Tee’s name popped up when the phone rang, but it was Bug’s voice on the other end. “Mommy, can I stay at your house tonight?”
Unprecedented. While Tee and I have been sharing Bug’s time exactly 50/50, he always, always, asks to stay at his Daddy’s. Sometimes just reminding him that he gets to spend an entire weekend with me will reduce him to tears.
At the house we share, Bug has his own room. Bunk beds, toys everywhere, free rein in that one space. At his daddy’s, he also has bunk beds, toys everywhere, and free rein. What makes his room at his dad’s house unique is that he shares it with Tee. His favorite man sleeps deeply right under him all night, and that man does not stir awake when Bug climbs down into the warm comfort of the big bed in the wee hours.
Bug’s request would have been more of a surprise if I had not known the big news of the day: Ms. Song had announced she would be leaving on an “adventure.”
Ms. Song is Bug’s touchstone. A Mary Poppins in mom jeans, she has been the most constant presence in his world for over a year. It is a rare thing to stumble across a sharp-minded and big-smiling person who teaches preschool because it is her calling, not just because it is all she could get. Every day, Ms. Song greets every single child in her class with a big hello and a hug. She calls the children by name. She requires the same joyous and personalized attention of every staff member in her classroom. Her gift is the ability to attend with precision to each child’s unique capacity to manipulate scissors, pronounce Rs and Ls, and channel strong feelings into words and positive behaviors. Ms. Song knows the kids.
And she is leaving. A new teacher starts next week. Bug gets about seven months with this next one before the big transition to kindergarten.
Parents want to shield their children from the sting of loss. Even knowing it is important for young people to learn how to navigate disruption, the instinct is to create stability. Even false stability, at times. What parent can stand watching a kid’s heart break? What parent does not want to rush in to balm the wound and whisper promises impossible to keep?
Adaptability is a requirement for thriving in the world as it is, and parents have an important role to play in helping kids learn the mechanics of it. Still. It hurts to see our little ones grappling with big feelings. Against that squeezing desire to protect is the knowledge that kids learn life is not so certain and nothing lasts forever. They learn it despite us. Often, they learn it because of us, even when we think they are not paying attention. They are paying attention. They always are.
The desire for things to stay fixed is as powerful as it is common, and its power can be crippling. When the pink slip lands or the divorce papers arrive or the landlord announces she is selling the place, even the strongest among us feels seasick, no matter how well equipped we are for the ride. The urge is to deny or to hide. Nuanced language and the experience of survival can help us handle the upheaval accompanying transition. As for handling it well? That is a talent that few master.
Children learn how to deal with change by watching grownups. Do we fret and avoid, or attend and apply care? Do we give voice to our feelings to the point of wallowing, or do we decide, that’s enough, and climb back on board? Do we practice straddling that uncomfortable threshold, both by bidding farewell to what is behind us and by welcoming what is to come?
What do our words and behaviors teach our kids about resilience? About adaptation?
Usually, Tee and I stick to our schedule, but we agreed to let Bug have his wish this one night. A room of his own may not appeal as much as one that is shared, but it is still his. Sometimes, a person just needs to touch familiar things to know they are not slipping away. At least, not for the moment.
I picked Bug up at his one house and ferried him over to his other house. On the way, we spoke lightly about the idea of “mixed feelings.” This is a familiar refrain, but, like those lullabies, it bears repeating. I tell him I have mixed feelings when he goes away for Christmas or summer break. I am happy that he is having fun with his cousins, and I am sad to not be with him. People can feel several things at once, even if they are very different things. I remind him that it is fine to be happy that Ms. Song gets to go on an adventure and also sad that she is leaving.
I remember when I first introduced this concept to Bug when he was just about three years old. He pondered for a few minutes then piped up, “Like pistachios!”
Uh, really?
“Yeah! They are salty AND crunchy!”
Exactly.
The five year old in the back seat offered no such clever analogy. He simply absorbed my words (I have to hope) and changed the subject to our weekend plans.
Back at home, he proceeded to torment the dog, chase the kitty, ignore his grandparents (after checking their whereabouts), and jump on the furniture. Same bedlam, different day. I noticed, though, that he called out to me repeatedly throughout the evening. “Mommy? Come look.” And, “Mommy, where are you?” And, “Mommy, help.” With his talismans in hand – his flashlight, his pirate sword, his box of coins – he managed to settle down next to me, listen to a chapter of Peter Pan, and hum along to the three songs I sing before bed. It was a late one, but he made it to sleep. Eventually.
