Category: Poetry

The Conversation I Keep Having With My Younger Self

Reading Time: 2 minutes

She shows up in my dreams sometimes.

Not as a ghost. As herself. The version of me at thirty-two or thirty-five who is in the middle of something and has not yet made it out the other side and does not know there is another side and is doing what she knows how to do, which is keep going, keep going, keep going, because stopping has never been offered to her as an option and she has never thought to offer it to herself.

I want to sit down with her.

Not to warn her. I have thought about warning her and I have decided against it, because the things she is about to go through made her into the person I am, and I am, on most days, glad to be the person I am, which means I cannot in good conscience ask for the things to be removed, can only ask for her to be held a little more gently inside them. Not to warn her. To sit down with her and say: you are going to make it through. That is all. Not the details, not the map, just the fact of the making-it-through, which is the thing she cannot see from where she is standing and which would change the quality of the going through if she knew it.

You are going to make it through.

The contract years and the burnout and the year the contract did not come and the sitting in the parking lot doing the math on the phone. The things that happened in rooms that called themselves collegial and were not. The slow accumulation of a worth that kept being measured and found lacking by metrics that were designed to find it lacking. The grief of a career that gave so much and withheld so much simultaneously, that required her to love the work in order to survive it and punished her for loving it, and she loved it anyway, she always loved it, that is the thing no one will ever be able to take from her.

She is going to sit at the edge of a sea one February and remember who she is underneath all of it.

She is going to write it down. She is going to give it to people who need it. She is going to become, slowly and imperfectly and at considerable cost, the woman I am now, who is not finished becoming but is no longer afraid of the becoming.

I would tell her that. If I could sit down with her. I would say all of that and then I would say: now go home. Get some sleep. Tomorrow is still going to ask you for everything and you are going to give it and it is going to be worth it and you are going to be okay.

Go home. Get some sleep.

Still Here

Reading Time: 2 minutes

That is the whole of it, some mornings.

Not a small thing dressed up as a small thing. The actual enormity of it stated plainly because plainly is how enormous things sometimes need to be stated, without the ornamentation, without the architecture of metaphor and craft around it, just the fact itself standing in the morning light: still here. This body, this life, this woman, after everything, after the years that tried to diminish her and sometimes succeeded and sometimes did not, still here, still in the morning, still looking out the window at the whatever-is-there-today, the October trees or the May green or the November honest grey, still looking, still seeing it, still capable of finding it worth seeing.

I did not always expect to feel this way.

There were years when still here felt like a consolation prize rather than a gift. Years when the stillness of here was the stillness of exhaustion, of someone who has stopped not because she chose to stop but because there was nothing left to run on. I was here in those years too. I was here and depleted and not sure what here was offering me that would be worth the cost of continuing to be in it.

I know now what here was offering me.

It was offering me this. This morning. This body that has opinions about stairs and wakes at three and has been through the fire and is still, improbably, basically fine. This life that has a garden in it now, and a ceramics class, and a mother whose lamp is on my bedside table, and children who call from new cities with their new lives, and a marriage that found its way back to itself, and three friends who pick up in two rings, and a walk every morning in all weathers, and the writing that was always mine and is finally, fully mine.

Still here.

Not as what remains after the losses. Not as what survived despite everything. As what is, right now, on this morning, in this light, in this one life that is mine and that I am finally, at this age, in this season, fully in.

Still here. Still beginning. Still glad.

The Apology She Never Got

Reading Time: 2 minutes

She stopped waiting for it a long time ago.

Not with bitterness. I want to be clear about that because the bitterness is the version people expect from this story and the story she actually lived is more complex and more dignified than bitterness, which would have required a continuing orientation toward the person who should have apologized, a keeping-open of the wound in order to feel the wound, and she is not a woman who has ever been interested in tending wounds that the tending itself is keeping open.

She did the work without the apology.

She raised the children and worked the jobs and managed the household and loved the people who needed loving and made the soup and held her mother at the end and drove to the appointments and packed the bag and stood in the waiting rooms of her own life with the book she was not reading, and she did all of it without ever receiving the acknowledgement that the weight was real, that the carrying was extraordinary, that the person who had contributed most to the making of a life had contributed most and this should have been seen and named and honoured before it was too late to honour it.

