The Common Good podcast is a conversation about the significance of place, eliminating economic isolation and the structure of belonging. Your host is Rabbi Miriam Terlinchamp. In this episode, Joey Taylor and Miriam speak with Maggie Smith about her new book, You Could Make This Place Beautiful.
Maggie read the following poems or excerpts:
Musical Excerpt was Harness Your Hopes - B-side by Pavement
She also has a children's book you can preorder now called My Thoughts Have Wings.
This episode was produced by Joey Taylor and the music is from Jeff Gorman. You can find more information about the Common Good Collective here. Common Good Podcast is a production of Bespoken Live & Common Change - Eliminating Personal Economic Isolation.
The Common Good podcast is a conversation about the significance of place, eliminating economic isolation and the structure of belonging. Your host is Rabbi Miriam Terlinchamp. In this episode, Joey Taylor and Miriam speak with Maggie Smith about her new book, You Could Make This Place Beautiful.
Maggie read the following poems or excerpts:
Musical Excerpt was Harness Your Hopes - B-side by Pavement
She also has a children's book you can preorder now called My Thoughts Have Wings.
This episode was produced by Joey Taylor and the music is from Jeff Gorman. You can find more information about the Common Good Collective here. Common Good Podcast is a production of Bespoken Live & Common Change - Eliminating Personal Economic Isolation.
They look like gifts a crow might bring a human girl, desperate to impress her. In the left pocket of my thrifted emerald coat, a scuffed acorn, a glassy black stone, one pink Mr. Potato Head ear. When I touch them, I can believe almost anything. Who's to say they can't keep me safe? Who's to say a bird can't court someone's daughter? But in this life, it's my son who shows his love like a creature that clever. Leaving treasures for my fingers to worry against. I carry them like anything I love, Until they warm in my palm, Until I believe. Walking alone at night, The sky feathered blue black, And slowly folding over me, I pocket my left hand, And and tell myself a story about my life, a story I call talisman, a story that might end well if I tell it right.
Thanks so much for sharing that with us. We spent some time most recently with your memoir. There's a lot going on here, I think intersects with the poem that you just read, especially around choice and the way that you tell your story. it just really struck me that you were so explicit about not telling anybody else's story but your own, you're not telling your ex husband's story, you're not telling your kid's story, you're telling your story, and you say something about it.
And you're also not telling the future Maggie's story.
That's, that's a thing too. I mean, I think every book in a way and every individual poem is sort of a time capsule, and it's almost like a nested time capsule within a time capsule. I'm going to get very meta here, because it's not just telling the story of a specific time, it's telling the story of your thinking at the moment of writing it, of that specific time. So it's also a time capsule of your Thinking and articulation and processing of that event. And while the event itself will not change, you know, in 10 years, everything that quote unquote happened, the plot, say, of the life or the memoir will still be fixed, right? All those things happened. My thinking and therefore articulation of those things could be different in 10 years. And in some ways, I hope they are. I mean, we want things to hurt less and make more sense over time, don't we?
Yeah, absolutely. This theme of being able to make choices and tell your story the way that you intend to, for us is an active agency, it's an active finding your, your own power, I heard somebody say you can't change what happened, but you can change your relationship to happening. And so I don't know, maybe talk a little bit about that.
Yeah. Or you can't change what happened, but you can change how you respond, react, process. Don't respond. Don't react. I think that's absolutely true. I mean, everyone listening to this has had something happen to them that they wish hadn't, the end of a relationship, an illness, a diagnosis, a lost job, something that they thought was going to come to fruition that did not. And I think in the moment you have a period of time where you're Understandably angry and frustrated and disappointed and maybe there's a little period of wallowing for lack of a better word. And I think that's important. I don't think that we should have to snap immediately into well, this was probably for the best. thAt might be what we call toxic positivity, right? Like, everything happens for a reason, or this is probably part of my life plan. It's like, no, I don't think you getting cancer was part of your life plan. No, I don't think your marriage falling apart was part of your life plan. So if you can just accept that some bad things happen and that that's what it is to live a human life. Then what is the best thing you can do if you can't change it. And for me, it's been writing. And, and, and yoga and therapy and listening to music and taking walks and having fun with my kids. I mean, I can't intellectualize myself out of grieving things by writing on the page all the time, as I'm constantly reminded by my very kind therapist but for me writing and having that sense of agency and being able to take an experience that feels sort of amorphous and swirling in my own mind, and in that way kind of unmanageable and unwieldy, and if I can take it and give it form, whether it's a poem or a memoir Or even a newsletter posting. If I can take something that is living in me in a sort of chaotic form and give it a form outside of my body and share it with other people and then begin to have a kind of correspondence or connection or sense of community with other people around that happening and that processing, that's been incredibly Powerful, I think. And it is about agency. I think you're right.
