What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden.

T. S. Eliot

I see the girl sitting cross-legged at the bottom of the stairs. She is very quiet and still.

Her blonde head is bowed over a small book – a journal that she nestles is her lap like a kitten.

She is writing.

She is feeling very smart in her mod, mushroom colored, faux-suede pantsuit (the outfit and diary are new, both are birthday presents).

It is New Years Day, and she is composing a fresh new entry.

It is five years later and I see the same girl, ash blonde – a teenager now – she is propped up in bed. The hour is late. She writes in a spiral bound book, the words rambling and messy. There are tears in the corners of her eyes.

And time passes.

And doesn’t.

Because here, today – I am that same girl, sitting at my writing table.

I am that same person and I doubt if any of the journal entries differ profoundly.

T.S. Eliot wrote that all the roads we did not take, and the doors we never opened, point to one end – the rose garden?

So I’d like to think that the poet is letting us middle aged folk off the hook. He’s saying – so what if you’re not living that other life that glitters in your peripheral eye?

So what, the past life and this one are one and the same.

In this moment’s breath.

Like, if I close my eyes, I can conjure that small person. She is here within – she speaks, she remembers.

She is the end that is always present.

I have to say that I was not a little girl who ever had a Barbie Dream Camper kind of fantasy life. What I wanted was sorta what I already had, just a little bit bigger maybe.

I remember always wishing for a best friend, a partner, a child. And I always wanted to write, but it was never the capital W kind of write.

I loved the feeling of putting down letters, then words. I loved to hear my own written voice.

I craved the feeling of getting the exact word to define my sentence. It was pure joy when I could read back my own words and listen to the music.

Just saying them, they tasted delicious. They still do.

I think I am living the parallel life to any other beautiful life I could have imagined. And what I dream of now (not Barbie roller skates), is not all that far off from what the mini-me dreamed.

That girl knew what she absolutely wanted, and didn’t feel compelled to edit her words inside out. Or exhaust herself striving to write for anyone else.

And why did I ever think I’d stray from that dreamy girl who bit her lower lip and constantly hummed continuously, like a swarm of bees, under her breath.

I think it’s how we choose to see ourselves – and do we want to run from the inner girl or do we recognize that as impossible?

Anyway, I still like that small version of me, in fact, I love her. She was sweet and thoughtful and she had the best ideas.

Like the Easy Bake Oven home recipes of sugary egg and pickles and Worstesteshire sauce that she concocted for her sisters in her lil test kitchen. They loved it!

Artists thrive on self-delusion.

But mostly I liked who I was when I sat down to write in my Holly Hobby journal. I loved what I wrote.

It was fluid, easy, emotional. I barely erased. In fact, I always used my rainbow pack of felt markers, that how confident I was.

And now it is me, at 60. I want to be proud, like her, of my grit and my refusal to judge my writing against a capital W.

Because time present and time past are the same things, and there’s no correction fluid allowed.

Time past and time present – we’re simply who we’ve always been.

I want to wholeheartedly embrace it all and keep writing. This afternoon I wish for words, words that I’ve already used, but still.

They are my roses, my garden, my world. My here and now, my intention and luck, and all of my redeemable beauty, available to me for always.

Dawn points, and another day
Prepares for heat and silence. Out at
sea the dawn wind
Wrinkles and slides. I am here
Or there, or elsewhere. In my
beginning
 

 

 

 

Let me just say that there is no affirmation like the affirmation you get from your psychiatrist.

When he says you look great and you are doing great.

And isn’t it fortuitous when your psychiatric appointment coincides with a “good” day!

But mainly I just want to tick off the box that indicates that everything is just fine and to get my drugs, thanks.

Anyway, after my appointment today, I took the dog out to walk in the neighborhood. And we saw a little girl with a huge backpack waiting in front of the elementary school.

There was a little bit of eye-balling, but I liked that she wasn’t doing the stranger danger thing and all that.

She was pensive and serious, like a little droopy plant. She was maybe seven.

I asked her how her day at school went.

She went on a minor riff about math class and how she was the clear winner at solving math problems at the white board. I commended her.

Then the family minivan pulled up, the door opened and she bounced up into the backseat.

The tinted window scrolled down quickly and she shouted – what’s your dog’s name?