Ms. Song and the school have done their best to make the transition smooth. The low-drama announcement preceded a few farewell rituals. The kids and teacher alike created little memory boxes with tokens of one another. Ms. Song is leaving behind her bear puppet, Oso. The kids can talk to him if they get sad, and he will send the message to Ms. Song.
Come Monday, though, Ms. Song will be gone. For the moment, Bug’s mommy and daddy return to their rightful place in things. Perhaps we are not just his touchstones, but the cornerstones of his forever shifting world.
Category: Uncategorized
Vein
I used to walk through the house. So many rooms, I realize now. Even then, though, I was not naïve. I did not believe it permanent. From time to time, the wooden sturdiness of that cabin on the banks of Lake George would catch me off-guard, freezing me to the spot. In those gaping moments, the scent of sweet oat bread baking in the oven brushed open my lips. Low light washed in through the wall of glass, from beyond the porch and unruly lilac bushes and the open waters and the violet Adirondack sky. My child roamed the unknown terrain in his slumber and my husband was just a short walk over the bridge at his work.
I would stand in that frame of light, and marvel. This? The beautiful terror. This is my home? My family? The thrill of its truth would split my chest. The walls, scarred as they were, would upend me just before catching my shifting weight. I could not fathom that our home might be real, even as it held me to the firm on planks of the floor.
Belief was irrelevant. I still treated that house as the one that would carry us through. I stocked its larder with rice and fruit, tidied its collection of closets. I adorned its walls with sunflowers, sewed ribbons of aquamarine into the linen grazing our windows. The man who loved to camp and play helped fill our den with a library of games and words and music and friends. My boys tromped their muddy boots in from the wild woods and I knitted the woolen caps and scarves they hung, dripping, by the door.
Every so often, when silence was my only company, I stretched out in the delicious embrace of that sanctuary and surrendered to the staggering improbability of such abundance.
Nothing is fixed. Nothing at all.
Even if I had known what was coming, would I have treated it differently? Would I have decided not to nestle the snowdrops and Sweet William into the rock-ringed patch where we turned the earth to the northern sun? Maybe a realist would have left the dust in the corners, left the oven cold. It can seem a waste of time to trust in what is in our grasp when we sense it slipping. If I could have seen then the figure of the shaken-down woman standing here now, would I have warmed that home with the bellows of my faith?
Now, I sit with a man at the end of the world, amidst the rubble and debris. The apocalypse has left us this one table, standing on its bare legs with a single candle in a stained mason jar, flame guttering but still alive. He is new, but only to me. We pull our chairs to the same side. Grazing knees and upturned cheeks, we listen, we speak.
Behind my throat, an iced vein. It runs deep, biting along my spine, chilling me awake. No, no. Don’t partake. The soporific promise in that low light, the smell of him near. Stay alert, silly child.
To know how terrible we might become, how hollow the gaze, how peppered with acid the selfsame tongue we use now to lap at the rime edging the crag between us. To know we could turn so sour. And yet, to go on.
That current in its toothed chill is a living thing. It may spill over its banks, it might even roar so powerfully as to knock the rickety legs out from under us. But also, this: the frozen creek still courses below the solid frost. It still carries brook trout to their breeding ground.
How do I lift my eyes to the man here? Can I live inside a fleeting moment the way I lived in that house on the lake? Can I treat this tenderly, nourish it, lay the bulb in the furrow of earth while defeat’s crowbar snickers at my neck? The wide-awake vein carries its keening fear down along the axis of me, bright and searing. I want to draw my hands back from the table’s smooth wood, grab tight to my own chair, stiffen in anticipation of the quake, the flood.
I know now more than I did then, framed in the imperfect light of the cabin window. I know how mighty the wrecking ball of loss when it finally connects, yes. But also, I am still upright. Also, the root holds.
Does the wide-awake chill of knowing actually breed wisdom? The question is this: what do I choose to do with what I know? We may crash hard if we fall away from each other. We also may find our feet if we do. We can endure far more than we imagine.
It would be a terrible thing to leave the table bare while the scent of the bread in the oven grows so warm, so near. Now we are here, leaning in, lips parted. Tasting what is in the air.