One thing that I appreciate about your writing, especially in this book, is that you are Expressing your own agency by giving it form and you're leaving it open, it's not an absolute. And now the story is complete. Now the story is finished. Let me tell you the moral of the story. So that still stays open. You still are allowing your agency to continue into the future by letting it be, moldable. Is that strike you as true?
Yeah, I mean, I, I I think the tricky thing about, maybe about memoir in particular is The book has to end, but the life doesn't. At least not yet, if we're lucky, right? So the book ends, but the life continues. And so, really, anything, it's almost like splicing bit of film strip. Like anything you're writing about, if you're writing about your life, you're really just taking a portion. It begins somewhere in the middle and it ends somewhere just later. In the middle. But there's a bunch of stuff even as I was turning in this book, even as I was copy editing this book, even as I was on book tour with this book, this very story was still continuing to shape and change and morph and become something else that made me think, gosh, am I going to have to write about this again? Because the story doesn't end. It's just, you know, the book isn't a magical thing that can constantly update itself according to the life of the writer. It has to end somewhere. Thank goodness. And so it's between two covers as complete a whole as I could make at the time, based on what I knew and was feeling. And yet, man, a lot has happened since I turned in that book, two years ago.
And I was thinking about that as I listened to your book because I wanted to hear it in your voice. And two examples you use is like bad stuff that could happen are true for cancer and a broken marriage. And that two of us are sitting here with that same truth. And there's moments of that book where I felt like a breach or an amen, which I'm sure many people have said to you as they've interviewed you. But I was curious how it felt to tour with this book knowing that the story was emergent and knowing that it's part of, at least my wisdom tradition, ancestral tradition, you know, the Israelites flee Egypt, they go through this breaking, this change of who they are, they imagine there's a change in the future, and where do they land for most of the context of that wisdom tradition? In wilderness, in a place of unknowing. And, I think the Israelites in those stories are constantly evolving in their story, but also finding talismans along the way. So I I'm curious as it was emerging, and you were telling the story as it was changing, even though there's a fixed one, was there a talisman or some kind of guide that helped you in the wilderness of the next story that's emerging from you as part of this?
Oh, that's a great question. I don't think of people necessarily as, as talisman, but I leaned on my community a lot. I will say that. I mean, touring, you asked what was touring for this book like? Because it is so vulnerable and I had a lot of trepidation, frankly, about publishing this book. I mean, it's one thing to write it, it's another thing to hand it over and surprisingly it was Maybe even harder for me to know I was handing it over to people who knew me as it was to hand it over to perfect strangers. There are plenty of people who know me, who I'm friends with, even people in my own family, who didn't know what my interior world looked like during those years because I... smiled a lot. And can make pretty great self deprecating terrible gallows humor jokes even when things are really, really bad. And one of the first responses I got from just even the rough draft that I sent my parents was my dad reaching out to me. And he said, first of all, I couldn't put it down. And I thought, well, that's funny you, it's not like a page turner, like, you know, what happens? Um, you got spoilers galore because you're my dad. But he said something that I have just not been able to get out of my head, which is, I didn't know how much pain you were in. And I thought, I have Sunday dinner with my family every Sunday. They saw me through all of this. They babysat my kids when I had to be in court. they, I thought, knew. And then, of course, I was like, no. Because I wasn't talking about any of this, especially with my kids present. And, I unloaded a lot more on my mother than I did on my father for probably obvious reasons. And so even people who knew me were in some cases surprised by some of the happenings, but also just how hard It was that it didn't quite show on the surface all the time, kind of like that image of the swan or the duck that looks like it's kind of serenely floating on a pond because you're not looking at how fast its little feet are paddling under the water and so the touring with this book was really challenging and frankly you know, you brought up boundaries. It was really hard for the first like 48 hours when I hadn't figured out quite how to talk about this book in public and how not to feel like I was at the mercy of others. Like, they're going to ask me questions I don't want to answer, what do I do? Or people are going to bring up things I just don't want to talk about, which should be obvious because I didn't talk about it in the book. aNd so I had to kind of come up with a system for myself in the middle of book tour. Like I'm going to actually have a frank conversation with these audiences at the very beginning of these events where I say, I'm going to give you everything that I can. I'm here with you. We're all holding space together. I'm happy to answer your questions at the end of this, but you're going to have enough sense not to ask me about X, Y, or Z. Because if you've read this book, you know, I'm not going to talk about those things. And let's just spare ourselves an awkward moment at the end of this. And at first I thought, oh, I've scared them now. Like, no one's going to raise their hands because they're going to be afraid of being chastised by the poet. And it didn't have an effect like that at all. People were really respectful and asked a lot of great craft questions about the building of the thing, which I am always so Excited to talk about as a writer, like, how did you make it? and so I had to teach myself and then teach the reader or the audience member how to be in the room with me. And then it got a lot easier
There's this image from the book that I have stuck in my head and it's of you on Christmas morning, eating orange cake by the hand. And you know, like. not all of us, people who are listening, all of us in this conversation even our published authors, poets, and you have a structure for yourself to write through the shit that's happened in your life, but also to invite other people to come alongside you through this writing and publishing process. So I wonder as you think about your own self made structure for inviting community to come alongside and offer you cake or to engage with you in appropriate ways at a reading, do you have any advice on how the people who are listening can create structures for themselves of community and belonging like that?
