Category: Poetry

The Walk I Take Alone Every Morning

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I did not intend it to become a practice.

It started as exercise, as the body’s request for movement after the first months of retirement when the built-in movement of a teaching life was gone and the body noticed. I went out because the body said to go out and I walked because walking is the movement that requires the least amount of deciding and I came back because I had to and the next morning I went out again and then the next and then the next until the going-out was the thing I did before anything else could ask for my attention, the first act of the day that belonged entirely to no one but me.

I know this route in all its weathers now.

The February version with the ice on the path at the corner by the park and the particular quality of cold that gets into the wrists above the glove line if you do not tuck them properly. The May version when the trees are doing the thing they do in May that they only do in May, the particular green that lasts about ten days before it darkens into the green it will be for the rest of the summer, the ten days I try not to miss. The October version I already wrote about. The November version that is the hardest, the low light and the stripped branches and the mornings that feel like the world is practising going dark.

I go out in all of them.

The November version too. Especially the November version, because the November version is the one that most requires the going, that most benefits from being met rather than avoided, that holds the particular medicine of a cold grey morning when you are the only person on the path and the world is quiet and stripped and honest about itself, not performing anything, just being the November it is, and you are in it, just being the person you are, and the two of you are out there together in the honest grey morning and there is something in that, something that November cannot give you if you stay inside, something that requires the meeting.

I come home different than I left every morning.

Not transformed. Not resolved. Just slightly repositioned. The thing that was large when I left is the same size but I am standing somewhere different relative to it, I have walked around it once, I have seen its other sides. The walk does not solve anything. It changes the angle. That turns out to be enough. That turns out, most mornings, to be exactly enough.

The Threshold Between

Reading Time: 2 minutes

There is a version of me on each side of this.

On one side: the woman I have been. The one defined by the labour and the children and the decades of building, the one who knew exactly what she was for and did it with a thoroughness that cost her and built her in equal measure. The one with the lanyard and the folders and the children at the table and the parents who needed her and the colleagues who relied on her and the students who would email a decade later to say she had changed something in them.

On the other side: I do not fully know yet.

That is the honest thing. I am standing in the threshold and the threshold is not comfortable. I have read the metaphors about thresholds and they tend toward the lyrical, toward the idea that standing between is a gift, that the not-knowing is itself a kind of freedom. And sometimes it is. Sometimes I stand in it and feel the openness of it, the genuine possibility of it, the sense that I am not behind or ahead but exactly where I am supposed to be in a life that is still underway.

But other days the threshold is just a hallway.

A place you stand in between rooms, not in either one, not settled, slightly cold, waiting for the next thing to clarify. Other days I want the other side to hurry up and show itself so I can stop hovering and begin.

I am trying to trust the hovering.

I am trying to take the advice I would give anyone else who was standing where I am standing, which is: you do not have to arrive today. The arriving is not the point. The point is the quality of attention you bring to the in-between, the willingness to not know for a while, to let the next version of yourself develop at the pace she needs rather than the pace you are demanding of her.

She is coming. I can feel her at the edges of things.

She is quieter than I expected. She is less interested in being right. She is more interested in the light on the water and the long walk and the meal shared with someone she loves and the conversation that goes somewhere real. She is not in a hurry.

I am learning to keep up with her.

The Things That Belonged to Her Mother

Reading Time: 2 minutes

There is a blue bowl on my shelf that belonged to her mother.

My mother gave it to me years ago, before the giving became complicated, before the question of what goes where and why was a question loaded with the weight of an ending rather than the lightness of a gesture. She gave it to me on a Tuesday without ceremony, the way she gives most things, practically, with a brief account of where it came from and the expectation that I would receive it the same way, practically, and put it somewhere useful.

I did not put it somewhere useful.

I put it on the shelf where I can see it from the kitchen table, where it catches the light in the afternoon in the particular way that blue things catch certain kinds of afternoon light, and every time I notice it I think of the woman who owned it before my mother, who I did not know well, who died when I was young enough that my memory of her is mostly texture and smell and the particular quality of her attention when she looked at me, which was the attention of someone who found children genuinely interesting rather than merely tolerable.