Disclosure
You avoid it until you can’t
then you speak it the best you can
then you say I’m sorry
then you go look
for the first time
straight in the mirror.
Do not linger there.
You will not get any prettier.
Go tidy up the kitchen
and bake bread for a neighbor.
Then turn up the music
and dance.
Mind the Gap
The traditional approach to change is to look for the problem, do a diagnosis, and find a solution. The primary focus is on what is wrong or broken; since we look for problems, we find them. By paying attention to problems, we emphasize and amplify them.
– Sue Hammond, The Thin Book of Appreciative Inquiry
The bike was the key. It was liberation. It was the only way to get to the shopping centers with all their pre-teen allure: Montgomery Donuts, the movie theater, dark alcoves and roaming packs of boys. By way of the broad and quiet neighborhood streets, I could meander up to the busy stretch of what passed as “town,” spend a few bucks on comic books and Twix, and feel like I had really gone somewhere.
I have never been very good at riding a bike. I wobble widely. When another rider calls, “On your left,” I throw a gaze over my left shoulder and end up veering directly into her path. This is still the case, despite several decades of practice.
At 11, I was as already a full-grown klutz. For some reason on this one particular day, my sister and I chose to take the more direct yet less forgiving route to the edge of our neighborhood. We turned ourselves out along a roaring stretch of Old Georgetown Road. Six lanes of frenzied traffic whipped past as we made our way to Wildwood Shopping Center for our sanitized version of adolescent mayhem. We rode on the narrow sidewalks, confident in our immortality and in the protective capacity of those three inches of curb.
At every intersection, a handy little dip in the curb for folks on axles – strollers, wheelchairs, skateboards and the like – ferried us smoothly down to the road and back up again. I am sure the sidewalk engineering choice was not intended for cyclists, but considering how few pedestrians actually frequented those loud and dangerous thoroughfares, we made happy use of them. I could zoom down the sidewalk, slowing just enough to make sure no one was turning off the main road onto a neighborhood street, and buzz right through the intersection up onto the opposite path. I was too poor a cyclist to learn how to “pop a wheelie,” as it was called. The sidewalk design saved me slowing to a stop, walking, and lifting my bike up over the curb.
I was zipping joyously along, picking up speed as I became more confident in my ten-speed prowess. I looked ahead. One of the intersections neared. My stomach leapt into my throat. An enormous telephone pole was rammed right into the sidewalk just beyond the opposite ramp. I saw it. I could not slow. I took its measure, and I knew I had enough room to veer around it. I watched it and I locked my gaze on it, calculating the distance, determined to miss it.
Wham!
My bike flew out from under me. I body-slammed into the pole, face pressed against the splintered wood and old staples. My arms wrapped around its girth as my poor bicycle wobbled and fell into the gutter. My sister screeched to a halt, whipped around, and burst out laughing. “You are so weird! How could you not see that pole?”
I slid down and did my best not to burst into tears. We rescued my bike and made the rest of our limping way to the strip mall.
How could I not see that pole? That was the wrong question. I did see the pole. I was looking right at the pole! My question was this: how could I crash into something I was working so hard to avoid?
Anyone who has put a kid on training wheels or taught a teenager to drive knows the answer. You do not look at where you do not want to go. The gaze is more powerful than any of us really understands. Look, and your mind, posture, and even behavior will veer in the direction of your vision. For this reason, any student of the road learns to look at where she intends to go. She looks ahead.
My sister, with her natural physical aptitude and addiction to speed, had learned this without knowing how to articulate it. She focused on the gap and squeezed herself through it. I fixed on the obstacle and met it.
Today, in the face of several mounting so-called problems at work and at home, I needed a reminder of how to direct my gaze at the open road instead of the flashing lights and gaping potholes. I dipped back into Appreciative Inquiry’s fount of refreshing thinking.
Appreciative Inquiry (AI), a tool that has gained its foothold in the worlds of Organizational Development and leadership practice, offers up practical approaches for drawing upon the power and possibility in people and systems. Work, love, parenting, friendships – hell, life itself – all are riddled challenges. This is especially true if they are seen as such. Pulling from AI’s handy toolbox is a great way to training the mind away from problems and towards capacity when trying to build a way forward.