I honestly feel like I've lucked into a lot of my sense of structure and community in large part by staying put. I Have stayed put in ways that most people I know have not stayed put. I still live within 20 minutes of my home that I grew up in as a child. I eat meals there once a week with my entire family and there are 13 of us and my mom cooks every week. I stayed in the house that my ex husband and I bought, almost 14 years ago, and I'm still living here now with my kids in the same neighborhood where I still, when an appliance breaks, count on my neighbors, who some of them have been friends of mine for 25 years, I haul my wet laundry over there to their dryer when my dryer's broken, or I borrow their lawnmower, whatever the case may be, and I I don't think that the fact that I have all of these long, deep friendships or people who will bring me cake if they see me running by because they know I'm probably sad or people who drop things off at my house or check in on me. I don't think it's because I'm an amazing human being. I think it's because I've stayed put, and we do these things for each other. And I honestly think a lot of times, I don't know how I would fare if I had picked up and moved, or if my ex husband's job had taken us to a different city or state all these years ago, and then when things inevitably fell apart, I was living far from my circle of, people. And so, I guess I'm making a case for blooming where you're planted. And I feel like in visiting high schools a lot lately for this Wexner Center project, I've been talking a lot to high school kids in Ohio about just that. That art gets made here. And if you want to leave the state, go, if you want to go have a wild adventure, like go have an adventure. I really thought I would, it didn't end up happening for me. Maybe it'll be my next act once the kids are out of school. But I also think it's important for young people, especially in the Midwest or in places that don't feel like arts hubs or particularly sexy, cosmopolitan places, to be told that you can make your art and live your life and it can be beautiful and varied and exciting. And it doesn't even have to look like your parents life, even if you live within 20 minutes of them. And that staying put will afford you a lot of security that you won't have on the road in the wind.
I'm so curious because I feel like you and I have different orientations to that statement. Joey has stayed in place in Ohio and I came here for just like a few years and now I'm a decade and a half in and I have found coming from a coast that The need to create neighborliness or find your people is true no matter where you are and it is possible in all these places. It's possible sitting next to someone in a plane when it starts to shake and just like the humanity of the person next to you just shines through in moments of extremism. I You know, When I lived in Seattle, everyone felt cool and in Ohio, nobody feels cool. And yet when you find somebody who you're connected, you have to invest in them. Like you have to be like, we need to be friends and we need to be people and we need to be family to each other. And that family can be co created in all kinds of contexts. I don't know. Family. Do you feel the same way?
Yeah. I was thinking, there's some really obvious things here, like you choose how you tell your story, you choose how you live your life, turns out you can make this place beautiful, right? so there's some really obvious threads that are running through. I mean, a part of my story was I went away, I lived abroad and I did that whole wanderlust thing and it wasn't meaningless, but the significance of my life is now so rooted in this place. It's so rooted in this friendship and the particularity of where I live now. And I don't see how I could live another way now.
