In graduate school, I wrote a short story about a old man with colitis. The only reason why was my professor challenged me to stop writing about love. She found my work cliché. (Though she was the same woman who wore a t-shirt that read, “Would you like fries with that?” to my Master’s defense, as cliché a joke about English degrees as there is.) But I didn’t love ugly truths then, so of course the story was about love, about an old man who rejected love because he couldn’t control his bowels. But I did give the man a dog, because otherwise he’d have had no one to commune with. Dogs think nothing of shit. In fact they seem to have an appreciation for all the meaning to be found in a pile dropped on the curbside. There is a lot of who’s, why’s and when’s to be learned from what is left behind. I thought I was edgy when I wrote about shit, but now that I know how it represents the very mundanity of life, not the extreme, it seems ridiculous to bring elimination to the page. And that’s the irony, certainly. I have a husband with blood cancer; chemo and a stem cell transplant aren’t terribly kind to his insides. I have a disabled son who is afraid of the toilet at age 10. So here is what I wonder: Is it my responsibility now to write here about loose stools and “BMs” and colonoscopies and Miralax and pull-ups in size Large and the guilt I feel when my friend takes my dog for a walk and he’s eaten something that doesn’t agree with him and they must wipe up the liquidy mess from the neighborhood lawns or park sidewalks? Will there be a reader who says, yes, my life is shitty too, in a similar way that you write it? Maybe. Now I think I wrote that story about the old man all wrong. Ridiculously, love is revealed when we agree to clean up after another living being’s literal or figurative shit, especially when you think you cannot bear it even one more time. Even when you gag and wonder what your life has come to, and how maybe you wanted a more elevated life, not one that reminds you, without consideration of your own desires, of the most base element of humanity besides death. Maybe Rosa, the old man’s love interest, had once been a nurse or a doctor, a mother, a veterinarian, and she wouldn’t have batted one of her false eyelashes at his trouble. But no, I didn’t even given her the chance to say yes to a man neurotic about his own shit. Instead, I’d wanted him lonely, alone except for his beagle. So he (or I?) couldn’t even ask someone to love him. Because I couldn’t imagine someone loving him, not if they had to discuss shit. But that is an obvious difference between true life and fiction: we are not asked about what we are willing to deal with, or what kind of life we will accept. We are presented with a thoroughly messy life, and the only choice we have is to keep picking up after ourselves and the ones we love with a fierce determination and a very short memory.
Tag: parenting
The Only Way Out is Through
I am finding joy
in the little things again.
A jar of spice,
that pungent powder,
from a specialty store,
two spry puppies rolling
in a social sparring,
a truffle of dark chocolate,
cool line of liquor
flooding my tongue.
I am finding joy
in his crooked finger
straining upward, pointing
to the waving leaves and limbs
of trees, to boats bobbing
in the lakefront marina,
to the eighteen-wheeler sliding
past us on the freeway,
to the wedge of toast hidden
beneath pale yellow eggs.
I am finding joy
not in the measurements
or accolades, nor the “whys?”
and wants, nor the precociousness
of a typical toddler.
I am finding joy in him,
he who deserves
to be celebrated
as a joy onto himself.
I am a Woman
If I were a man, maybe I’d be the kind of man who hits women, who snaps and shakes a baby, who drags his child by the arm across a parking lot. If I were a man, maybe I would have left my son by now. Dead-beat dad. No ties to bind. No evidence to cover up. No silvery stretched skin bearing the proof. Maybe I’d be the kind of man who leaves because staying means feeling, and feeling means staying.
My emotions come on too fast and strong. They gather in my chest like an itch. I feel a pillow over my face. A cover over my coffin. I feel the tingle of adrenaline in my hands and fingertips. I feel a punch in my fists. I want to lash out, just to slow everything down, quiet it all, perhaps shock myself into silence. I feel an urge in my thighs to stretch, expand, put miles between me and what I might have done if I’d stayed.
My love for Noah is combustible. Powder and strike. The intensity of my love threatens to stoke my gasoline-soaked heart into wild flames, and I want to beat it to the punch, fight and flight. But it’s no good. I am a woman. And I am his mother. Presence or absence could land the final blow, scrape against flint, phosphorus and sulfur smoke. I have no choice but to wrap my arms tightly around him, prevent the distance that allows for a leak of oxygen to snake in and fan my fears, and, against my better judgment, I stay.
Rough Drafts Only 