AI involves, in a central way, the art and practice of asking questions that strengthen a system’s capacity to apprehend, anticipate, and heighten positive potential. . . AI deliberately, in everything it does, seeks to work from accounts of this “positive change core”—and it assumes that every living system has many untapped and rich and inspiring accounts of the positive. Link the energy of this core directly to any change agenda and changes never thought possible are suddenly and democratically mobilized.
– David L. Cooperrider and Diana Whitney, Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change
Through a series of questions about the system when it is at its best, AI allows participants to give voice to stories that generate power and animate dormant resources for building towards a vision. Instead of a problem to be solved, the task at hand is a mystery to be explored full of opportunities to be discovered. The people involved are rich sources of insight. It is a choice to perceive of things this way.
Today, I began again to wean myself from panic, and returned to the practice of asking the generative question. Little by little, the answers offer up source material for telling a new kind of story. Learning how to do this takes intention. I am as much a klutz here as I am on two wheels, but, as ever, learning is exhilarating. (More on the specifics of AI and the questions can be found here.)
Dissect a fear and watch it thrive. Describe despair and feel it spill out of its container. Delineate the barriers to your greatness, and notice how quickly they harden into cinder-block and razor wire.
In the inverse lies solace: You can make real the very thing to which you attend. Ask the right sorts of questions, and watch the future bloom.
Be careful where you set your sights. Yours is an awesome power. That telephone pole is there, for sure. But so is the gap. The open path has been there all along. Hop back on the bike. No matter how you wobble, the way ahead is waiting to meet you.
Seasick
I suppose two and a half weeks is a nice reprieve. After all, Christmas and New Year’s filled the space with noise and ribbons. This weekend, however, the magnitude of the change hit me like a blunt object. I’m divorced? Hell’s bells. What now?
Sunday was one of those low, swimming-in-the-cesspool-of-despair days. An overindulgence of self pity left me far more bloated than even eating the whole pan of Rice Krispie Treats (not that I’ve ever done that before). Between bouts of crying and morbid thoughts about my unavoidable fate as a bag lady, I did manage to read a few chapters on the origins of the universe, fill several pages of my journal, and go to both Zumba and the contra dance. It is a small comfort to notice that my wallowing behavior has matured even if my panicky thinking has not.
On days like these, it feels as if I am trying to keep a dinghy afloat on the open water. Bug is in the back in his oversized life vest, holding the sides of the wobbling boat and asking, “Which way, Mommy? Where are we going?” We have no map of the stars, no sextant, and no horizon for which to aim. Our store of hardtack is shrinking precariously. In every direction, we face the blank, surging sea.
This metaphor is a joke. We are not anywhere near the ocean. We are paddling along the Intracoastal Waterway somewhere around Boca Raton. Just off the starboard side, the Banana Boat is pulsing with the boozy chatter of cruising singles. The salt is on the rim, the tequila is top shelf. Conch fritters, karaoke, even crayons and a kids’ menu. A few from the crowd wave us over, their happy hollers echoing off the murky water.
A diving boat passes on our other side, its captain and skipper engaged in earnest conversation. They are off to hunt for abandoned traps, to find the unintended victims – the sea turtles and marlins caught unawares and left to die. Their work is the only thing that matters. The tactics for achieving results require research and debate and quick decisions when the Coast Guard is bearing down. They need extra hands. They invite us to board, but they have neither the time nor the attention for us to dilly-dally as we assess our options.
At the edge of the water, a man stands on the pier. His smile is kind. He is good with knots. He gestures towards an open slip. In moments, we could have our feet on dry land.
Hell, if we keep looking, we could even find a riverboat with an all-night swing band and a cabin for two.
This is how it is. Up and down this stretch of wet highway, docks and ports and way stations turn our heads. Some are roomy enough to accommodate us. Others, we will have to squeeze our way in. Entertainment, conversation, direction, distraction.
As for Bug? He just wants whatever passes closest. Whatever makes the biggest splash. Whatever shines.
“Go faster, Mommy!”
Such an abundance of options! More than enough. We could troll up and down, sampling everything on offer. We could choose to dock, and leave our patched-up vessel to rust. We could fill a year or a decade making the circuit of this populous scratch along the edge of our continent. Our bellies would be full. Our heads dry.
All this assumes we don’t remember what is just beyond the mouth of the here and now.
That open water. That nauseating, restless sea.
If only I had the courage to plunge us out into its merciless expanse.
“Which way, Mommy? Where are we going?”
