Category: Poetry

What She Couldn’t Afford to Rest

Reading Time: 2 minutes

My mother never had thirty days.

I want to say that plainly before I say anything else about alonetude, about the sea, about what it means to rest long enough to remember who you are. My mother has worked every day of her adult life. Not as a metaphor. Literally. Retail and childcare and housework and the informal economy of a woman who fills every gap that the formal economy leaves and gets paid for almost none of it.

I went to Mexico and theorized my rest.

I gave it a name. I wrote a thesis. I documented the nervous system’s capacity to soften when it is no longer required to brace. I used words like somatic and alonetude and embodied inquiry and I meant all of them, they were true things said in the language of the institution that was funding me, and while I was saying them I was thinking about my mother on the couch with the flu at sixty-five apologizing for being sick.

She could not afford the breakdown. That is the plain truth of it. She could not afford the thesis or the sabbatical or the thirty days because her precarity was not the kind that produces elegiac essays about burnout. Her precarity was the kind that does not leave. That does not resolve into a writing retreat. That wakes up with you every morning and reminds you before your eyes are fully open that the rent is due and the body had better cooperate.

What would alonetude have looked like for her. I ask this not as a rhetorical question. I ask it as an honest one, with the knowledge that I do not have the answer, that the answer was never mine to have.

Maybe ten minutes in the garden before anyone else was awake.

Maybe the drive to work with the radio off.

Maybe the pause at the window with the coffee going cold that I used to see and not understand, that I understand now as the thing she was doing instead of the thirty days she did not have. Her own small sea. Her own way of going somewhere in the middle of staying.

I am writing this so her rest is in the record too. Even if she never had the words for it. Even if no institution ever funded it. It was real. It was hers. It counted.

When She Stopped Recognizing the House

Reading Time: 2 minutes

She called it the wrong name.

She called it by the name of the house she lived in forty years ago, the one I grew up in, the one with the particular smell and the particular light coming through the kitchen window in the late afternoon and the linoleum floor in the bathroom that was cold underfoot in December. She looked around the living room where she has lived for eleven years and called it by the name of the house she left when I was eighteen, and I understood in that moment that the house she lives in her memory is not this one.

I said: this is your home, Mum. You’ve lived here since 2013.

She looked at me with the look that I am learning to recognize, the look that is not confusion exactly but uncertainty, the look of a woman who is no longer sure whose version of reality to trust, hers or the people around her who keep gently, lovingly, persistently telling her she is wrong. That look breaks something in me every time I see it. The uncertainty in the eyes of a woman who was never uncertain. Who knew everything about every room she was ever in. Who could have told you the inventory of every cupboard in the house she grew up in and the house she raised me in and probably still can, somewhere in the deeper archive where the early things are better preserved.

I stopped correcting her after that visit.

Not as defeat. As a different kind of love. As the understanding that the correction costs her something it does not cost me, that every correction is a small erosion of a dignity she is working to keep, and my need to have her be accurate about what year and what house and what day is my need, not hers. She does not need to know what house this is. She needs to feel safe in it. Those are different things and I had been confusing them.

She sat down in her chair and said: well, wherever we are, it’s nice.

I said: it is. It really is.

And meant it. And meant it for both of us and for every room she has ever lived in and every version of home her mind is moving between and the dignity of not needing to land on only one.

What She Said When I Told Her I Was Tired

Reading Time: 2 minutes

She said: I know.

Not as dismissal. Not the I know that means: yes, yes, stop talking about it. The other I know. The one that comes from having seen you for long enough to have the full archive of you, to understand that when you say tired you mean something with a specific gravity and a specific texture that ordinary tired does not have, that you have been precise in your use of the word tired for years and when you use it now it means what it has always meant when you use it, which is: I am at the place where the body and the mind have run out of the reserves and what is left is the essential, the bare continuing, which is still something but is not the thing I want to be surviving on.

She said: I know. And then she did not offer a solution.

That is what I needed. Not the solution. I know the solutions. I know that I need to sleep more and eat better and exercise and reduce my stress load and say no to things and prioritize the things that restore me over the things that deplete me, I have read the literature, I have written some of the literature, I know the solutions and I did not need them listed in the voice of a person who thinks I have not thought of them.