Three women have owned this bowl.

Or known it. Or been in rooms with it. My mother’s mother who I did not know well enough and my mother who I know as well as I know anyone and me, and the bowl has been in these rooms, in these lives, witness to the ordinary and the extraordinary in the way that objects witness things, without comprehension but with presence, just there, blue, catching the light.

I think about what it has seen.

I think about all the kitchens. All the hands. All the ordinary Tuesdays and the extraordinary days that also had kitchens in them, because the extraordinary days always have kitchens in them, the kettle going on, the hands needing something to do, the blue bowl sitting on whatever shelf it was sitting on, holding its own quiet and patient continuity, the line of women in the rooms around it coming and going, coming and going.

My daughter will have it when I am done with it.

I have not told her yet. She does not know about the bowl or the women or the line it represents. I will tell her. I am choosing when to tell her. I want to tell her in the kitchen, in the afternoon, when the light is right.

The Things I Do Now That No One Evaluates

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The ceramics. I already mentioned the ceramics.

But I want to say more about it because the ceramics are teaching me something I did not expect to be taught at this point in my life, which is what it feels like to do something badly without the badness meaning anything about you. I am bad at the ceramics. I am the worst in the class by a margin I find mildly impressive. My bowls are not symmetric. My walls collapse. I have been at it for four months and my results are the results of someone who has been at it for four months and no amount of effort has yet produced the graceful, even, properly dried thing that the instructor produces with the ease of a person whose hands have been doing this for thirty years.

And no one is grading it.

That is the thing. There is no rubric. There is no committee that will review the bowls and determine whether they meet the criteria for continuation, no contract that is renewed or not renewed based on the quality of the output. The bowls are just bowls. The bad ones are bad. The slightly less bad ones are slightly less bad. The process of making them is enjoyable in a way that has nothing to do with the product, that is in the clay and the wheel and the hands learning something slow and the complete absence of anyone measuring the learning against a standard.

I also bake bread now. The same principle applies.

And I have started drawing. Small things. Plants from the garden, the neighbour’s cat, the view from the window on November mornings. I am not good at the drawing. I do not need to be good at the drawing. The drawing is the act of looking slowly at a thing, so slowly that you have to understand its structure in order to put it down, and the understanding is the point, not the line, not the finished thing, the slowing-down and the seeing.

I spent my whole career being evaluated.

Every course and every paper and every committee hour assessed against a standard, placed in a hierarchy, found adequate or inadequate according to criteria I did not set. The doing-for-no-evaluation is its own education. It is teaching me that the making has value that the assessing of the making cannot access. It is teaching me that the unevaluated life contains things the evaluated one was too busy measuring to notice.

The bowls are getting slightly less bad. I notice this without urgency. That, too, is new.

The Things I Grew Into

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Some things I chose. Some things I grew into without choosing.

The patience, for instance. I was not patient at thirty. I was efficient, which is not the same thing, which is actually almost the opposite of the same thing. Efficient moves through waiting rather than being in it. Patient stays. Patient understands that some things take the time they take and the wanting them to take less time does not reduce the time, only reduces the quality of the time, makes the waiting harder rather than shorter. I grew into patience gradually, through years of waiting that did not resolve on my schedule and did not shorten in response to my urgency, until eventually the urgency ran out and what was left was patience, or something close enough to patience that I have started calling it that.

The tolerance for ambiguity.

I needed things to be resolved at thirty. I needed to know where I stood and what was coming and how the story was going to end, which is a reasonable need and also a need the world is spectacularly uninterested in meeting. The contract years cured me of the need for resolution. Twenty-five years of pending, of planning to, of always-almost, of the future always slightly conditional, will have done that to you. I emerged from the contract years able to live in the not-yet in a way I could not have done before, which is one of the strange gifts of having had no choice about living in it for so long.

The comfort with my own company.

I was never afraid of being alone but I am something more than not-afraid now. I am genuinely good company for myself. I have things I want to think about. I have interests that exist independent of their usefulness to anyone else. I find myself worth spending a morning with, which is not something I could have said with confidence at forty and can say plainly now without irony or qualification.