The apology did not come. It is not going to come.

I have had to make my own peace with that on her behalf, which is not the same as making her peace, which is not mine to make. I have had to understand that the absence of the apology does not mean the wrong did not happen, does not diminish the size of what she did, does not change what is true about her, which is that she was more than what anyone recognized her as, that her life was larger than the room it was given, that the recognition she deserved and did not receive was the world’s failure and not hers.

I am writing this so it is somewhere.

The record that the world did not make. The acknowledgement that came late and from a sideways direction, from a daughter who is old enough now to see the whole shape of what her mother did and is putting it in the only record she has access to, which is this page, which is imperfect and partial and the best she can offer.

You did more than you were given credit for. The credit was owed. I am paying what I can of it here, in this poem, with this inadequate and real and wholly meant thank you.

The Body After Fifty

Reading Time: 2 minutes

It has opinions about stairs now.

Not all stairs. Not dramatically. Just a certain kind of morning, a certain quality of cold, the first flight of stairs before everything has warmed up and found its range of motion, the body registering the descent with a commentary that was not there a decade ago and is very much there now, audible, expressing itself in the language of small sounds I find mildly embarrassing and have mostly stopped trying to suppress because suppressing them takes energy I have decided to spend elsewhere.

I am learning to be interested rather than alarmed.

This is the practice. When the body offers information, new information, information in a register it has not used before, to receive it as information rather than as diagnosis. To say: noted. To say: let’s see what this needs. To say it to the body without the charge of dread, which used to accompany every new sensation, every unfamiliar protest, the immediate translation of body-speaks into what-if-this-is-the-beginning-of-the-thing-that-ends-me.

The body is not trying to scare me. The body is trying to tell me things.

It tells me when it needs water. It tells me when the walk was too long and the rest should be proportional. It tells me, with considerable clarity and no apology, that the things that used to be fine to eat at midnight are no longer fine and I should plan my evenings accordingly. It is not unkind about any of this. It is just honest in the way that long-term relationships become honest, no longer interested in the performance of being easy, willing now to say what it actually needs.

I spent decades not listening to this body.

I spent decades treating it as the container for my brain, the transport system for my productivity, the inconvenient biological situation I had to manage around the things I was actually trying to do. It has been patient with me about that. More patient than I deserved. And now it is asking for its turn, asking to be attended to in the way I attended to everything else, with full presence and adequate care and the willingness to take it seriously as a thing that matters.

I am listening now. Slowly, imperfectly, but actually listening.

It turns out the body has been saying interesting things for years. I just was not in the room.

The Child Who Came Back Different

Reading Time: 2 minutes

She came home for Christmas and she was different and I had been told this would happen and I had thought I was prepared for it and I was not prepared for the specific way it felt to be in the kitchen with this person who was my child and also someone I was still learning.

Not worse. Not better. Just more herself.

More of the person who had been forming all her life and had, in the five months since September, been forming without me in the room, without my daily witness, without the constant low-level presence of a mother who notices things, who tracks things, who knows the face before the face knows it is making an expression. She had been becoming herself in a room I could not see and the version who came home for Christmas was further along in the becoming than the version I had driven away in August, and the gap between those two versions was months of her life that I was not in.

She had opinions about things I had not known she was thinking about.

She pushed back on something I said at dinner, not rudely, thoughtfully, with the kind of thought that comes from having been in rooms where ideas are taken seriously and started to take your own ideas seriously as a result. I felt the pushback and underneath the pushback I felt something that surprised me, which was pride. The specific pride of a woman who raised someone who will push back. Who taught her that a table was a place where you could say what you thought, that the thinking was welcome, that she did not have to agree in order to be loved.

I said: you may be right about that.

She looked at me like I had given her something. Maybe I had. Maybe the willingness to be pushed back on and not punish the pushback is one of the things I can still give her, this version of her that is growing past the versions I planned for, that is becoming someone I did not fully design and therefore did not fully predict and therefore get to be genuinely surprised by, which is its own kind of joy, the joy of a person you love becoming someone you could not have anticipated.

