Category: Poetry

What I Want My Children to Know About This Time

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I want them to know it has been good.

Not in spite of everything. Not by managing to find the good alongside the hard. Actually, straightforwardly good, in the way that things are good when you finally stop waiting for them and start inhabiting them. Good in the mornings and good in the garden and good in the long walks and the writing and the ceramics class where I am bad at the ceramics and do not mind being bad because being bad at something while still doing it is its own kind of freedom, which I had forgotten, which the years of being required to be competent had made it easy to forget.

I want them to know I am not just fine.

I know they ask and I say fine and they hear the fine as reassurance rather than as the full account. I say fine because I do not want them to worry and because fine is faster and because the full account would require them to understand something about this season of life that they cannot yet understand because they are not yet in it, the way I could not understand what my mother was in when I was their age and she was mine. The full account is: I am better than fine. I am, in ways I did not anticipate and would not have predicted during the hardest years, at the beginning of the best part.

I want them to know the hard years were worth it.

Not because suffering is valuable. It is not. Not because difficulty makes you stronger in the simple way the saying implies, because it does not always, because sometimes it just makes you tired. But because the life I have now, the capacity I have now to be present in a morning or a garden or a conversation, was built in the hard years, was built out of what I had to learn in order to survive them, and I would not have this morning without those years and I am glad to be in this morning and so, therefore and despite everything, I am glad to have been in those years.

I want them to know that it gets better.

Not as platitude. As the plain testimony of a woman who did not always believe it and is now living the evidence. You come through. The coming-through is not the same as arriving somewhere final, there is no final, there is just the next stretch of the ongoing, but the next stretch can be genuinely, not-in-spite-of-anything good. I am in it. I want them to know I am in it. I want them to see it, so that when they are here themselves, they know it is possible. So that they remember their mother was here and she was, improbably, glad.

What I No Longer Apologize For

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The list has gotten shorter every year.

I used to apologize for taking up space in a conversation, for having a strong opinion, for being right in a room where being right by a woman was read as aggression rather than accuracy. I used to apologize for my needs as though my needs were an imposition, as though the having of them was already too much and the naming of them required an apology for the naming on top of an apology for the need itself.

I no longer apologize for needing rest.

That one took the longest. The rest-apology was the deepest one, the one with the most roots, the one that had been growing since childhood in the soil of a culture that taught me that a woman’s worth was her output and her rest was therefore a deficit, a subtraction from the total, something to be explained and justified and kept brief and followed by visible productivity to prove that the resting had not been excessive.

I no longer apologize for my feelings taking the amount of space they take.

I no longer apologize for leaving a party when I am tired rather than performing energy I do not have for an audience that will not remember whether I was there until eleven. I no longer apologize for saying no to things that cost me more than they give back. I no longer apologize for the writing, for the time it takes, for treating the writing as a legitimate use of a morning when there are other things the morning could be used for.

I am not done. There are still apologies I issue reflexively, the small ones, the sorry-for-existing ones that come out before I have authorized them, the ones that are so habitual they arrive before consciousness and require a separate act of will to retract. I am working on those.

But the list is shorter.

Every year the list gets shorter and the space I take up gets closer to the actual space I need, and the woman who is learning to stand in her actual space without apology is someone I am glad to be becoming, even now, even late, even imperfectly.

Especially now. Especially late. Especially imperfectly.

What I Stopped Competing With

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Other people’s timelines, first.

The particular exhaustion of measuring your life against the lives of people who went faster, who got the permanent position when you were still on the one-year contract, who owned the house when you were still renting, who had the children and the career and the marriage all apparently coordinated into a coherence that yours never quite achieved, the coherence that looks, from the outside of any life, like the obvious and achievable result of making better decisions than you made. I spent years in that comparison. I spent years finding myself behind in a race I had not consented to enter and could not locate the finish line of.

I stopped.

Not heroically. Exhaustedly. The comparison simply became too expensive to maintain. It required a constant inventory of other people’s visible lives against my own, a constant recalibration of where I stood in a ranking that kept changing its criteria, and I had neither the energy nor the interest anymore, and without the energy and the interest the comparison could not sustain itself, and so it quietly stopped, and what I found in the quiet was that I had not been behind at all. I had been on my own route. The route looked different from the expected route. It was still a route. It was going somewhere real.