Today, as poorly equipped as I feel (and probably am), I choose the metaphor that makes me sick with exhilaration:
Wave and smile but paddle on. Pull our little tin can out to where the horizon is beyond reach. Get ourselves hopelessly lost. Learn to fish. Learn the stars.
In the absence of a way, make our own.
In Bed with Book
The bed needed a new orientation. Mildew had flowered on the window panes. Stink bugs had built their incubators and mausoleums in the corners of the wells. All of that had to go. Vacuum and cloth, then clean linens, then the pillowcases with the dragonflies and tiny birds in butter yellow, in the green of ferns.
Now, the head of the bed is to the wall under the cascade of family photographs. Its foot is closer to the windows. The wintry morning light, low in the east, falls through the sheer curtains and rouses me to meet the day.
It is a fine thing to nestle into a heap of feathers and foam, to unfurl the tucked wings of a story. A whole sack of gold is nothing compared to a long moment’s gaze out at a hazy day. Up above, four sepia 8×10’s in their mismatched frames keep a gentle watch. Grandfather, grandmother, father, mother. Such smiles on those faces! And each of them, so young, so very bright.
Now, as before, we share a name.
For eighteen months, I kept them near my feet. Their gazes were unsettling. Their judgment, subtle. In another time and place, I would have stayed. They all did.
When the bed found its new direction, something else slid with a whisper into its proper alignment. From this place, their smiles are guileless. Patient. Even kind. I have stopped looking at them now that they linger above my tousled cocoon. Their presence is still palpable, but less worrying. They are in the place I don’t let my gaze linger: back, behind.
Here, just flesh, just bed. I settle the weight of my 38 years into the embrace of the day as it begins to stir. I feel the give and accept the invitation. My eyes drink in the quiet light, the quilt warming my skin, and the page as it breathes awake, opening in my lap.
Gated Community
My son informs me that God is real.
“He lives in a house in the sky,” he tells me.
“When people die on earth, he brings them back to life up there.”
And, as an afterthought, “God also makes the storms.”
How does he know these things?
He has never been to church.
Our Sunday morning conversations are more likely to involve
atmospheric pressure
than divine intervention.
Even though my own faith lies in stars and seas
mitochondria
and ink
I do not question where my son sinks his teeth.
He is five
and is entitled to his comforts.
Who could blame him for finding solace
in a home
forever
for everyone and everything
that vanishes from his sight?
Imagine what a sprawling, jumbled neighborhood
it must be.
Not just the all the people and their pets,
their chariots and wagons and vintage cars
restored to their chrome-fendered glory,
but the fields of prairie grass and wheat
blown away in the dust bowl, now lush and pulsing
with the hoofbeats of buffalo
by the thousands.
Up there, even dead ideas have their chance at salvation.
The earth rotates around the sun.
Phrenologists find answers in the topography of skulls
and every family is still intact,
their quaint, precious routines repeated without a hiccup
for all eternity.
When you are finally ready
to admit that one notion of the way things are
is ill-suited to this life,
it is nice to picture it taking root in a corner of heaven
so at least the effort of holding it so long
was not wasted.
When my boy was small, he declared himself a girl
and lived as one for a year.
Up there, in God’s teeming quarter,
my three-year-old daughter
in a pink tutu and tiara
rides the back of a diplodocus
who dips its head
to nibble
from a pole bean stalk
flourishing a little more each day
as its twin
in our back yard
decays
in the deepening winter.
What Did You Learn Today?
I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning to sail my ship.
– Aeschylus
In college, my friend Gabriel and I used to ask each other this question: “What did you learn today?” It is hard to remember the exact parameters of this exchange. Did we ask each other every day? For a few weeks, or the better part of a year? It may have been a passing fancy or a practice to which we adhered with religious intensity for as long as the passion lasted. What I do recall is how much I loved the question.
“What did you learn today?” Imagine ending your day with someone you love asking you this and really listening to your answer. Imagine then offering up the same curiosity, sitting back, and hearing how the other’s mind has opened up, even if only by the slightest degree, that day.
Imagine walking through your world, knowing that someone is waiting to know what you have taken in.
