The courage to reckon—and write about it

Slingshots, snow, and letting go.

Sparrow silhouettes at East Point Park, Scarborough, Ontario

I have a sunrise-mimicking alarm clock, a half-globe that gradually emits more and brighter light to wake you up. Instead of a squawking alarm, hopeful little forest birds sing from its speakers. It’s all quite gauzy and calm and Zen, designed to make you love mornings.

I usually roll over and smack the glowing semi-orb a half-dozen times, shutting up the songbirds like an 8-year-old menace wielding a slingshot.

A week before Thanksgiving, I rolled over to the sound of that sanguine chirping, to an artificial sun rising in my eyes—and to the caller I.D. on my phone scrolling a name that I had not seen in three years.

Mom & Dad, it said. Mom & Dad … Mom & Dad …

I froze. Some part of me debated for a second whether to answer that call. Someone is in the hospital, I thought. Someone is sick.

Someone needs me.

But that was the same thought I had the last time I picked up the phone when it displayed their name, in November 2021, and it had been a mistake to answer then. It ended with my excommunication.

Worse than that, it burned a heightened response signal in my body: If I encounter someone with a similar voice and tone or overhear cruelty around me—in a grocery store or on the news—my heart races, and my head scrambles, and there I am again: Listening to all the ways my mother believed I’d fallen short as a human being.

This time, I let the phone ring.

Mom & Dad … Mom & Dad … Mom & Dad.

After a few minutes, the scrolling stopped. Then it started up on the other nightstand. I did not listen to any of the seven voicemails left on my device, nor the ones left on our home phone (yeah, we still have one of those), nor the ones left on Randy’s. I did not need to—and for my own preservation, I did not want to. I heard the highlights from his voicemail as he walked from the bedroom to his closet and back into the bathroom, my mother’s familiar voice coming and going like a clanging fire alarm, asking me to choose once more: fight or flight?

Terrible person … tell your wife … coward.

I got the gist. She had discovered this site, the place where I am currently doing the thing I do and have always done, only with more honesty and authenticity than I have ever allowed myself.

I am writing.

This cannot be a shock.

I am not a chef, an engineer, a dentist, a decorator, a programmer, a teacher, a builder, a farmer, an organizer, an athlete, a scientist, a therapist, a politician, or a professor. As far as I know, as far as I have ever known, I do this one thing well. I have only ever done this one thing well.

I write.

And I guess that’s the problem, the reason for the voicemails. I have written magazine profiles long enough to understand the difference between a cheap portrait and a careful rendering of humanity. The stories on this site have been written with searching, longing, sadness, grief, pain, gratitude, joy, hope, and, above all, affection for who and what remains. They have shown, I hope, the pointillism that reflects most lives.

I daresay they were written with courage, not cowardice. Not because I’m taking on my family’s dysfunction but because every time I publish here, I’m challenging myself within it. How has it affected the way I care for and relate to others? The way I parent? The way I love? The way I make mistakes, make mirth, make meaning, make space? The way I grow?

Where am I headed with my “one wild and precious life?”

Well, that’s the question, isn’t it?

Three weeks ago, I fought my impulse to disappear from these pages. Tall, dark, anomalous columns rising on the bar graph of my Substack site visits during the third week of November—the evidence of what I suppose I should call hate views—made it difficult to open my publisher’s dashboard for Other People’s Parents. Those metrics, which I generally abhor, threatened to eclipse all the good that has come from this endeavor this year.

Fight or flight? I wanted to choose the latter: to sit on my couch and rewatch the last 20 minutes of the “Ice Chips” episode of The Bear (wrenchingly honest mother-daughter scenes I would give my right arm to experience in real life), play a bunch of solitaire, eat peanut M&Ms, and give in to my old habit of running away.

And I did. For a day or so.

But soon, I sat in a rented house in Toronto instead, not running away so much as being away. Thinking. Grounding myself. Asking myself what needed to happen next. After three years of spending this magnified family holiday alone, the four of us (five, including Luna) decided to take American Thanksgiving north to spend it with Randy’s family.

That week, I discovered a devastating poem by Eugenia Leigh and watched her present it in a virtual class. I discovered a gorgeous song by Canadian artist Jennifer Castle called “Blowing Kisses” that echoed through my head daily. I bought books. I stretched. I breathed in. I breathed out.

I didn’t write a word of my own. I just curled up inside the life and art and song of someone else’s space.

On the night of our Thanksgiving dinner, I stepped out on the back deck in the starless cold with Luna and stayed longer than necessary in that stillness, noting what I could see and what I could feel. The bright lights of our borrowed home shined on the 16 members of my husband’s family inside. He seemed pleased. My children looked loved, needed, wanted—everything I’d hoped. My brother-in-law was teaching Kris how to make martinis for the crowd, both of them laughing. My sister-in-law somehow managed to pull together activities that engaged “kids” from age 17 to 24, young adults who once wore tiny tuxedoes and floofy dresses to our wedding, who once spun with our children on a merry-go-round, small bodies holding on tight for what came next.

All I really needed to do, besides leave one dish in the oven to burn—and don’t worry, I did—was take it all in.

The next day, snow came down in small, frozen bits of confetti at first and later in large, sparkling pieces that looked like works of art. It was a light dusting, but it mattered. I rarely see snow where I live now, but in my childhood winters in West Virginia, it was a given. I stood and watched it fall on the blue spruce, on a Buddha statue, on Luna. Time slowed.

I realized that I needed to slow down, too.

When you begin to reckon with an ancient and persistent injury to your self-worth, when you finally locate the origin of the hurt, you begin to replay all the moments in your life that have been affected by it. You convince yourself that you could have done more, been better, or loved bigger if only things had been different. You could have stayed; you could have gone. You could have climbed; you could have flown. You could have believed you were good. You could have sworn that you were.

You spend a lot of time tinkering with recalcitrant shadows.

But what if, you know, you always were good enough, even when you didn’t have the answers you needed?

What if this myopic sentence that you typed earlier in this post is the real slingshot on your self-worth: As far as I know, as far as I have ever known, I do this one thing well. I have only ever done this one thing well.

What if you just need a different idea of flight?

Five minutes from the home we borrowed in Toronto, there is a bird sanctuary that acts as a migratory staging area for Monarch butterflies and more than 178 species of birds. They rest, they eat, they stay a little while before they get on with their journey. A local architecture studio designed a small bird-watching shelter for the sanctuary from weathering steel, and the scientific and English names of the park’s feathered visitors are etched on its surface.

Part of their story is written. Part of it is still to come. No one is wielding slingshots at them just for being birds and butterflies in this space—least of all themselves.

In the next week and a half or so, I’ll publish the last Intrepid Post of the year—about running away, about who you might have become if you lived elsewhere. Sometime after that, I’ll end 2024 with some acknowledgments. And then, I’ll be away from this newsletter until February to take time for creative writing, submissions, pairing the socks in my laundry room, and planning that memoir I keep avoiding.

(If you are a paid subscriber, you’ll hear from me sporadically in January with pieces I published elsewhere this year— narrative poems and a short story, with some additional notes about them.)

When I return, this newsletter will look different by necessity. I’ll be retooling it to ward off burnout, publishing around twice a month. I am awed by those on Substack who can produce so much content, but that’s not how my life works, and it’s not how I work. (I don’t even like the word “content.”) The fact is, I work slowly and think better when I give myself more time to do so.

I work better, frankly, when I know all the socks in my life are paired.

See you soon, friends. ♣

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