Category: Poetry

What I Am Doing With the Rest of It

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I am going more slowly.

That is the first and most important thing. I am going more slowly and not apologizing for the pace, which is new, which is harder than it sounds for a woman who spent decades moving at the speed the institution required and before that the speed the children required and before that the speed of a young woman who had something to prove, who was always arriving slightly breathless, whose relationship with time was fundamentally anxious, always behind, always catching up, always not quite where she should be by now.

I am writing.

I am writing things that are not for a grade or a committee or a rubric or anyone’s approval. I am writing because the writing is how I think and how I grieve and how I make meaning out of the material of a life, and I have always known this and spent years treating the writing as the last thing on the list, the thing I would get to when everything else was done, which meant I almost never got to it because everything else was never done. Now the writing is the thing. Now I get up in the morning and I write before I do the things that need doing and the things that need doing are still there when I come back to them and they do not resent me for the delay.

I am learning to receive.

This is harder. I am better at giving, at being useful, at the careful competent management of what other people need. Receiving is a different skill and I was not taught it and I am learning it late, learning what it means to let someone cook for me without jumping up to help, to let someone say something kind without immediately deflecting it with self-deprecation, to let the care land rather than redirecting it.

I am choosing things I cannot justify on a curriculum vitae.

The long walk with no purpose. The novel. The afternoon at the sea. The dinner that took three hours because no one was rushing and the conversation kept going somewhere worth going and we let it. I am choosing these things and calling them important, calling them the point, calling them the life I am finally getting around to living inside of rather than managing from the outside.

This is what I am doing with the rest of it.

I am living it rather than preparing for it. I am finally, mostly, here.

What Do I Do With My Hands Now

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I did not expect to miss the busyness.

I expected relief. I had been telling myself for years that I was ready, that I had earned this, that the body knows when it is time and mine had known for a long time, had been asking in all the ways bodies ask, the sleeplessness, the jaw, the mornings that felt like bracing for impact before anything had even happened.

But the first Monday was strange.

I woke at the same hour because the body does not forget on command, and I lay there and thought: now what. Not as despair. More like standing in a room where the furniture has been removed and the light looks different without it, familiar and unfamiliar at the same time, your own room and not your room.

I went to the kitchen and made coffee and stood at the window and my hands did not know what to do.

That is the part no one tells you. Not the freedom, not the sleeping in, not the travel or the garden or the things you promised yourself you would finally get to. The hands. The hands that spent decades holding things, folders and pens and the weight of other people’s learning, the hands that were always in motion, always producing, always earning their place in the room.

I looked at them like they belonged to someone I used to know.

I have spent my whole life being useful. Being legible. Being the person who arrives prepared, who can be counted on, who knows what to do next because there is always a next and the next is your responsibility and you do not set it down because setting it down means you have failed at the only thing that made you real.

I did not know I had confused being real with being busy until the busy stopped.

And now I am learning. Slowly, the way you learn something the body has to learn rather than the mind, something that has to be practised rather than understood. I am learning to let my hands rest on my knees in the morning and feel the sun come through the window and not call that idleness. Not call it waste.

To call it, maybe, arrival.

To say: you have been in motion for a very long time.

To say: you are allowed to stop.

They Stopped Looking

Reading Time: 2 minutes

It happens gradually and then you notice it all at once.

You are in a room and the room does not orient toward you the way rooms used to orient toward you. You are at a counter and the person behind the counter looks slightly past you, not rudely, not intentionally, just in the way that people look past things that have receded from the part of the visual field that the culture has trained them to attend to. You are in a meeting and the question goes to someone younger even though you have the answer, you can feel the answer in your chest, you could give the answer in twenty-five words or fewer and it would be the right answer, and the question goes to someone younger.

I am trying to tell you something true about this.

Not that it does not hurt, because it does, sometimes, in the small way that a drip of cold water hurts, not devastating but cumulative, the accumulation of small drips adding up to a kind of soaking. And not that I did not, on some level, want to be less visible in the ways that visibility had cost me, because I had wanted that, I had spent years wanting to be able to move through the world without being assessed or appraised or found adequate or inadequate by a culture with very specific ideas about what a woman’s body was for.

What I did not expect was the ambivalence.