Gabriel was the most precious companion during those wide-open years of our early twenties. The world around us was a fecund jungle, exploding with exotic curiosities. He was always willing to peek into the guts of things to see how they worked. With Gabe, I learned how to identify jewelweed and its more menacing cousin, stinging nettle, on springtime hikes in the Green Mountains. I learned how to knead bread, dry apples, facilitate a meeting, and appreciate Jorge Borges. I learned how to look at a stone by putting all five senses to the task. Most importantly, I learned that a bottomless appetite for questions is, paradoxically, the greatest way to sate a curious mind.
Gabe has drifted off into the fogs of time. He is, I hear through the thinning grapevine, a doctor in Boston. Internal medicine. I remember the explanation he gave years ago for why this type of practice appealed. “I love the puzzle,” he told me. He was jazzed by the chance to figure out what is going on with patients before the specialists get hold of them.
I was out and about this afternoon, and Gabriel’s question bubbled up from the depths. “What did you learn today?” Here are just a few things that captured my mind on January 1, 2012:
• When making tamales, you spread the uncooked cornmeal mixture on the corn husk first, followed by the raw meat mixture and sauce. All wrapped up together, the component parts cook at once inside the pressure cooker.
• A “luthier” is the fancy name for a guitar maker.
• It is only two turns off Monument Drive to get onto the Dulles Toll Road.
• Just because there are six cookies in the Tupperware, you do not have to eat six cookies.
• That thing I sang in church (Praise God from whom all blessings flow. . .) is called a “doxology.” This is a general name for a brief song of praise for the trinity, often sung at the end of a hymn.
• Some mallards, geese, and other waterfowl do not migrate south for the winter. These oddities, called “resident geese” or “resident ducks,” are becoming less of an aberration and more of a menace in some populated areas. Biologists are not exactly sure why the migration signal does not kick on in some waterfowl as it does in others, even others of the same species in the same region. The behavior of the resident birds is not nearly as fascinating as that of their migratory kin, if you think about. For as much as it is studied, migration is a poorly understood phenomenon in the biological world. How is it that these animals have their entire life story written around an annual journey of many thousands of miles?
Not bad for a day that did not see me crawling out of bed until 12:30 in the afternoon.
Most of us ask more questions and learn more things in a day than we can list. Whether we pass the hours bent over a computer or scaling a peak in Shenandoah, we are thinking and engaging. Often, we do not even know how to frame or name the occurrences into which we have inquired, as our minds are chewing on them without our conscious attention. What if we gave voice to our insights, what if we held them up to the light? We might be brink of unearthing something remarkable, even if that something is just the next question.
In the past few months, I have returned repeatedly to the theme of being on the cusp of a significant change. With the divorce final and the true magnitude of my single-mother-ness coming into focus, what faces is me is larger than a single lifestyle makeover. Several unsettling transformations are taking place simultaneously. As I try to capture, observe, make sense, and make choices, I barely catch one re-alignment in the landscape before another tremor shakes things up.
I am not sure exactly what my job is in all this (although there are more than enough people around here who are happy to advise). I wonder daily if I am missing something big. Hell, the whole of the marriage was built on shifting sand that appeared to be solid ground. How will I know if this next step – whatever it is – lands me in a sinkhole? Will I build my next home on a fault line? Is this job a mistake? This class, this financial choice, this school for Bug, this way I am spending my time tonight? Is it right or wrong? Is it safe? What the hell am I supposed to be doing?
Trusting the quaking ground to hold me, to shake me out into something whole, is terrifying. But let’s be honest. Pecos Bill did not lasso twisters just because he was a good guy. Grabbing the ropes and hanging on for the ride? That’s one massive thrill.
You know as well as I do that certain practices can keep you upright even as the bucking earth tries to throw you. New Year’s Resolutions are a catalog of these practices. Walk daily. Speak with kindness. Make art. Plant a garden.
Learn something.
Focusing the mind on the question is one way to stay open to the minor wonders of the world. If you are lucky, it might have the effect of keeping you excited about even the most nauseating changes, and give you pause when you face the temptation of the cave’s familiar comforts. It could even quiet that panicky chatter that besets the bewildered pilgrim at every fork in the road.
Finding a suitable travel companion does not happen overnight, if it happens at all. While you seek your Gabriel, make use of your own quiet witness. Ask the question. Listen for the answer. Carry the knowledge back to the journey while you let it carry you forward. Who knows? If you keep orienting yourself toward learning, you might find you have learned your way.
