POSTCARD FROM NORTH CAROLINA
Last month, I watched a child I once bounced on my knee bounce a baby on his knee—while his three teenagers sang in harmony. There he was, holding his cousin’s baby, a twinkle in his eye. And I had one of those strange experiences of time when it stops behaving like a straight line. His parents, my elders, sat next to me.
We could see him as a red-headed baby, cooing. I could see the man entertaining his family. And I could see the little boy whose weight I remember in my arms, sweet and so rewarding to hold.
The same body? Of course not. The same person? Somehow yes.
And suddenly you’re looking at generations as something that moves through the body rather than simply through dates.
And underneath it: what does it mean to begin again when we carry so much of what came before?
The Jewish New Year arrives with a particular invitation: look back. What have you done? Where have you caused harm? What needs repair? What do you need to ask forgiveness for? What do you need to forgive?
And then: begin again.
I love that the Jewish year doesn't ask us to become new people. It asks us to turn. Toward what happened. Toward one another. Toward the places where we have missed the mark. Toward the possibility of repair.
Which feels particularly poignant to me this year, because time is doing what time does.
My son moved out three months ago.
Three months is nothing. Three months is an eternity.
I am learning the strange discipline of loving someone who is no longer in my house. I don't hear his enormous laugh filling up the space, or have his help with a heavy box. I want to know how he is. I want to know if he's lonely.
All those annoying car videos? I would love for him to interrupt me with one more.
I want, sometimes, to reach into his life and straighten the blankets.
And then, because apparently the universe enjoys a good plot twist, he moved back in.
So much for the clean lesson about letting go.
Now I am learning a different version of the same practice: loving someone who is very much in my house, while remembering that his life is still his own. There are blankets I am absolutely not supposed to straighten. There are conversations I am not going to force. There are moments when I have to remember that being his mother does not mean being his manager.
It is, frankly, stressful. Apparently, I am still practicing.
And I am trying to learn that this is not my job. I am still practicing.
Meanwhile, my own body is becoming increasingly uninterested in my plans for it. There is arthritis in my hip. My teeth are doing whatever teeth do when they have decided that fifty-nine years is plenty of time to have a career.
There are days when I feel like I am slowly decaying in public. I am trying to do it with some dignity. And a sense of humor.
I walk. I swim. I stretch. I go to acupuncture. I pay attention. I try not to make every ache into a catastrophe.
There will be no going back to the body I had at thirty-five. Or even forty-nine.
I admit that traveling with a walking stick earned me more tenderness from Delta Airlines than I expected, and I liked it.
The child becomes the father. The son leaves the house. The body changes. People we love become older versions of themselves, and so do we.
The year turns.
And we are asked, again, to begin. Not from scratch. From exactly where we are.
I find this both terrifying and beautiful.
Because if I am honest, I have spent a fair amount of my life trying to hold things together. People. Relationships. Organizations. Communities. Myself.
I am very good at noticing what needs to be done. I am very good at making a plan. Increasingly, I am interested in a different question:
What if the work is not to fix it?
What if sometimes it is to repair? To release? To stay close without taking over? To simply pay attention to what is actually happening, instead of trying to make it be something else?
We don't practice because we're bad at something. We practice because we're alive.
We practice not straightening the blankets.
We practice the walking stick, and the tenderness it earns us.
We practice apologizing, and letting people be disappointed in us anyway.
We practice missing the car videos more than we'd ever admit.
And every once in a while, we get to sit very still and watch a person we once held become someone who is holding someone else.
And remember: oh.
This is what time is doing.
It is carrying us all forward.
May this new year give us the courage to turn toward what needs turning toward. The humility to repair what we can. The wisdom to release what is no longer ours to hold. And enough tenderness to notice the baby on the knee.
Happy New Year.
Poem of the Month
On the birthday of the world
I begin to contemplate
what I have done and left
undone, but this year
not so much rebuilding
of my perennially damaged
psyche, shoring up eroding
friendships, digging out
stumps of old resentments
that refuse to rot on their own.
No, this year I want to call
myself to task for what
I have done and not done
for peace. How much have
I dared in opposition?
How much have I put
on the line for freedom?
For mine and others?
As these freedoms are pared,
sliced and diced, where
have I spoken out? Who
have I tried to move? In
this holy season, I stand
self-convicted of sloth
in a time when lies choke
the mind and rhetoric
bends reason to slithering
choking pythons. Here
I stand before the gates
opening, the fire dazzling
my eyes, and as I approach
what judges me, I judge
myself. Give me weapons
of minute destruction. Let
my words turn into sparks.
Copyright Credit: Marge Piercy, "The Birthday of the World" from The Crooked Inheritance.
Copyright © 2006 by Marge Piercy. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Source: The Crooked Inheritance (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)
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