I grew into these things through the years, through the difficulty and the loss and the accumulation of a life that did not go as planned and went, in many ways, better than planned because unplanned lives make you adaptable in ways that planned ones do not.

I would not give back the years that grew these things. Even the hard ones. Especially the hard ones.

They made me someone I am glad to be.

The Things She Kept

Reading Time: 2 minutes

She has kept everything.

That is the word for it, I think, though the clinical word is different and less accurate to the inside of it. She has kept the birthday cards from the 1980s. She has kept the receipt from a coat she bought before I was born. She has kept the letters, decades of letters, in a shoebox under the bed that I have moved three times on her behalf and have been asked not to look in and have not looked in, because the not-looking-in is one of the dignities I can still offer her, the privacy of her own archive, the right to keep things that are hers without having them assessed by the person who is starting to need to assess everything.

I will need to look in the shoebox eventually.

I know that. She knows that too, on the days when she is clear enough to know things she does not say out loud. There is a version of this reckoning that I can see approaching from a distance, slowly, the way you see something on a long flat road, the shape of it coming toward you before you can make out what it is. The sorting of a life into what stays and what goes. The decisions about the birthday cards and the coat receipt and whatever is in the shoebox that she has been protecting from my eyes since before I understood why protection was needed.

I am trying not to rush toward it.

I am trying to let her keep things as long as the keeping is possible. To resist the practical efficient version of myself that wants to get ahead of the work, to sort now rather than later, to be organized about the approaching thing rather than present to the time that is still here. The time that is still here is the shoebox under the bed and her in the chair and me beside her and neither of us saying the word for what is coming down the long flat road.

We talk about other things.

We talk about the coat, sometimes, the one she bought before I was born. She still remembers the coat. She remembers exactly what it looked like and where she bought it and what she felt wearing it, which was, she says, like someone who had arrived somewhere, though she would not have used those words then, she just knew it was the right coat and she saved for it and she bought it and she wore it until it gave out, which took many years, because she took care of things.

She took care of things.

I want that in the record. Whatever is in the shoebox, that first.

The Specialist’s Waiting Room

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I have spent a lot of hours in waiting rooms this year.

Not my own. Hers. The particular experience of a waiting room that is not for you, where you are in the chairs on behalf of someone who is through the door, where the magazines are from seasons ago and the chairs are the chairs that waiting rooms always have, slightly too firm, slightly too close together, arranged in the configuration of people who are all trying not to make eye contact with each other’s worry.

I have learned to bring a book.

Not to read, exactly. To have. To hold. To look at when the waiting becomes the kind of waiting that needs somewhere for the eyes to go that is not the door or the clock or the other faces doing the same calculation I am doing, which is: how long, and: is long good or bad, and: should I ask someone, and: asking someone will not make the long shorter so perhaps I should just sit here with the book and the not-quite-reading and let the time do what time does, which is pass, which it always does, which I keep needing to remind myself of.

A woman sat down beside me once and said: is it your mum?

I said yes. She said: mine too. And we sat there, two daughters in waiting room chairs with books we were not reading, in the particular solidarity of women who are doing this, who are in the chairs, who drove the car and held the coat and filled out the forms and are now in the chairs waiting for someone to come through a door and tell them something that will either relieve them or require them to hold more than they were holding before.

We did not exchange names. We did not need to.

We were the same person in two chairs. We were every daughter in every waiting room, doing the only thing left to do once you have done everything that can be done, which is to stay. Which is to be in the chair. Which is to be the person who is here, in the room, present, ready, waiting.

Her mother came through the door first. She stood up quickly, the book sliding off her lap, and I saw her face do the thing that faces do when the person you love comes back, the small involuntary softening of relief. She caught my eye as they left. I nodded. She nodded.

That was enough. That was the whole of it.

The Second Shift, Ended

Reading Time: 2 minutes

It ended not with relief but with disorientation.

Hochschild named it for me before I had words for it myself: the second shift, the one that begins when the paid work ends, the invisible one, the one with no contract and no evaluation and no pension letter and no ceremony when it is done. The lunches packed and the forms signed and the appointments kept and the meals made and the listening, the endless specific listening that a mother does, that particular pitched attention to the frequency of a child in order to know, before they say it, what they need.