My own expectations, second.

This one was harder. The external comparison was uncomfortable but the internal one was insidious, was inside the architecture of the day, was the voice that ran the assessment before I had gotten out of bed, that knew what I had planned to accomplish and was already noting the gap between the plan and the likely reality. I had extremely high expectations of myself and they were entirely self-generated and no institution or person had asked me to hold them and I held them anyway, with a rigour I would not have applied to anyone I loved, with a mercilessness that I called standards and was something closer to punishment.

I am revising the expectations.

To something kinder. To something that a person who loved me would set for me, which is still high, I have not become someone who does not care about quality, but high in the way a good teacher’s bar is high, which is reachable, which is set with belief in the student rather than anticipation of their failure. I am setting my expectations with belief in myself. That is new. That is, it turns out, the right thing to compete with. Not the timeline. Not the other people. Just my own best version, approached with warmth rather than a stopwatch.

What I Know About Endings

Reading Time: 2 minutes

They are rarely the way you picture them.

I pictured the endings of the contract years as a moment, as a clear line, as the email that arrived or did not arrive, the door that opened or closed. But the ending was not a moment. The ending was a season. It was the gradual understanding that something was no longer sustainable, the body’s insistence arriving before the mind’s acknowledgement, the accumulating evidence of a cost that exceeded what the work was worth, the slow crossing of a threshold that I could not have pointed to at the time because I was inside it and thresholds only look like thresholds from the outside.

My mother’s ending will not be a moment either.

I am learning this. It is already a process of ending and also of continuing and the two things are simultaneous, are the same season, which is what I did not understand when I was young about what the ending of a life looked like from inside it. From inside it there is still tea and there are still songs and there are still the clear days and the moments of sharp irreverent humour and the hand held at the end of the evening. The ending is not the absence of all of that. The ending is that alongside all of that.

I know about the endings that are really beginnings.

The retirement that felt like loss until it felt like arrival. The children leaving that felt like diminishment until it felt like expansion. The relationship to the body that was adversarial until it became something closer to a late-forged peace. These endings were not losses. They were the releasing of one version of things to make room for the next version, which could not enter until the previous one had finished.

I am trying to hold all of this at once.

The knowledge that endings contain beginnings and that this is not a comfort when the ending is the ending of someone you love, that the beginning-that-follows will be yours and not hers and that the asymmetry of that is its own kind of grief that does not resolve into consolation no matter how much time I spend with it. I hold it anyway. I hold it because she is still here and the holding is not only for the ending, it is also for the now, for the tea and the songs and the hand and the clear days, which are still here, which are the whole of what there is, which I am learning, one day at a time, are enough.

What I Do Not Miss

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The Sunday-night dread.

I did not always call it that. I called it planning. I called it reviewing. I called it the responsible preparation of a woman who needed to be ready for Monday and readiness required a certain amount of Sunday, which over the years required more Sunday, until Sunday had become an annex of Monday, a preparatory space rather than a day of its own, and the only Sunday feeling was the dread of the Monday that was coming and the readiness that was never quite enough and the sense, persistent, unreasonable, and real, that the week about to begin was going to ask more than I could give and I was going to give it anyway and that giving was going to cost something I could not quite afford.

Sunday is mine now.

All of it. The morning and the afternoon and the evening that used to fill with the particular grey anxiety of a woman assembling herself for the week. Now the evening is dinner and the program and early to bed if I want to, which I often do, which is a fact I find quietly thrilling still, the permission of an early bed on a Sunday without the guilt of wasted time, without the knowledge that the preparation is incomplete, without the dread.

I do not miss the dread.

I also do not miss the performance of certainty in rooms where I was not certain. The faculty meeting where everyone spoke with a confidence they did not feel about things they did not fully know and the performance of certainty was the currency and I was good at spending it and it cost me something every time. I do not miss the emails that arrived at nine in the evening and required a response that needed to be calibrated for tone and implication and the management of a relationship that would be affected by the calibration. I do not miss the annual renewal season, the particular quality of February, which for twenty-five years meant waiting, means something different now.

February means the sea now. Or the memory of the sea. Or the garden catalogues and the planning for spring in a life where spring is something to look forward to rather than a semester to survive.

I do not miss any of it.