Huckleberry, I replied. And there was a huge six-year-old belly laugh as the van sped off.

It took me back to the long after school moments when our kids were in grade school.

How they would drag their sweaty little bodies up the porch steps, with shoulders sagging under bulging backpacks.

Like they had been roughed up. Or been to a war.

And any pep from the morning was long gone. Their energy packs depleted, they’d left it all out on the field.

And I felt a little sad that school was so hard, so demanding, of such small tender beings.

But that’s what the world does – we take our energetic youth and wring them out for all they are worth.

Yet, there was that de-compression time that had to occur every day – the flushing of institutionalization from their systems.

And I never knew where the release valve would be exactly.

But I knew I could never simply ask how was your day or how are you, even. That would be lame.

Yet talk was all I could think of to do.

Because I think we all have a need to report in to someone, preferably on a regular basis.

Pep-talks and positive words and all that.

A back rub, a bowl of mac and cheese. And sometimes a mom who is conveniently available for an argument.

Someone to listen at the other side of a slammed door.

In a deeper sense, it is vital to good mental health.

Like the conversation before bed with your husband, when you inquire about his job -the most incomprehensible, boring job you could ever conceive of, but still, you ask.

Because each of us want someone to notice us, to observe our days, to commend our small moments.

To get the scoop about all of that time we spend out there away from home, away from our people.

It’s as if we have been dispatched and are reporting back from some foreign country.

To know someone at home is waiting. Like the ellipses on the text message.

. . . . .

Someone is patiently waiting to hear about that crap day. Someone wanting to help you metabolize the rough spots.

We wearily tap out signals to check on one another. Texting coffee cup emojis and memes, slipping a carton of bright eggs into a friend’s back door.

Yesterday I got a text from an old friend who I haven’t seen in a very long time. She is struggling with the death of her younger sister. We texted a little.

I think I had sent her a sympathy card, but that was it. I had felt remiss, like I hadn’t done enough. But she remembered.

Sometimes small acts can transmit energy – like a virtual hug, a laugh or an ugly cry.

And so, after getting that A+ from my doctor, I will totally stuff that report in my backpack and run free every time.

And I may say that it doesn’t matter, but it does.

It means everything.

It means I’m good, heavy backpack and all.

And you?

It was the late 1970s, and like everyone else, we ran.

We were teenaged girls and we ran cross country and track.

We ran for fun, we ran to escape.

We ran to get in shape, sometimes even to compete.

Mostly we ran to simply adjust to our changing bodies, to feel proud of our muscled thighs and chiseled calves.

We ran to give the finger to the boy’s gaze, to their judging comments and sexist jokes.

My sister could stay up with the boys pack. In fact, she often beat them, she won medals in the track and field distance events.

She ran the mile, that uniquely rigorous feat that proved both physical and mental strength. She ran the brutal 400, the event that required an explosive speed.

She was a faster runner, but still I ran too.

I ran from the fat jokes, the insecurity, the fear that I would never be good enough, thin enough, that I’d never be seen for who I was – for my brain, my sense of humor, my kindness.

Junior year, my sister placed second in the West Virginia State championships. What can I say but that she was simply amazing.

But after that she gave up running. Running took her to a dangerous place. Things happened and she lost her running for a while.

Flash forward to the 1980s. She and I were pregnant with our firstborn, and still we ran.

We ran to take a break from the household, get a chance to recalibrate, to put the pieces of our selves back together.

We were still young and resilient. We felt instinctually that our bodies were made for this, we ran while weaning babies and chasing toddlers.

And then the children grew up. And we ran with an urgency, a striving need to reclaim the strong thighs and hard abs gone soft.

We both struggled with depression, eating disorders and marital problems. She divorced and moved to another town. We both did lots of therapy.

And many years later, I still ran slow miles on the trail in my neighborhood.

I ran to bolster my midlife self esteem. I ran to keep my moods in check.

And sometimes I would think back to our long runs from high school, the way my sister and I would talk and make sense of what we thought were the big problems.

And we thought we knew what those were.

Still we thought we were smarter and stronger than the men in trucks yelling crude obscenities at us. Smarter than the leering assholes who scanned our legs and breasts. Smarter than the boys pressuring us to have sex.