She went back in January.

I watched her go and felt the same two things I always feel now, the gladness and the missing, both of them true, both of them taking up the same space, both of them mine to hold.

The Afternoon We Just Sat

Reading Time: 2 minutes

No program. No agenda. No appointment to get to after.

Just the afternoon and the two chairs in her room and the light coming through the window at the angle it comes at that hour, which I know now, which has become familiar the way things become familiar when you are in a room often enough that the light at different hours is information you have accumulated without meaning to, that you hold without filing, that is just part of knowing the room the way I have come to know her room.

She was clear that afternoon.

Clear and not in a hurry, which is its own quality, the not-in-a-hurry, which happens on the clear afternoons when she has the leisure of her own mind and is not trying to hold onto anything or find anything or manage the gap between what she wants to say and what she can reach. She was just there, in the chair, in the afternoon, and I was there, in the other chair, and we were simply two people in a room together who love each other and had nowhere to be.

We talked about small things.

The bird outside the window, which she had been watching for days and had named, not with a bird name but with a person name, which I found both charming and characteristic, which is exactly the kind of thing she has always done, the naming of things around her as though the world is full of particular individuals rather than categories, each one worthy of its own designation. We talked about the bird and the light and something she had seen on the television that had made her think of something from years ago that she had not thought about in a long time and was glad to have back.

I did not check the time.

That is the thing I want to hold from that afternoon. I sat in the chair in the good light with my mother on a clear day when she was entirely herself and I did not check the time. I was in the afternoon the way I have been learning to be in things, all the way in, present to the bird and the light and the story from years ago and the particular quality of her voice on a clear afternoon when nothing is being managed and the conversation just goes where it goes.

It went somewhere good. It always goes somewhere good when she is clear and I am present and neither of us is anywhere but there.

She Remembers the Songs

Reading Time: 2 minutes

The names go first. Then the years. Then the faces of people she knows she should know.

But the songs stay.

That is the thing that surprised me the most about this, the songs. The music is in a different part of the architecture, in something older and more insulated than the naming and the dating and the sequential placing of events on a timeline. The songs are in the body the way the body knows the songs, the way you know a song you have not thought about in forty years and have it come back complete, every word, every turn of melody, the way the chorus rises and the way the bridge resolves, all of it intact in a place that the fog cannot seem to reach.

I put on her music last Sunday.

The music she would have known at twenty, at thirty, the music that belongs to the decades before I existed, that is the soundtrack of a life I only know through her telling of it, through the photographs and the fragments she has given me over the years. I put it on and she went somewhere. Not away. Somewhere inside. Her eyes changed, the way eyes change when recognition arrives in a register deeper than the mind, when the body knows before the mind catches up.

She started singing.

Not performing. Not self-consciously. Just the song coming out of her the way songs come out of a person who is fully inside the song, not remembering the words but inhabiting them, the way you inhabit a thing that is stored somewhere more durable than memory. She sang the whole of it. Every word in place. The voice not what it was at twenty but still hers, still carrying the specific quality of her voice that is hers the way her laugh is hers, that I would know anywhere.

I did not speak. I did not want to interrupt the territory she was in.

When the song ended she looked at me and said: I used to know all the words to that one.

I said: you still do.

She looked uncertain. I let her look uncertain. Some things are better felt than argued. She still knew the words. I heard them. They were all there. Whatever is left, the songs are there.

Sixty Is Not Old

Reading Time: 2 minutes

I want to say this plainly because I spent years believing the opposite.

Not at twenty, where sixty was simply abstract, a number so far forward in the calendar of a life that it had no texture, no specific weight, no particular meaning beyond the general understanding that it was a lot of years and a lot of years were a long time. Not at twenty. But at forty, at forty-five, at the edge of fifty where the culture begins its particular project of preparing women for their disappearance, its gentle insistence that certain things are now behind her and she should make her peace with the behind-herness, that the appropriate response to arriving at fifty is a graceful acceptance of reduced visibility, a stepping-back from ambition, a settling-into.

I did not settle.

