For the last five years, I have been writing. I was writing about menopause and the unraveling of my brain. I was doing field notes from inside the unravel – pulling at threads, finding patterns, asking questions, excavating. I was falling apart and capturing it on paper.
It was all coming out like a memoir, but who would want to read a memoir from an unknown? Famous people write memoirs.
There were 60,000 words and I scrapped everything in January when a poem about my mother came tumbling out with urgency. The problem I needed to solve was how to love my mother. The urgency in the floorboards was that my dad was dying and we didn’t know it. We didn’t know how fast it would happen. With him gone, she would have me as her closest relative and she and I have been at each other’s throats all our lives.
She would see it differently. She would say she has loved me fiercely my whole life. I would say she has wanted to control me my whole life. She made me cringe. My shoulders would rise up and hover around my ears. I love my dad. I couldn’t be the one caring for his bride of 62 years and be so easily triggered by her. I needed to understand my mother.
From January to March, I wrote in every spare minute I had – up before work, late at night, on the side of the road, in parking lots of hospitals and the Assisted Living. When first mom took a turn for the worse and was in the hospital, and then when dad took a big turn while she was there and got put on hospice – I was dictating poems into my phone while driving.
So much work had already been done in that 60,000 words. I’d learned where my rebel moniker came from, what it meant, and who I really am. I’m the curious one, the poet, the one with my head in the clouds, the one who sees things, and asks questions. That’s all.
And I got to see misunderstandings and missed opportunities for understanding, and I got to see the beauty of my childhood, the lovely and the wondrous. I got to revel in the woodlands of Narnia that were a huge part of my growing up. I got to see my mom through a grown-up mother’s eyes. I don’t want my kids rolling their eyes at me. I don’t want to be rolling my eyes at her.
We have so much in common, my mom and I. In the last couple of months, after dad has been gone, she and I are alone here, and we’re having fun. We’re picking out pictures in the clouds on the way places, we’re playing games, and howling at the moon, and coloring. I’m seeing her strength and her character in ways I never have. New little similarities between us pop up all the time, and instead of being chagrined, I am excited – another thing I have in common with my mom.
I intended to learn to love my mom better, and training my poet eyes and poet heart on her did exactly that – it helped me see her more lovely and complicated and interesting. Multi-faceted, sparkling and wondrous.
We are in a new season, where doctors are telling us she needs me more. She doesn’t want to need anyone, so some spicy is coming up again, some fierce independence that gets in the way of safety, some “I can do it myself” toddler behavior from an 85 year old woman – as it happens, and I get to learn even more how to love her through this.