I did not expect to stand at the counter and feel both things at once. The relief of not being looked at and the small, real grief of it. The way the invisibility I had sometimes longed for turned out not to feel like freedom but like something else, like being excused from a game you did not ask to play but now that you have been excused are not sure you wanted to leave.

I am still negotiating this.

I am still deciding what it means to be a woman who is no longer looked at by the world in the way the world looks at women when it decides they are relevant. I am deciding whether the looking was ever really about me or whether it was always about something the world was doing for itself. And I am learning that being seen by yourself, clearly, honestly, without the distortion of the external gaze, is a different kind of visibility.

It is quieter. It is, in some ways, more accurate.

I am learning to prefer it.

This Is What Joy Looks Like Now

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Not the loud kind.

Not the kind I imagined at twenty-five when I thought about what joy was going to look like when I finally arrived at it, the champagne-and-confetti version, the unambiguous declaration that something wonderful has happened and is being celebrated with the full production value of a wonderful thing. That kind of joy exists and I have felt it and it is real and it is not what I am talking about.

I am talking about the other kind.

The joy that comes in without announcing itself. The ten-day green in May that I mentioned, the particular green of the trees before it settles into the ordinary summer green, which I have been stopping to look at every year and will stop to look at every year for as long as there are Mays available to me. The first soup of the season, the one I make in October when the temperature drops and the house can hold the smell of it properly and the eating of it has the quality of a small ceremony, a marking of the season, a saying-yes to the October we are in rather than the summer we have left. The dog at the end of the road who always recognizes me now and does the specific full-body wag that dogs do when they are genuinely glad, without ambivalence, without management, completely glad in a way that I find both enviable and instructive.

The call on a Sunday morning from a voice I know.

The book that is so good I stop reading it for a moment to be in the fact of its being that good, to feel the quality of having found something that is exactly what I needed without knowing I needed it. The afternoon in the garden when nothing goes wrong. The late evening with the people I love best when the conversation has gone somewhere real and the wine is finished and no one wants to be the first to say it is time to go home.

This is what joy looks like now. Smaller than I imagined. More frequent than I expected. More available than I knew joy could be, now that I am no longer moving too fast to receive it.

I am receiving it. I am showing up for the ten-day green. I am stopping for the dog. I am in the soup and the book and the late evening and the Sunday voice.

This is it. This is the whole of it. I am glad to be here for it.

The Women Before Me

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I have been thinking about the line of us.

My mother and her mother and the woman before her whose name I do not know because the names did not always make it forward, because the women who carried the line often did not carry their own names into the official record, because the record was not for them, the record was for other things, and the women were part of the background of the record, the unseen labour in the footnotes.

None of them rested. That is the thing I keep coming back to.

Not as accusation. Not as grief exactly, though it is grief, it is grief in the slow and diffuse way that structural truths become grief when you finally let yourself look at them directly. None of them had thirty days. None of them had even ten. They had the minutes they carved out in the margins of the work, the coffee going cold at the window, the garden before anyone else was awake, the brief and unremarkable pauses between the labour that no one was tracking because no one was supposed to know the labour was that much.

I rest for them too. I need to say that.

I know it is not a transaction. I know that my rest does not retroactively give them theirs, that the logic of inheritance does not work that way, that I cannot pay a debt forward or backward through time with an act that they cannot receive. I know all of that. I am saying it anyway. When I sit at the edge of the sea and I am still and I am not producing anything and no one needs anything from my body for these thirty minutes, I am doing it with an awareness that this was not available to the women who made me.

And maybe what I am passing forward is different.

Maybe what I am passing to my daughter and her daughter if she has one is this: a woman who rested. A woman who said out loud that she needed it and took it without waiting for permission and did not apologize. A woman in the line who modelled that a body is not a tool and a life is not a ledger and rest is not something you earn by suffering enough first.

The line continues. I am in it. I am trying to bend it, slightly, in the direction of dignity.

I think that is enough to try for. I think that is the whole thing.

The Weight I Stopped Carrying

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I did not realize it was there until it was gone.