But still we owned this: the gentle pounding of our shoes and our syncopated breath. Our shoulders grazing, lungs puffing – there was an honesty that only the running together could give us.

And we thought we could somehow outrun the cultural messages all around us.

But still we owned this: the gentle pounding of our shoes and our syncopated breath. Our shoulders grazing, lungs puffing, there was an honesty that only the running together could give us.

Those days there was no #MeToo movement, there was just a lot of girls running to stay ahead of the sexism.

In reality, every girl I ever knew faced down some kind of sexual harassment. It came with the territory of being a girl.

All we wanted was a real coach, not a driver’s ed teacher. And we also wanted our own uniforms.

All we wanted was a real coach, not a driver’s ed teacher. And we wanted new uniforms.

And finally the #MeToo Movement was the oxygen that brought our memory back.

I think it allowed us a chance to revisit the toxic running culture we carried with us.

It’s funny how you can be so incredibly strong but so vulnerable at the same time.

Because our pride, our guts on the running track, kind of gave us a misplaced idea of power. We fell into a catch-22 of eating disorders and distorted body image.

And our vulnerability, our sex, was never protected by the insensitive coach or the groping boyfriend.

The boys never had to go through this, they owned their bodies, they were free to use and abuse their autonomy.

Looking back, I think we believed that equality would come with time. That we would outgrow the insecurity, like bell bottom jeans and big hair.

That things were moving forward.

But really the remembering is the only path back to healing, the acknowledging of the shame housed in those long ago locker rooms.

I think I can finally understand, not just cognitively, but on some physical level, that we were never to blame.

We just ran. We didn’t ask for the harassment.

To heal is to expose, to laser-cut the pain, and to hold it up to our families, to our communities. To call out and lay bare our shame.

And today I see that years ago we ran for so many complicated reasons.

We ran in fear, we ran confused.

We ran with and against the abusive climate of the times. We ran, all the while fighting against our own selves when we didn’t even know it.

And we ran to escape the systemic truths we were never built to understand at that tender age.

We ran because on some level we thought our bodies could withstand the abuses of men.

We thought that the world was changing, that the world was finally made for us.

But our endurance gave us the false belief that our running would protect us.

And now I recognize how critical it is to know what we know– to put the pieces of memory back together. So that my sister and I, now almost 60, can finally let go.

Because the trauma from the past is buried in our bodies, muscle memory. The beautiful runs, the jagged pain. All of it, is still with us.

And until we stop pushing it down, and tell our stories, that hurt will never completely heal.

But my sister and I are doing the work and we are healing. We’re in this together, like when we slogged through those killer 10 milers along the Kanawha River.

Those runs were so tough, but just when one of us would want to quit, the other would push.

We were, and are, stronger together.

And finally, the truth was this; we are women and we run, and that is enough.

My beekeeper friend Ryan came by yesterday with bad news.

The hive in our yard is not thriving, it is infested with parasites. And the old queen has become ineffective – she is aging, and not producing new brood.

We were optimistic earlier this year – the box looked beautiful – it was teeming with the perfect ratio of larvae, brood and honey.

And then something changed. And really, its anyone’s guess what went wrong.

But it strikes me how something can look so active and robust and at the same time be quietly rotting from within.

Everything seemed healthy, we pulled the frames out and saw the brown, ravaged comb.

In contrast, last summer it had the perfect thin, white casings over the amber globes – all of it glowing like a gold treasure. The puffy pregnant pockets bulged and dripped with the sweet honey.

The healthy wooden frame was like a progress report showing us how well we had cared for these little bees, how attentive we were to what threatened to kill them off.

Alas, this year tells a different story.

It tells of a season of neglect (maybe we didn’t treat the mites early enough).

Or too much rainfall at the wrong time. Or an old queen who refused to secede the throne. Or maybe some rogue drones who flew off in search of better things.

Of course, it is a folly.
It is such a small thing.
But such a small ache in my heart.

Of course, it is a folly. It is such a small thing. But such a small ache in my heart.

I used to believe that our years were like these hives – the rewards and failures could be measured one season to the next. Learning would cancel out any possibility for error. Our success would be linear.

And the failure was just that, a failure.

And I still look at things that way, sort of. But I also have to acknowledge the unpredictabilty of the entire venture.

