particular value of a room that contains only the people you would choose if you were allowed to choose honestly, without obligation or history or the feeling that the list should be longer because a larger list looks like a more successful life. My list is not long. My room was the right size. The night was the right length. I laughed until I was tired and went home.

Sixty. I am here. I am proud to be here. I intend to make something of what is left.

My Daughter Is Braver Than I Was

Reading Time: 2 minutes

She said no to the job.

Not because it was a bad job. It was a good job, a reasonable job, the kind of job that a practical woman with a mortgage and a student loan and a mother who spent twenty-five years saying yes to every contract offered because the alternative was nothing would have taken without deliberation, would have taken with relief, would have signed on a Thursday and felt grateful on Friday and started the rationalizing by Monday.

She said: it’s not what I actually want.

I held the phone and I felt two things at once. The first was the old fear, my fear, the fear I carry in my body from twenty-five years of knowing that the contract could end, that the no could close a door, that there was always someone younger and more affordable and more willing in the line behind you. I felt the fear on her behalf with the full force of a woman who learned that fear early and has been unlearning it slowly and expensively for years.

And the second thing was something closer to awe.

She is twenty-four years old and she knows what she actually wants and she said so. She said it plainly, without the elaborate hedging I would have used, without the sorry-but and the I-hope-you-understand and the pre-emptive apology for the inconvenience of having needs that do not align with what is being offered. She said: it’s not what I actually want. And she meant it. And she is figuring out what is.

I said: I think you are right to wait for the right thing.

I meant it completely. I also heard myself say it in the voice of someone who wishes she had been told the same thing at twenty-four by someone who believed it, by someone who was not so hollowed out by their own precarity that they could not afford to say: wait for the thing that is actually yours. I am saying it to her. I am saying it to her the way I would say it to my younger self if I could, with all the conviction I have accumulated from having said yes too many times to the wrong things in the hope that the yes would eventually become the right thing.

She is braver than I was.

I think I had something to do with that. I think the watching me finally learn to say no taught her something I could not have taught her in words. I think the years of me figuring out my own worth showed her something about hers. I hope so. I am choosing to believe so. It is the best inheritance I have to offer.