That is the strange thing about weight you have carried for a long time. You stop noticing it the way you stop noticing the furniture in your own house. It becomes the condition of the room rather than something in the room. It becomes normal. It becomes the baseline against which you measure everything else, so that what you call rest is rest with the weight still on, what you call ease is ease with the weight still on, and the full category of what rest and ease could be without the weight is simply not available to you as a reference point because you have never experienced it as an adult, or not in long enough stretches to learn the shape of it.

And then one day it is less.

Not gone, not all of it, not the deep-buried kind that took forty years to accumulate and will take what it takes to metabolize. But less, measurably less, the shoulders at a different height than they have been, the jaw unclenched in the mornings rather than working something through while I slept, the particular quality of waking that does not begin with the assessment of threat, that does not begin mid-calculation, that just begins, quietly, in a body that is trying out the possibility of being in a morning without first checking it for danger.

The contract is what I stopped carrying first.

Twenty-five years of the pending. Of the planning-to. Of the email that would come or not come and the body keeping the record of every year of the not-yet-knowing, storing it in the shoulders and the jaw and the held breath of a woman who had learned to brace and forgotten how to unbrace, who had been bracing for so long that bracing was the posture she thought of as her own. I put that down when I retired and the putting-down revealed how much of me had been going toward the carrying, how much was available when the carrying stopped, which turned out to be more than I expected.

I am using it now.

The energy that the weight was using. The attention. The portion of myself that was always allocated to the carrying and is now available for something else, for the morning and the walk and the writing and the being-present in a conversation rather than partly elsewhere managing the weight. It is not a small thing, the putting-down. It is the whole difference between a life that is survived and a life that is inhabited. I am inhabiting mine now. I can feel the difference in my shoulders every morning.

The Weight of Her Coat

Reading Time: 2 minutes

She has always had a coat for every occasion.

That is the kind of woman she is, or was, the kind of woman who understood clothes as a form of readiness, who did not leave the house unless she was prepared for whatever the day might require of her, who took that seriously, the preparation, the presentation, the small daily ceremony of being a woman who was put-together before she went out into the world that was going to look at her and form opinions before she spoke.

Last winter she forgot which coat was for what.

Not all at once. The forgetting came slowly, the way it comes, reorganizing itself around her so quietly that by the time I noticed the reorganizing was well underway. She wore the heavy coat in October when it was still mild. She reached for the light one in January and I had to redirect her gently, the way you redirect someone gently, the way that is not correcting, that is steering, that is keeping your voice level while your heart is doing something that is not level at all.

I help her with the coat now.

I hold it open and she puts her arms in and I settle it onto her shoulders and sometimes she pats my hand and says thank you in the voice of a woman who knows she is being helped and is still deciding how she feels about being helped, still negotiating the dignity of it, the way that needing help with something you have done without help for eighty years sits differently in the body than needing help with something you never could do alone.

I think about the times she helped me with my coat.

The small-child years when she held it and I put my arms in and she would tug it down at the back and say there. I did not notice it as love then because it was just Tuesday. It was just leaving the house. It was just the ordinary efficiency of a mother preparing a child for weather. I know it now as love. I know it as the love that lives in the practical, in the coat-holding and the appointment-driving and the name-saying, in all the small attending that does not look like love until you are the one doing it and you feel it in your hands.

There.

That is what I say now when the coat is settled onto her shoulders. There. The same word. The same small ceremony. The same ordinary act of love.

The Years I Was Too Busy to Be Sad

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The sadness waited.

That is what I understand now about the years when I was not sad, or was not noticeably sad, or was sad in the background in the way you are sad in the background when the foreground is full and the foreground has to come first because the foreground is the children and the work and the parents and the logistics of a life that does not stop requiring things because you are having feelings. The sadness waited. It sat in the anteroom of my life for years, patient, not going anywhere, understanding that eventually there would be a lull and the lull was when it would be received.

The lull came when I retired.

Not immediately. But within the first months of the quiet, in the space that the constant forward-motion had occupied, I found things I had left there. Griefs I had moved past rather than through. Losses that had been acknowledged in transit and then set aside because the next thing was already arriving and demanded attention. The particular grief of the years I did not fully inhabit because I was managing them rather than living them. All of it still there, waiting, not rotted or diminished but simply stored, held in the body the way the body holds things, without language, without the full permission of the mind, waiting for a time when there was a time.