And I imagine my brain as a honeybee comb.

The way it has these connections and also these unpredictable synapses. And it buzzes along, happy and productive most days, but dormant on other days – dark and inert.

And all of that sweet, golden potential within – stored and ready, but sometimes painfully difficult to extract.

Human and bee – with crenellated corpuscles that link to one another in a system that is ever-changing and alive. Channels of energy metabolized like sunshine to honey. Electric currents controlled by who knows what.

For the bee, each hexagon of the comb is where an egg will be laid (and who knows why it chooses that place?) and then larvae and then food will be produced to service the entire organism.

And all of it works together in a symphony

And it works so often. Unless it doesn’t.

The little honeybee – so perfectly programmed, like a robotic drone with a singular destination with no deviation in flight map.

And yet. To see the hive in the shank of summer, it is a glorious riot of chaos.

A drunken house party with bee bodies bumping against one another, crackling and popping in the heat.

Chaos and order. Random insect movements, and an orchestrated dance of pure joy.

So today, I raise my glass to last year’s crop (how did we ever take you for granted?) And I quietly watch the erratic and clumsy parade of bees.

It’s a little like Times Square on New Year’s Eve for bees, the desperation. But really more like a death watch.

But if the honeybee hive mind is anything like my own, I’ll hope for the repairs to come swiftly and with as little cost to the whole comb as possible.

And the sweetness?

It will come (I hope).

Or not.

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops – at all

Emily Dickinson

When I’m feeling depressed, but I am still able to write, I feel a tiny bit of hope stir.

The depression swims deep, like blue veins in my arm, invisible, beneath the skin.

I want to tap my wrist to bring them to the surface. To expose the root of this sadness.

To see the disconnect, the defective wiring, the source of this pain.

So I try to rewire the circuits between body and brain. I go for a run and I percolate, and I ruminate.

And some days I play with ideas and words and images. I etch, erase, and edit.

It is a good day when I can write any of it down.

But as my jogging body stretches and unfolds – hips like cement, calves straining, my movements are stiff, slow and plodding. I’m hardly moving forward.

I have to breathe deep, loosen into the cadence, trying to knit the loose ends from the trauma back together.

And returning home, I am spent.

Later, doing chores, up and down the steps, my feet are heavy, I sometimes forget the task at hand.

In the kitchen, scrubbing the pots, the dry, cracked skin of my hand feels tight and sore as it pushes the yellow sponge, catching the the crumbs as it glides across the countertop.

The cool water rinses through my fingers at the tap as I lift and turn the lip of the scratched old pan, to rinse over and over.

Each task, done a thousand times.

But yesterday, after a hot shower, as I was drying off with the towel, my eye wandered to the framed watercolor hanging on the wall.

A soft pastoral scene of the West Virginia mountains, the New River Gorge near where I grew up. I’ve glanced at that picture nearly every day for years.

But today I saw it.

And I felt a tiny shift, a slight lift, in my mood. And I simply thought: I would love to have a notecard of that print to send to my friend.

And that was all.

I think that sometimes the best I can ever do is to keep moving up and down, I can’t always move forward. There won’t always be any actual progress.

But maybe this is what healing looks like.

Maybe healing is simply being able to notice. Maybe, for even just a moment, it is seeing color.

Maybe it is a glance of the mountain’s horizon through smoke. Maybe it is the memory of an old friend.

Maybe healing is squinting my eyes at an imagined vanishing point – not seeing an ending, but being curious about a possible beginning.

Maybe healing is this tiny flutter deep in my brain – a lightening, a levity, a curiosity, a question.

Maybe healing is writing these words, my restless rustling, like a thing with feathers.

Maybe it is hope.

It is late afternoon and through the nursery’s gauzy drapes I can see the shadows dusking across the lawn.

It is Spring, but it could be any season, any year.

It is Spring but it could be any season, any year

For me it is this chair.

My tailbone aches from sitting, wrenched forward in order to maintain a hollowed out abdomen for my grandson’s head as he naps.

He is warm, almost sweaty, and breathing so lightly, so smoothly, he sips the air in the nursery.

I know that I am here for the duration. Let the minutes tick, the hours wind down.