Cross Over
In a village cut into the edge of a mountain, the sound of pounding feet and howling beasts dredges a boy up from the tidepool of sleep. Men in masks, their bodies streaked with paint, haul him from his bed and carry him away while his mother and sisters shriek from the porch. Somewhere in the distant hills, the men burn him with charred spears and chant in the dark, handing him a machete hammered with glyphs he has yet to learn to decipher. He makes his first kill many months later, but that night, he becomes a killer. The sky, slung low across the blood-red veins of the manzanita, shrouds the transformation. The men pour a fiery brew in a circle around his prone body before making him drink, but even they cannot see the rearrangement of his component parts. When he walks back into his village two mornings later, he does not recognize his mother, despite her teary prostration at his scarred feet.
I wait naked in my bed for the ululating horde of women to arrive and bind my wrists and ankles. A barebacked Palomino follows them to the steps of my front door. They lift me, writhing and protesting, down the stairs, past the china cabinet and the baying dog. Out into the suburban street, they throw me over the damp spine of the mare. Belly down and ass exposed to Orion’s sword, I can see nothing but the familiar blacktop as it gives way to alien terrain. The ragtag caravan ferries me to the place I have known exists but had never been able to find. Behind the roar of the waterfall, a swath of Eden. All about, the implements of alchemy: the crucible and its white-hot fire, the crushed roots of blue cohosh, the skewers and spears, the jewels and the pelts of slain whitetail deer. The drums, of course. The hole dug deep into the throat of the earth where my body lands as the gruff whispers begin.
I wake in the morning, still naked in warm sheets. The dog snuffles around at the base of the stairs, waiting for her walk. The damp winter grass, bleached and flat, shows no evidence of hoof prints, no signs of a scuffle.
If a woman falls open in the night and no one is around to hear her crack, did she change at all?
Maybe I could take the blade and run it across my own skin, sprinkle the ash in, and let the wound scream and seal.
In the absence of rites, how are we to mark passage? If we were once carried over a threshold, by what choreography do we uncross it? How do we make sacred the soil to bury the blessed stone? Fall on your knees, the women whisper. Learn the names of the insects that unfurl on your flesh. Tunnel in and follow the stink of sulfur to the hidden spring.
It is morning on the last day of the hardest year. No one is knocking. Even so, behind the haze of December sun, the stars studding the belt of our galaxy flash and blaze. Cassiopeia rises from her extended recline, stretches out those stiff joints and drinks deep from the deep, cool well of space. She goes to work unchaining Andromeda from the rock. By tonight, they will be ready to cross the distance to my bedroom door. I tuck myself deep into the musty sheets and ignore the faint echo of their preparations. For a few moments longer, I can pretend that I belong locked in the safe in the cell of my parents’ home. I can pretend nothing is on its way to pull me over onto the other side, that the sun will keep the dark at bay and that the silence of this last morning is the only company I need.
Ground Level
In the photo from an unidentified year, Christmas is a litter of red bows and crumpled paper. Two grinning and sleepy-eyed girls hold up matching nightgowns. As they kneel there, a drab stretch of olive green peeks through the debris. That carpet was already flat and washed out when we moved into the house in 1983. Wall-to-wall padding the color of tinned peas stretched along the hallway through the living room and out to the edges of the dining room.
For the years we lived in that house, I barely noticed the flooring. It took a beating under our adolescent feet. Forgotten Easter eggs and candy canes gathered dust in its corners. Dander from a revolving menagerie of dogs and cats dusted its depths. Embers popped from the fireplace burned dark scars into its skin. Everything we tracked in from the woods and sidewalks worked its way into the fibers, along with the desperate sweat from our middle school dance parties, the busted lamps and windowpanes from our high school drinking parties, and the spilled ink from our volumes of love notes to uninterested boys.
My sister and I lay on that floor with the usual suspects from the neighborhood. Stretched out on our bellies, we played Trivial Pursuit and rubbed the belly of one dog or another. From the record player, Prince and UB40 belted out the soundtrack to our epic conspiracy to win the attention of those aforementioned boys.
The carpet is such an expanse of dingy green, almost popping out of the photo now. In all those years and all that proximity, I don’t think I ever even noticed that it was holding me up. It was as invisible as dust mites, as overlooked as the native tongue.
The surfaces that hold us and bind us are this way. They meet us on our arrival, having been laid down by the folks whose arrival preceded our own. The pell-mell approach of our predecessors becomes a Way that eventually mellows into The Way Things Are. It even becomes ours. We walk upon those planes, the familiar buoyancy cushioning our feet even as we are oblivious to its presence.