I was not prepared for the sadness when it came.

Even though I knew it would come, even though I had read the accounts of people who said this happens, that the body catches up in the quiet, that the emotions that were deferred come due when the deferral is over. Even knowing, I was not prepared for the specific quality of it, for the sadness about things I thought I had moved past, for the grief of years I had been in but not present to, for the mourning of my own life, which sounds strange and is not strange, which is the appropriate response to noticing that some of the years went by faster than they should have because you were moving through them rather than in them.

I let it come.

That is the whole of what I had to do. Make room for what was waiting. Let the anteroom empty. Sit with it without trying to resolve it ahead of schedule, without managing the sadness the way I had managed everything else. Just let it be sad for as long as it needed to be sad, which was not as long as I feared, which was a season and then a lightening, and then the particular quality of a morning that follows a long cry and is clean in a way that mornings that precede it are not.

The sadness had things to teach me. I am glad I let it speak.

The Version of Me Nobody Needed

Reading Time: 2 minutes

There is a version of me that only exists when no one needs anything.

I met her in Loreto. I have been meeting her in small increments since, in the garden in the early morning and at the edge of the water and in the chair with the book and the tea that I let go cold because I was in the book and the book was where I needed to be. She does not come when someone needs something. She requires a particular kind of quiet, the quiet of an unscheduled hour, the quiet of a morning with nothing pending, and she is cautious about showing up because for most of her life the unscheduled hour was a rumour.

I like her.

I like her in a way that is different from the effortful self-acceptance I have practised for years, the deliberate choosing to be on my own side, the daily practice of treating myself with the care I would extend to anyone I loved. That is important work and I am still doing it. But this is different. This is actual liking. The way you like a person whose company you seek, whose presence is its own reward, who makes the room feel better rather than more complicated. I am in the room with her and the room is better.

She is curious about things.

She notices the bird on the fence and wants to know what it is. She reads things that are not relevant to anything, that are just interesting, that are interesting for the pure reason that the world is interesting and she has time to be interested in it now. She makes things slowly and without purpose. She takes the long route. She says yes to things that have no productive outcome and no entry on any ledger and no value except the value of having done them, which turns out to be a significant value, which turns out to be the value she was missing for most of her adult life without knowing she was missing it.

I have been trying to introduce her to the other versions.

The one who manages and the one who produces and the one who shows up and delivers. I am trying to let them all be in the room at the same time, let the version nobody needed sit alongside the version everyone depended on, let them look at each other and find they are not in competition, that the room is large enough for all of them, that none of them has to leave for the others to exist.

The version nobody needed has been waiting a long time for the room.

She is in it now. I intend to keep the door open for her.

The Way She Held My Hand at the Airport

Reading Time: 2 minutes

She is not a hand-holder.

That is not a criticism. It is just true, just part of the particular shape of her love, which has always expressed itself more through presence than through contact, more through the practical thing done than the gesture made, more through having the right coat packed and the right soup on the stove than through the extended hand or the prolonged embrace. I knew this. I grew up knowing this. I am her daughter and I learned love from her particular way of giving it and I have some of her tendencies toward the practical expression and away from the demonstrative one.

But she held my hand at the airport.

The year I was going away for the first time, really going, the first independent going, not to a school or a program but just away, just a decision I had made about where I needed to be for a while. She drove me. She carried one of my bags. She stood with me in the departures hall in the way that parents stand in departures halls, slightly uncertain, the end of the practical having arrived and only the symbolic left, and she took my hand.

Not to stop me. She was not stopping me. She knew I was going and she wanted me to go, she had said so, had said it in the direct way she says things that she has decided and does not intend to revisit. She held my hand the way you hold something you are about to release. The way you hold it once, fully, before the letting go.

I have held her hand many times since then and it is always different and always the same thing.

The same fundamental act, the taking of someone’s hand, the whole of what that means, which is: I am here, you are here, there is this between us, whatever comes next there is this. She holds my hand differently now, more often, at the appointments and in the evenings and on the days when she is uncertain and my hand is something certain to hold. The direction of the holding has changed. I am the one who is solid. She is the one who holds.

It is still the same thing. Still the hand and the here and the whatever-comes-next, there is this.

There is always this.