I worked two shifts for years.

I did not think of it as exceptional. It was just Tuesday. It was just the way Tuesday worked for a woman like me in a life like mine, you did the work that paid and then you came home and did the work that did not, and somewhere in there you were supposed to also be resting, also be present, also be growing and healing and becoming, though who had the time for becoming when the becoming had to wait for the second shift to end and the second shift did not end until everyone was in bed.

And now both shifts have ended.

The children are grown and housed and fed by their own hands in their own kitchens. The contract is done. And I wake up on a Monday and I do not have a shift. I have a day. Just a day, open, mine, no one else’s claim on it built into the structure of it by the time I open my eyes.

I did not know the emptiness would feel like this. Not bad. Not good. Something more like the ringing after the sound stops. The way quiet is not the absence of noise but a presence of its own, the way it takes time to understand what the silence is made of.

I am learning to live in the first shift of the rest of my life. The one I get to name myself. The one where the work is mine to choose. I am taking my time with the choosing. I have earned the taking of my time.

The Sibling I Am Doing This With

Reading Time: 2 minutes

We have not always been easy together.

That is the honest beginning. We grew up in the same house and grew into different people with different ideas about how the world works and different tolerances for ambiguity and different relationships to the parents we share, which are complicated by different memories of the same events, which is one of the stranger facts of siblinghood, that you can both be there and come away with accounts so different that you wonder if you were in the same room, which you were, but were in different rooms within the room, which is what it is to be children together, separate interiors in a shared building.

But now we are doing this together.

The parents. The appointments and the medication and the phone calls and the decisions that are starting to need to be made about things that none of us wants to decide but someone has to decide and the someone is us, the children, which is another version of the role reversal that no one fully prepares you for, the moment when you understand that the adults in the room are you and your sibling, that you have become the generation that makes the decisions, that the generation above yours is now the one that needs the decisions made for it.

We are better at it together than I expected.

We have found the thing we are actually good at doing side by side, which is this, which is the practical love of a parent who needs it. She is better at the logistics. I am better at the emotional temperature of a room. Between us we have most of what is needed and where we do not have it we figure it out, imperfectly, with the occasional disagreement that is handled with the bluntness of people who have known each other their whole lives and do not need to manage the impression they are making.

I did not know she would be my person for this.

I am glad she is. I am glad that the same house that made us different also made us related, made us the specific two people who share this particular weight at this particular time and can look at each other across the room where our mother is sleeping and say, without words, just with the look: yes. This is hard. I see you. We are doing it. Keep going.

The Talk We Never Had

Reading Time: 2 minutes

There are things we do not say in my family.

Not out of cruelty. Out of the particular silence that gets passed down through generations of people who survived by not examining things too closely, who learned that some doors are better left closed because what is behind them is large and old and does not improve a Tuesday. We are a family of people who manage rather than process, who deflect with practicality, who say: well, what can you do, in the tone that means the conversation is over rather than the question answered.

My mother and I have not talked about her dying.

We have talked around it. We have had the practical conversations, the will, the preferences, the small administrative preparations of a woman who, on her clear days, is methodical and unsentimental about the arrangements because the arrangements are just logistics and logistics she understands. But the other conversation. The one about what it means, what she is afraid of, what she wants me to know, what I want to say to her in the time before I cannot say it. That one we have not had.

I do not know if we will.

I am holding that honestly. There are families who have that conversation and it is the right thing for those families and I respect it and I have read the accounts of it in the books people write about their parents dying and I have cried at those accounts and also understood that my family is not structured for that conversation, that to demand it would be to make her last years about my need to process rather than her need for the ordinary comfort of a daughter who shows up and holds the coat and makes the tea and does not force the thing that is coming into a conversation it has not been invited to.

Maybe the conversation is in everything else.

Maybe forty minutes on the phone talking about nothing important is the conversation. Maybe the soup and the coat and the childhood name and the parking lot vigil are the talk we are having, the talk our family knows how to have, the love expressed in showing up rather than in the saying of the love out loud.

I am trying to let that be enough.

Some days I manage it. Some days I want the words. Both of those days are true and I am living in all of them.