I am glad it happened. I am glad it is over. Both things, at the same time, without contradiction, which is how I feel about most of the chapters that are finished. Glad they were and glad they are done and glad to be here, in this chapter, in this Sunday, which is entirely mine.

What I Do With the Anger

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I used to turn it inward.

That is what I was taught to do with it, not in explicit instruction but in the thousand small corrections of a childhood and a culture that did not have a place for an angry woman, that received anger from a woman as something to be smoothed, as a problem of presentation rather than a legitimate response to a legitimate grievance. I learned the smoothing early. I learned to translate the anger into something more acceptable, into the quiet persistence that reads as determination, into the relentless working that looks like dedication, into the composure in the difficult room that looks like equanimity and is sometimes rage at a frequency no one else can hear.

I am done with the smoothing.

Not done with composure, not in favor of burning anything down, not interested in rage as a permanent state or a personality or a posture. But done with the translation. Done with taking the legitimate thing and making it smaller and more palatable before I am willing to acknowledge it even to myself. The anger is information. It has always been information. It points at things that matter, at gaps between what was promised and what was delivered, at places where the wrong was absorbed and metabolized and called something else because calling it what it was felt like a door I was not allowed to open.

I open it now.

I stand in the anger long enough to understand what it is telling me. I ask it: what did you need that you did not get. I ask it: what was the wrong. I let it answer. And then, and this is the part that took years to learn, I do not marinate in the answer. I take the information and I do something with it, I write it or walk it or change something in my life based on what the anger named, and then I put it down. Not suppress. Not perform. Take the message and set down the carrier.

The anger has been a good informant. It has been more honest with me than most things.

I have stopped punishing it for existing. I have started thanking it for arriving. It has been pointing at true things my whole life and I have been telling it to keep its voice down. I am listening now. I am paying attention to what it knows.

What I Inherited

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Not things. She does not have things to leave.

A woman who worked every day of her adult life in the kind of work that does not compound, that does not accumulate into property or portfolios or the kind of inheritance that arrives in envelopes from lawyers and changes the mathematics of a life. What she has to leave is not that kind of thing and I want to say clearly that this is not a complaint, that I am not writing this poem from inside resentment, that the accounting of what she does not have is not where the weight of this is.

The weight is in what she does have to leave.

The stubbornness. I inherited the stubbornness and I used to call it something else but now I call it what it is, which is the refusal to be smaller than the situation requires, the refusal to stop when stopping feels like giving up, the particular digging-in of a woman who has been told no enough times to have developed a relationship with no that is more curiosity than capitulation. She taught me that without teaching it, by being it, by modeling an entire life in which the no was not the final word.

The laugh. I inherited the laugh that starts before the joke is finished because she always knows where the joke is going and she finds it funny before it arrives. I have the same laugh. My daughter has it too. Three generations of women laughing before the punchline, in advance of the funny, ahead of it, which is another way of saying: trusting that the funny is coming. That is not nothing. That is a disposition. That is a way of being in the world that says: I expect delight. I have always expected delight. The delight has not always arrived but the expecting of it has kept me oriented toward it and that orientation has saved me more than once.

And the hands. I already told you about the hands.

The hands that are hers at the sink. The hands I will leave in turn to whoever comes after me, carrying whatever the hands carry, the specific cellular memory of women who worked and held and made things and kept going and sometimes stood at the window with the coffee going cold and looked out at whatever was there and found it, for a moment, sufficient.

This is what she leaves. This is what I am already giving away.

What Grief Actually Looks Like

Reading Time: 2 minutes

It looks like standing in the cereal aisle for four minutes.

Not the dramatic version. Not the version that has a score and a lighting design and the particular quality of collapse that looks, from the outside, like the appropriate response to loss. That version exists. I have been in that version. But grief is not only that version and the cultural emphasis on that version does a particular disservice to the people who are in the cereal aisle version, who are standing in front of the boxes and cannot decide which one and understand dimly that the inability to decide is not about cereal, is about something that has taken up residence in the ordinary and refuses to be located only in the dramatic.

It looks like driving past a restaurant and having to pull over.

Because you ate there. Because the eating there was unremarkable at the time and is now what the grief has chosen to attach itself to, the specific unremarkable meal in the specific restaurant with the specific quality of the conversation that was just conversation, just a Tuesday, just two people eating and talking, and the Tuesday is gone and the talking is changed and the grief lives in the restaurant now, and you did not know that until you drove past it.