There is no getting up to get a glass of water, no trips to the bathroom.

We are here, in baby time.

My body is now the concave version of my pregnant self when I supported my own daughter.

I would contort into any position to keep this child’s head safe.

Patience comes with age. There is no better thing outside this door, only distraction. Only the messy world that threatens the napping of my wee one.

To give in, to surrender to the shape that is required to love and to support, is no weakness, it is like the strongest tendon in the body, a ligament that can stretch to bear the weight of unbearable things.

Sometimes the body rests easily when the mind wrestles and strains.

Today I let my thoughts sift away on the mountain air. Being here with this child inflates the old bellows from motherhood, the muscle memory kicks in and inflates my old lungs.

My old heart.

And this child will break this old heart, of this I am sure. It’s what happens when you allow yourself the opening to love.

And this child will break my heart, of this I am sure. It’s what happens when you allow yourself the opening to love.

When you surrender everything – your judgements, your opinions, your petty hurts of the ego – when you offer up the soft underbelly.

When you risk to conform to this new shape. This safe new nest beneath an expanding breast.

Now he smiles, pupils still rolling beneath thin blue lids. What does he dream about? Does he see the light and stars from his placental galaxy?

Or is it the giant moon of his mother’s gaze on this bright new planet?

Where my daughter nestled, now my grandson rests.

Looking back, I recognize that so many moments with children demanded a choice: whether to stay firm, or to take a breath and give in.

So much harder to give up the spinal rigidity, but in the softness lies the trust.

When my mind slips back to worrying, I think of how the modern digital world moves at such a furious clip and I’m anxious that I won’t keep up.

Will he still want to read with me in a few years?

But for now I sigh and pull the chunky board book out from under my numb backside.

I Will Love You Til The Cows Come Home.

My daughter has memorized the lyrical lines of this book and I can almost see his small belly relax and pulse when she repeats the rhyming phrases.

For the words live in the body. Like memory. Like my love for this boy. And my body’s hammock wants to imprint upon his recollection in the same way.

But his memory is no one’s but his own. And I have to trust that as he grows he’ll recall that in some way that his Gigi has a space, a hollow, a safe cave for him to run to.

I’m so grateful that my daughter trusts my cradling care. For some reason she hands this child to me without much of a worry.

Today I am sworn to this vow – to protect and defend this child or at the very least, to always be a soft place where he can land.

He’s made a salad. And I am grateful because making the salad is the part I hate.

Too much intention, too fussy, too much effort in pulling out the sticky drawer to search for a fresh vegetable.

But I won’t eat.

Or, more correctly, the plastic spinner bowl will sit and condense and grow warm. So neither of us will eat.

Because we are fighting.

___________________

The argument starts small, and days later neither of us knows what it is about really.

Yet we do

because the emotions after the fight still cling,

like the white salt that limns my lips after a swim in the ocean.

___________________

A crusty buildup from hours in the surf.

It sticks, and dries and cracks the corners of my mouth.

And on my torso, it chafes under my sticky armpits and wedges into the elastic ruching of my swimsuit.

_________________________

Residue

small price I pay for adventure

Or at least for wanting it.

To swim in the sea that is.

__________________________

In the tide

I flirt with the current,

cresting the shallows.

How far do I dare?

_________________

Quickly I’m nervous

and people wave frantically, from the shore.

Swim, swim

swim towards the danger,

not away, they say,

(defying any logic and intuition).

Let it take you.

________________________

Later, at the hottest spike in the afternoon, I surrender to the outdoor shower

to sluice the brine away,

but I never come completely clean.

My shoulders prick and and sting.

__________________________

And tonight, the heat will radiate and pulse along my entire body,

and the grating scratch grows incessant and insane, and I yank the sandy bed sheets to the floor.

My anger still radiating off of me

in the thick night air.

____________________________

You would think the sun, the ocean, the sky would sift this mood,

but like errant grit in the shag carpet, it’s impossible to sweep away.

The afterburn never breaks the skin, so the repair will be quick,

but tonight both of our backs are throbbing,

angry remnants

as if from a lashing.

__________________________

We sleep (finally),

and dream of silently swimming away from the hurt,

alone or together,

giving up to a salty blue balm of forgetting,

or senselessly letting the riptide drag us away.