As willing as I have been to bore with drill-press intensity into definitions of justice and art and the magical capacity of the human mind for learning, I have never quite turned the implement back on myself. Have these eyes ever looked straight at my own assumptions about work and family as they relate to my choices? Oh, sure, I have burnt a few gallons of midnight oil playing psychobabble ping-pong with friends and lovers about what relationships are all about. Breathless with certainty that I had re-written the script, I managed to skirt around the scrupulous inspection of my notion that I would and should have a partner in this life. Even while raging against gendered and racist patterns of thought and behavior, I avoided focusing too closely on the preconceptions about what roles my partner and I are to play in creating our very real shared narrative. Similarly, I have never looked dead in the eye of my own sense of what it means to succeed. The ideas that I am gifted yet troubled, and that I can do anything but end up doing very little, are a little too densely packed for whatever tools I have brought to the task.
Is this experience true of other people who have had minimal struggle in a largely unremarkable life? Do others share this comforting idea that native ability combined with a little hard work will pay off, and that the pieces will simply fall into place? Have I been piling faith and weight onto a belief that a spouse by my side would lead clearly to kids and then to home and then a future, and the whole package would coalesce into something not so different from what surrounded me in my growing-up years? Tee and I fell into each other. We set up house on a foundation poured long before our arrival. This is what family is (isn’t it?) This is what work will bring (won’t it?) All you need to do is stake your claim to this stretch of land, and the rest will come.
Right?
Not to heap too much abuse on this old girl, but I realize now I have been living like that grinning adolescent in the photo. Sprawled on a floor I take for granted, I parade my plenty. All the while, I gaze past the person at who is holding the camera and even past what might be gazing back from the other side of it. A bill is on the table, detailing the price my own parents had to pay for creating that little postcard snapshot for the album. What child wants to look at that? It is so easy for a kid to avert her eyes from the sweat popping on her parents’ brows as they hand down the double-edged sword of their labors: the unquestioned assumption that such bounty is a birthright.
Since leaving home (returning, leaving, returning again), I have padded along the familiar set and slipped into unquestioned grooves, following a script written in another time and place for a character who is not me. The ground below, not solid at all. Particle board and paste, leading nowhere, threatening to give way.
My childhood home went on the market in 1990. Seen through the eyes of potential buyers, it came up lacking. First came new kitchen linoleum, then fresh bedroom paint, and by all means, get rid of that awful carpet. Our family went to work yanking up the foul, green stuff in strips. The first among us who tore the padding from the nails below stopped and called the others over. We gathered round in slack-jawed awe. Down below, hardwood floors. Miles and miles of gleaming, untouched boards.
We pulled up every inch of carpet and exposed the honeyed oak. The glossy surface shined even brighter with a sanding and a polish. Like a new copper penny, it caught the light spilling in from the picture windows and cast it right back up to the very corners of our home – the home we would shortly be leaving. We had never thought to look. We had never thought to dig. It had simply not occurred to us that a treasure might be less than an inch below our feet.
It was not without regret that we left a home we had never truly seen, never really been able to know as beautiful. Who among us considered the true potential of what is right within reach? The cushion of the familiar is usually good enough.
Last week, I walked out of the courtroom, frayed at the edges. My corners were beginning to tug away from the known, the bare underneath of me exposed. As raw as I felt, the experience was not as traumatizing as I expected it to be. The procedure of the divorce is an exercise required by the state. Tee and I have long since vacated the premises of the marriage. I have already begun to pull up and shake out the memories, the stains and glitter alike.
I may not be stripped down yet, but I am getting close. Without the name, the spouse, the soft layer of family that has absorbed the falls for the better part of the past decade, the very ground can feel uncertain. Too hard, perhaps, to cushion the blows. Or maybe not hard enough to hold me.
Despite the uncertain topography, I walked out with my paper and its Commonwealth seal feeling oddly calm. I have a sense that something extraordinary might really be under the surface of this life I have been living. If I can pierce through my own patterned ways, crack open the legacies I have handed myself through years of unquestioned approaches to things – to men, to work, to the very sense of what I might do with the time I have left on this earth – then I might uncover miles of lush, open terrain. A gleaming way, made for my very own feet.
Shannon E. Williams 