What I needed was the I know.

The witnessing of it. The being-heard in the specific register of the tired, the acknowledgement that the tired is real and is the size I am saying it is and does not need to be immediately reframed into something more manageable before I have even finished saying it. The I know that just sits with me in the tired for a moment before asking anything of me.

She sat with me in it for a while.

We did not fix anything. The tired was still there when we stopped talking. But I was different inside it after the being-witnessed, slightly less alone in it, slightly less certain that I was the only one who knew the size of it, which is the particular medicine of being genuinely heard, not solved, not redirected, just heard, and which I am still trying to offer others with the same quality she offered it to me.

I know. I know. Two words and the whole room changes.

What Retirement Does to a Marriage

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Suddenly we are in the same house at the same time.

That is the simple version. The longer version is that we built our life together around separate schedules, around the particular rhythm of two people who love each other and also have their own orbits, who come home to each other at the end of the day and that coming-home is the structure of the love, the daily returning, the reliable choosing of each other at the end of all the other choosing. We were very good at that version. We had been doing that version for a long time and it worked and we did not think much about it because things that work do not ask you to think about them.

And then I retired and we had to learn a different version.

I am not complaining. I want to say that clearly. But I am also not going to pretend it was immediately easy, the adjustment to all this together, to the shared kitchen in the morning when I used to have the kitchen to myself for the hour before anyone else was awake, to the presence of another person in the house during the hours that used to be mine to use as I needed, to the negotiation of space and time that we had not needed to negotiate before because the structure of our days had negotiated it for us.

We have been learning each other again at a different pace.

There are mornings when I look at him across the kitchen and think: I have known you for thirty years and you are still interesting to me, and I do not take that for granted, I know that is not guaranteed, I have watched enough marriages harden around each other to know that interesting is a gift you have to keep giving and receiving.

We went for a walk last week without a destination. Just out the door and down the street and left and then wherever the left led us, talking the way we talk when there is no agenda, the way we talked when we were new and the conversation was still an adventure. We walked for an hour and forty minutes. We did not realize it until we checked.

I think that is what retirement is offering us, underneath the adjustment. The time to remember that we still like each other when we are not just surviving the week together. The time to find out what we are like when we are not managing logistics and parenting and careers but just two people who chose each other, choosing each other still.

What My Hands Have Done

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I was looking at them this morning.

The way you look at something you have had for a long time without looking at it, which is a different kind of looking, the looking that happens when the familiar becomes briefly visible again, when you see the thing rather than looking through it. My hands. The specific geography of them, the knuckles that are her knuckles now, the particular lines that are the lines of a hand that has been used, that has done the work that hands do over decades of a life that required things of them.

These hands wrote things.

Thousands of pages. Lecture notes and committee reports and emails at midnight and the thesis that took years and the poems that are taking years in a different way, a better way, the way that is chosen rather than required. They wrote letters to students who were struggling, the specific kind of letter that takes longer than it should because the words matter and the student’s name at the top matters and you want them to know you actually saw them rather than a file folder with their name on it. They wrote things that mattered and things that mattered only at the time and things that will not be read by anyone and all of it was the hands.

These hands held children.

First at the beginning when the holding was the whole of what was needed, the weight of a new person who was entirely dependent on the adequacy of the arms, and then throughout, the holding in different forms, the hand on the shoulder and the hand that reached for the hand in the dark of a bad dream, the hand extended at the graduation, the hand that let go in the parking lot of a university residence in August.

These hands have made a great many meals.

Have made the soup and the bread and the birthday cakes that were never quite level and the dinners that fed people who needed feeding and the tea that was the right response to nearly everything, the kettle on as the first move in a hundred difficult conversations, the mug placed in front of someone who was having a hard time as the beginning of the being-with-them-in-it.

These are good hands. They are her hands and they are mine.

They are still here in the morning light and they still have things to do and I am glad of them. I am, this morning, looking at them directly, glad of every line.

What My Body Remembered When I Stopped

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The first thing it remembered was how to breathe.

Not the shallow managed breathing of a woman who is in the middle of something and cannot afford to be in her body because the body is the distraction from the task and the task is what is real. The other kind. The full kind, the kind that goes all the way down, that fills the places that shallow breathing cannot reach, the places that had been empty for so long I had stopped noticing the emptiness.