It looks like being fine for three weeks and then not being fine on a random Wednesday.

The Wednesday has no reason. The Wednesday is not an anniversary or a trigger you can identify in retrospect and use to warn yourself next time. The Wednesday just arrives with the grief already in it and you spend the Wednesday in the grief and you go to bed and you wake up on Thursday and the Thursday is fine again. This is not progress and then regression. This is just how it works. The grief is not linear. The grief does not care about your schedule for it.

It looks like being grateful and sad simultaneously, which is not a contradiction, which is exactly what grief is when it comes alongside love, which is the only kind of grief that matters.

It looks like a life that is going well and also contains this. Both of those at the same time, the going well and the containing this, and the containing-this does not disqualify the going well and the going well does not mean the grief is finished, and you carry both of them, the joy and the sorrow, the gratitude and the grief, you carry them together in the same hands that are also making tea and driving to appointments and writing poems and standing in the cereal aisle unable to decide.

Both hands. Full. Still going.

What I Didn’t Say at the Door

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I said: call me when you get there.

I said: you have everything you need.

I said: I am so proud of you, and I meant it, that one I meant with my whole body, I could feel it in the way the words came out, slightly unsteady, slightly too full, the way something feels when it is real and too large and you are trying to hand it over without dropping it.

I did not say: I have been rehearsing this moment for weeks and I still do not know how to do it.

I did not say: I am afraid I will forget the sound of you in the morning. The specific rhythm of your footsteps, which I could identify from anywhere in the house, which I used to track without meaning to, that sound as information, as presence, as the ongoing low-frequency reassurance that you were here and you were fine.

I did not say: I do not know what I am for, now, in the same way.

I did not say that because it was not your weight to carry. You did not ask to be my purpose. I decided that, quietly, over years, the way you make decisions that do not feel like decisions, that feel like just the way things are, and the undoing of them is not your responsibility. The undoing of them is mine. I held all of that back at the door and gave you the version of me that you needed, the one who was solid and proud and certain, and that version is also real, I want to be clear, that version is entirely real.

But so is the one who drove home and sat in the driveway for ten minutes before going inside.

So is the one who made dinner for one for the first time and set one place at the table and then moved to the couch because the table was too much.

Both of those women are me and neither of them said everything at the door and that is how it should be. Some things you carry yourself. Some things are only yours.

What I Am Building Now

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Not a career. Not a reputation. Not the kind of thing that goes on a page and is assessed by people who do not know the cost of it.

A life. An actual life, the kind that is present in its own mornings rather than managed from slightly above them, the kind that knows what it likes and takes time for what it likes and does not require those things to justify their existence in productivity terms before they are allowed to occupy an afternoon.

I am building a practice of attention.

This is the most accurate way I have found to describe what I am doing with the days. I am learning to pay attention to what is actually here rather than what should be here, to the morning as it is rather than as I planned it to be, to the conversation as it goes rather than where I intended to steer it, to the body as it arrives on a given day rather than the body I was expecting based on yesterday. The attention is the practice. The practice requires the daily showing up, which I am better at than I was, which I am still working on, which I expect to be working on for the remainder of whatever time I have, and I find that not discouraging but orienting, like having a compass direction rather than a destination.

I am building relationships that are honest.

Which means I am building relationships in which I am honest, which is harder than it sounds and requires the ongoing unlearning of the management habits, the deflection habits, the I’m-fine habits that kept me safe and kept me alone inside the safety. The relationships that are honest are the ones where someone asks a real question and I give the real answer and both of us are still standing afterward and the standing-afterward is what the honest relationship is built out of, the accumulated trust that the real answer will not destroy what we have made.

I am building toward something I cannot fully name.

That is the truest thing. I am in the building and I can feel it taking shape around me, the shape of a life that is mine in a way the previous chapters were not fully mine, and I do not have the word for what it is becoming because the becoming is still underway and the naming requires a completion I have not reached and I am not in a hurry to reach it.

Let it be underway. Let the building continue. I am here for it, finally, entirely here, and that is the whole of what I need to bring to it. That is enough to begin from. That will always be enough to begin from.