Mistaken for a Flowing Spring
Words and water and the gift of receiving
Y’all, I’m not working on any more novel-length story cycles just now, but I am getting back to a weekly schedule with the essays and short stories and whimsey. It’s just harder because I’m working with a new set of constraints:
Tell the truth.
Do good. (Or at least, Do no harm.)
What that will look like, I don’t know. While I think of myself as a milquetoast lady writer, I’ve had people tell me my posts are so violent they’re hard to read. That’s fine if it’s necessary, but is it ever necessary? I suppose we’ll find out how I answer that question when I run up against a test case. Meanwhile, you’ll probably still find shards of brutal writing here, buried in the shadows under the peonies. But I hope there are more peonies, less broken glass. What you won’t find, I hope, are cheap effects — shock-value descriptions, irony.
In other news, and perhaps related, I’ve left my day job to go back to college. Enough of the shifting sands of the knowledge economy and the laptop class — I’m learning a TRADE. I’m going to be a physical therapy assistant. Huzzah! Thinking about movement … helping people move .. talking with people about movement … for ever and ever. Life is preparing me for my new challenge by giving me dance classes to teach. On a couple of classes a week, student loans, and these writings I’m holding body and soul together.
If you feel like supporting my quest — or if you just like these essays and tales — please consider a paid subscription.
Here’s a short essay I developed — as I did my earliest essays on Substack — from a Facebook post.
When I was three years old, my mother read me “The Little Mermaid.” I then wanted to write a story about a mermaid. But at three, I didn’t know how to spell many words. I could read plenty of words and I could write my letters, but writing out more than my name and perhaps “I love Mommy” was beyond me.
So my mother created me a glossary populated with words I could use for my story. I remember “rocks,” “waves,” and “fish” were part of the glossary. In place of a definition, my mother drew a little picture beside each word so I would know what it said. With my glossary beside me, I wrote a story about a mermaid.
My mother has the story in a box somewhere. It’s about three kindergarten tablet-pages long. I don’t remember what happens in the story, but I remember waiting eagerly — probably clinging to my mother and pestering her — while my glossary was being written. Both then and now, the glossary impressed me much more than my own creation. Then because it was a word-hoard, my very own word-hoard, filled with words and pictures, enough to construct a world. Now because it was a gift, one that took time and craft, one that was beautiful and useful.
My mother was fully present for me, so much so that I never realized, maybe, what a greedy little girl I was — greedy for her time and her gifts. I imagined that her words, stories, glossaries, drawings, crafts, projects, all, all of them just flowed out of her naturally as a spring rises from a rock.
And yet, you know, in a way I wasn’t wrong. There was a time when women surrendered more or less completely to their families and it was considered fulfillment, not oppression. And receiving with thanks but without guilt is an underrated gift.
Occasionally, people have given me that gift, the singular gift of receiving.
From the time they could trot along beside me, I used to go for long evening-time walks with my sons and tell them stories. They generally had lead roles as goblins or Transformers or superheroes locked in combat with the fiercest of enemies. (The youngest liked fighting zombies best.) Gradually, my sons began participating in their stories, then easing my contribution to a slim supporting role, then spinning tales for me instead. Then they took the stories away, online, maybe, or somewhere off out of mind.
They are hesitant to ask too much of my time nowadays. I think they realize how little time I’ve always had, how fragmented it’s all been. I think they — and many young folks today — are more mindful and considerate than I ever was, that greedy little girl who thought her mother lived only to make her cookies and glossaries and a full set of Barbie-doll sized costumes for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
I’m not sure how to tell them all this, because two of them live in New York and a third one has a wife and a job with lots of overtime and a long-running World of Warcraft game to occupy his time, and anyhow I don’t want to be a burden on them, but I miss being present like that. I miss being taken for granted. I miss people mistaking me for a flowing spring.
Last week I filled in to teach a ballet class. I think the little girls were about 11 years old. They were dancing cautiously, as if wary of extending their limbs too far and being caught out doing something wrong. I wanted to tell them everything I felt about dance, all of it, all, how if they left off fear and lifted up their hearts then body and spirit would soar together. I did not tell them any such inane thing, of course, but I probably gave them about 20 too many metaphors for extending, unfurling, inhabiting space with confidence and moving with amplitude.
Poor kids. They were probably terrified.
How should I pull these fragments together, do you think? How can I explain the way realms flow out of us sometimes, the ways we create this world and imaginary worlds for our children?
“I don’t like to ask for that,” my beloved used to tell me sometimes, or “You shouldn’t have to do that for me.” And of a story I wrote him, with chagrin, “People will think I’m a narcissist.” Then he added, urgently as if I might start deleting the files then and there, “But don’t take it down. Leave it posted. You have to leave it posted, even so.”
Like my sons, he’s mindful and wary of taking advantage of me or pressing his own cause too much.
Yes, beloved, I’m only a human woman, but if I could be the rainy heavens I’d fill your reflecting pool over and over so you could always see your grave, serene image looking back at you. There’s no harm in that image, beloved, any more than there’s harm in a little girl once thinking her own sweet will was Heaven’s will.
Your life is hard enough, God knows, but in the quiet margins I’d like to create you a world where you could ask and receive without self-consciousness, confident that any request would be welcome whether or not it could be met.
My mother is making a felt book for my niece, who turns two this month. Each page features a different story, different animations for little fingers to manipulate. There are zippers to zip, buttons to button, ribbons to tie. On one page, a spider’s eyes move to follow a fly when tiny hands make the creature buzz along its path. On another spread, children at a campsite cook hotdogs. Unzip their red tent and open the flap and you find a real dog with a hotdog in his mouth.
The book keeps growing. Still unassembled, the stack of felt pages towers thick as a medieval pulpit Bible. My mother’s starting to store the extra pages in a second box.
Like a mermaid plunging towards her treasure-hoard, Little Niece will dive again and again into her book, discovering each time some new delight.
I’m thinking this morning about the girl ballet dancers and that fear of extending their bodies into space that you wrote about so beautifully here. It reminds me of the first time I went skiing. Letting go of my fear and soaring down that mountain.