It remembered the sea.

Not just the Loreto sea, not just the specific water of that specific February. The body’s general memory of water, which runs deeper than any particular experience of it, which is older than I am, which is the memory of being the kind of animal that is calmed by the sound of water moving, that finds something in the quality of light on a surface that the nervous system receives as permission to soften. The body knew this before I did. The body had been trying to tell me for years. I stopped long enough to hear it and it said: water. So I went to the water.

It remembered what hunger felt like.

Actual hunger, physical hunger, the body signaling a genuine need rather than the stress-eating or the not-eating that had characterized the years when food was fuel or comfort or neither, when mealtimes were logistics. When I stopped and the days became slow enough to feel their own rhythm, the hunger came back as information, as the body saying: now. Not as demand but as conversation. I had not been in conversation with my own hunger for a very long time.

It remembered how to be still without bracing.

That one took the longest. The stillness without the held breath underneath it, without the readiness-for-impact that had become the default state of a woman who had spent years waiting for the contract email, the difficult student, the institution’s next requirement. Stillness without armoring. Stillness as the actual absence of threat rather than the management of it.

The body knew all of this the whole time.

It had been keeping it for me, holding it in reserve, waiting for the moment I would stop long enough to let it give it back. The body is patient. The body is the most patient thing I know. It waited twenty-five years and when I finally stopped it said: here. Here is what I have been holding for you. Here is everything you set down without knowing you were setting it down. Here is the breathing. Here is the hunger. Here is the stillness that is not fear. Take it. It was always yours.

What I Wish I’d Said While She Could Still Hear It

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Not the big things. I said the big things.

I said I love you regularly and I meant it and she knew I meant it and on the days when the love was complicated, when the love sat next to frustration and the not-quite-understanding and the old unresolved architecture of a mother and daughter who are similar enough to generate heat, I still said it, because the love was always true even when it was not always simple.

What I did not say enough were the small specific things.

I did not say: the way you laugh before the joke is finished is one of my favourite sounds in the world and I have it in my body the way I have music, the way I can hear a song without the song playing because the body holds it. I did not say: I watched you work every day of my childhood and I understood nothing about how hard it was and now I understand everything and I am sorry it took me this long and I am grateful in a way that has no adequate word in English, or possibly any language, for what you did in all those ordinary days that did not ask for acknowledgment and did not receive it.

I did not say: you made me brave. Not the kind of brave that requires a moment or a crisis. The daily kind. The kind that is just continuing, just getting up and doing the thing again, just not stopping even when stopping would be easier and no one would blame you for it. You modelled that so completely that I absorbed it without knowing I was absorbing it, the way children absorb the essential things, without noticing, through the walls.

I am saying it now.

I do not know how much of it she can receive, on the harder days when the fog is thicker and the words land but do not quite stay. I say it anyway. I say it because it is true and because the saying matters even if the receiving is incomplete, because love that is only expressed when it can be fully received is love that is waiting for conditions that will not always be met.

I say it for both of us now. For her to hear as much as she can hear, and for me to say as clearly as I can say it, so that when she is gone the words will have been spoken out loud in a room where she was present and that has to be enough.

It has to be enough.

What I Would Tell My Forty-Year-Old Self

Reading Time: 2 minutes

She is at her desk at eleven at night and she is still working.

I can see her. I can see the desk and the lamp and the particular hunch of a woman who has been at a screen for too long and knows it and has decided that the knowing is not sufficient reason to stop, that there is still more to do, that the more-to-do is never actually done and if she waits for it to be done she will never stop and if she never stops she will eventually be stopped in a way that is not her choice, which is in fact exactly what will happen, but she does not know that yet and I am not sure knowing it would change anything.

What would I tell her.

Not to work less. She will not work less, the work is part of who she is, the work is the love made practical, and I would not take that from her even if I could. Not that it will be fine in the end, because fine is not the right word for what the end looked like, the ending was hard and long and more costly than she can currently imagine, and minimizing that in advance would be a kind of lie.

I would tell her to sleep more.