Or rather: I settled some things that needed settling, the things that were never right for me and that I was holding out of obligation or habit rather than genuine wanting. But I did not settle the ambition. I did not settle the desire for the work to mean something. I did not settle the writer, who was always there and is here now, more productive and more honest than she was at thirty-five when she was too busy to write and too afraid to write and told herself both of those things were about time when one of them was about fear.

At sixty I am the best writer I have ever been.

I say this without qualification because the qualification would be the old habit, the hedging, the making-smaller before anyone else can make-smaller for me. I am the best writer I have ever been because I have more to say and less reason to be careful about saying it and more practice at the saying and less performance in the saying, because the writing now comes from a place that is past the managing of impressions, that has decided the truth is more interesting than the managed version, that has sixty years of material and the willingness to use it.

Sixty is not old. Sixty is the beginning of the part where you finally know enough to do the thing properly.

I am doing the thing properly. I intend to keep going.

She Taught Me to Make the Soup

Reading Time: 2 minutes

Not from a recipe. That is important.

There was no recipe. There was her hands and the pot and the particular rhythm of a woman who has been making this soup for sixty years and knows it in her body the way you know things that predate language, the way knowledge that is old enough becomes instinct, becomes reflex, becomes the hand that reaches for the right amount without measuring because the right amount is known at the level of muscle and memory and cannot be transferred through a card in a box.

I stood beside her at the stove for three Saturdays in a row.

I watched. I asked questions and she answered them in the approximate way that people answer questions about things they do not think of as knowledge. A handful of this. Until it looks right. You’ll know when. I wrote things down and the things I wrote down were inadequate and I knew they were inadequate and I wrote them anyway because something was better than nothing, because some version of the soup preserved in approximate words was better than no version at all.

I make it now.

It is not quite the same. It never will be. The body knowledge did not fully transfer, which I understand now as one of the small irreversible losses of a parent aging, the things that live only in a specific body and will leave when that body leaves. But it is close enough that when I eat it I go somewhere that is not quite memory and not quite presence but something in between, something that is her kitchen and my kitchen simultaneously, something that tastes like the line of women I come from, the women who fed people, the women whose knowledge lived in their hands.

I am teaching my daughter now.

She stood at the stove beside me last month and I said: a handful of this. Until it looks right. You’ll know when. And I saw on her face the same look I must have had standing beside my mother, the look of a woman trying to hold something in her hands that does not have handles, trying to learn something that the learning does not quite capture.

She will make it someday, her version, approximate and real.

The line continues. In soup. In handed-down imprecision. In the specific and irreplaceable knowledge of women at stoves, passing it forward the only way it can be passed, which is imperfectly, which is enough.

Still

Reading Time: 2 minutes

There is a difference between stillness chosen and stillness imposed.

I have lived in both. I know the texture of each. The stillness imposed is the one that comes when the body finally wins the argument, when the burnout becomes loud enough that even the part of you that is very good at pushing through cannot push through anymore, and you stop not because you chose to stop but because stopping has been chosen for you by your own depleted nervous system. That stillness is not rest. That stillness is the body doing what it had to do when you would not listen.

The stillness I am practising now is different.

It is the stillness of sitting in the morning with the coffee before anyone else is awake and choosing not to fill the time. Not reaching for the phone. Not drafting the list. Not beginning the day’s work before the day has actually begun. Just sitting. Just being in the early light with the quiet and the coffee and the particular quality of a morning that has not yet been asked anything of itself.

This sounds simple. It is not simple.

Every time I sit in stillness there is a voice that tells me I should be using this time. That the stillness is waste. That a woman with things to do and people who need her and a life that requires management does not have the luxury of sitting in a chair watching the light change. The voice is old. It learned itself in me long before I was old enough to question it. It has the authority of decades.

I sit in stillness anyway.

Not always. Not every morning. Some mornings the voice wins and I am up and moving before the coffee has finished brewing, already inside the day, already managing it. But more mornings than before I sit. I let the light change. I let the coffee go slightly cold because I was paying attention to something other than the cooling of it. I let still be enough.

I am counting this as progress.

I am counting this as one of the practices of the rest of my life, the practice of choosing stillness before it is chosen for me, of learning that the quiet morning is not empty time waiting to be filled but full time that I have, for once, decided not to spend.