I would tell her that the body is keeping a record and the record will be presented eventually and she should invest in the body now the way she invests in everything else, with attention and care and the understanding that the return on investment is not immediate but is real. I would tell her to call the friend more often, to not save the long conversations for when she has time, because she will not have time until she is fifty and by then the friendship will have needed tending for a decade and will still be there but will require re-learning.

I would tell her she is already enough.

I would say it plainly, without scaffolding, the way you say something to someone who you know will argue with it. I would say: the bar you are trying to clear is not a real bar. The real bar was cleared years ago. What you are jumping now is air. I know you cannot feel that yet. I know the air looks exactly like a bar. But it is air and you are spending yourself on it and the spending has a cost.

Go to bed. The work will still be there in the morning. You will be there in the morning too, and the you that is rested is worth more to every person who needs you than the you at eleven at night, diminished, proving something to no one but yourself.

Go to bed. I love you. Go to bed.

What My Daughter Taught Me About Leaving

Reading Time: 2 minutes

She left on a Tuesday in September and by Wednesday she had sent me a photograph of her breakfast.

Not because I asked. Because she wanted to. Because even in the leaving there was still a reaching back, a here is my morning, here is the new version of my morning, here is a window into the life that is mine now, and I want you to see it even as I build it away from you. I looked at the photograph of that breakfast for longer than a breakfast photograph should take. Eggs. Toast. A mug I did not recognize. A table in a kitchen I had not yet been inside. Evidence of a life underway.

I replied: looks delicious.

Which was true but was also not the whole of what I wanted to say. The whole of what I wanted to say was: I see you. I see that you made yourself breakfast in a new kitchen. I see that you are feeding yourself, which is the most basic act of self-care and also somehow the one that makes me the most proud, the evidence of a person who knows she needs to eat and does the eating, who is taking care of the body that I spent eighteen years taking care of and has now taken that work on herself.

She is teaching me something about leaving.

She is teaching me that leaving is not the same as going away. That you can build a life at a distance and still send breakfast photographs. That independence is not severance. That she can be wholly hers and still reach back, still include me in the small Tuesday mornings of her life in a new city, and those two things are not in contradiction.

I had confused leaving with losing for most of my life.

I had thought that when the children left the children would be gone, that the going would be a kind of closing, a door at the end of a hallway. She is showing me a different architecture. She is showing me that the leaving makes a different kind of room, that the relationship that was parent and child becomes something more like two adults who love each other and check in and send breakfast photographs on Wednesday mornings, and that this version, this particular new version, is its own kind of beautiful.

I am learning to love it on its own terms.

What I Know Now That I Didn’t Know

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Not wisdom. I want to be careful about that word.

The word wisdom implies a completion that I do not feel. It implies that the knowing has arrived in full, that there is a view from here that is clear and steady and cannot be shaken. I do not have that view. I have a partial view from a particular place at a particular time in my life, a view that is cleaner than the one I had at thirty-five but still obscured by things I cannot see yet, things I will probably only be able to name later, looking back from somewhere I am not yet.

But there are things I know now that I did not know.

I know that the work was real and the cost of it was real and both of those things can be true simultaneously without one cancelling the other. I spent years trying to resolve that tension, trying to decide whether my work had been worth the cost or whether the cost proved it had not been worth it, and the answer is that the question is wrong. Worth is not the right frame. It happened. It shaped me. Some of it was good. Some of it was harm I am still metabolizing. All of it is mine.

I know that the body kept the record and the body can release the record. Not all at once, not on command, but slowly, with the right conditions, the body can put down what it has been carrying. I have felt this. I want to say that I have actually felt it, in Loreto at the edge of the sea, in the slow morning walks I take now, in the particular quality of an afternoon when there is nowhere to be and the afternoon is fully mine. The body softens. It is not metaphor. The body actually softens.

I know that I was harder on myself than any institution ever was.

And I know that the people I loved did not need as much of me as I gave them. Or rather: they needed me, but they needed the present version more than the perfectly prepared version, and the perfectly prepared version was always partially absent because she was preparing for the next thing. I gave a great deal of a very good performance when sometimes what was needed was just me, just there, not prepared, not performing, just in the room.

I am practising being in the room.

It turns out I am better at it than I thought. It turns out the room is fine with just me in it, underprepared and present and alive.