I'm wondering also too, if trauma or conflict or pain, whether it's experienced by the entire world, like COVID or specific to a family unit, like an illness or a marriage breaking, that, You land up deciding something beyond the identity politics of the time. Like, I'm a Jewish person and Joey is not. aNd yet when I think about what does it mean to make Shabbat now, if I'm not in a congregation or that I've changed who I am. And then to realize as I'm counting on my fingers who would be there. It actually has nothing to do with what sort of we're ascribing to in a holistic way. It's like how the personal is connected. And that's. been a total surprise to me. So I'm curious, is that also how you've chosen your people? Is that also been a way, or it's truly is the specific neighborhood
I think it's a mix. I mean, a lot of the people I'm close to live in my neighborhood because I met them through my children. Like how do adults make friends? It's so tricky. When you're in college, you make friends in your dorm and you make friends in class and at parties and then you get out and you're in the wide world. For me, I work from home, so I don't have a workplace. I'm not meeting people at work. The only person I meet every day at work is my dog. So, it can be really isolating to write here alone every day. So meeting people who are other parents in the neighborhood by showing up the kindergarten fundraiser or volunteering in their classroom or just during drop off, you see somebody wearing a band t shirt and you're like, Oh, you like pavement. Oh, you're my people, I agree, though. I think as adults, when you find your people, you hold on to them in a way you probably wouldn't have when you were 15, because when you're 15, you think you will have an infinite amount of time, and that you will be able to make connections with an infinite number of people throughout your life. And I think you get to be 46 and you're like, Oh, actually, not everyone thinks the way I do about things. Not everyone appreciates my sense of humor. Not everybody wants to watch what I want to watch or go do what I want to go do. And so if I find people, and frankly, being around them is easy and feels comfortable that sense of chosen family, whether it's like place adjacent or because we're all poets and we show up at the same readings every month, maybe we don't see each other that often, but it's not nothing. I mean, sometimes it's just a group text because that's what adult friendship looks like sometimes when we can't always be together, You know, someone asked me recently, why are you still in Ohio, and I was like, well, the obvious answer is my kids are in a school system that I'm committed to keep them in until they're done. And then my life is my own in a way that it's not now, and I can make a different decision if I choose to. But really, it has nothing to do with the place and has everything to do with the people. And if everybody I loved all picked up and moved someplace else, I would probably go there.
I wanna dig into this kids' neighbor's energy, especially that first Christmas and the natural sort of common good that was happening in the neighborhood, but I think And You have this way of taking the mundane, which by that I mean the specific or the particular, and making it universalized somehow, like your repetitive energy around laundry, which I'm like, yes, it's all about that laundry. And there is something about the fact that it never ends and it's like just the weight of it all. And one of my sleeper favorite poems of yours is Rose has hands.
My phone doesn't observe the high holidays, auto correcting Shana Tova to Shaman Tobacco, Rosh Hashanah to Rose Has Hands, apples and honey for a sweet new year or apples and honestly or news and years, always more than one. Yesterday my daughter asked, out of what felt like nowhere, but must be a real place inside her. When people kidnap kids, do they kill them? Why would someone kill a kid? When I texted my husband this, my phone corrected kill to Killarney, kid to kids. We have two. My phone suggests their names, suggests what the duck, suggests news, years, and honestly, what truth can I tell her? I don't ducking understand. I don't understand ducking any of it.
Maggie, we have used your poetry as prayer. We have used it as code between friends. We have used it in the podcast, in our writings. And this poem, I always wanted to use in a religious context that I was just like, how do I say this in this way? I but the poem that so many people found you through was Good bones.
I also feel like to enter the world in this way that say, but I keep this for my children and then sort of enter into the place of questioning of my kids are going to ask these questions anyways. And the answer is like, I don't ducking understand it. And, and I'm curious in the world climate that we're in. The divisions that we're seeing just exponentially grow beyond even the moment of conflict in the Middle East, but how do you navigate this questioning, this growing with family, and really our wisdom not really necessarily changing, or maybe it does change for you and I'm... Sitting here feeling like I just know less now.
You know, I think when I first had kids. I Thought maybe I can pretend to be a wise oracle and I'll almost kind of cosplay parenting, like in my real life. I have no idea what's going on any of the time. I can't do algebra. I don't really understand how television works. There are so many things. There's a long, long list of things I don't really understand and I'm not qualified to speak on, but as a parent, I need to set all of that unknowing aside because I am their tour guide in the world, and nobody wants a tour guide who's like, okay, Aside, I went to the Wilds in Ohio, you know, that place that's like a safari, as a gift for my father, don't ask, I don't know why he wanted to go do this, but all of us went, and we had a tour guide on her first day, and she didn't know what any of the animals were, and couldn't get the gates to open with the little remote control, and it was an absolute shitshow, and I just feel like no child wants a parent that is a poor tour guide. And when they're like, what's that? You're like, I don't know. Like, that does not inspire confidence. You want to believe the pilot of the plane knows how to fly the plane. You want to believe that the tour guide at the safari knows the difference between animal A and animal B. And so I kind of went into this early parenting thing, like, well, I'm just gonna have to kind of fake it a little bit. And I, I grew away from that really quickly, because it felt dishonest. And I thought, maybe the best answer, really, for almost any question my kids have Is I don't know, what do you think and so that is more my approach to parenting than anything and it I would have thought that it would make me feel inadequate. And like I'm not really at the helm of the boat or something, but it actually just feels deeply honest. When they have a question about whether it's something terrible that's going on in the world, or just something really basic, like how do you multiply fractions? I can't answer any of that for them. And often I'll say things like, I know a lot about a few very specific things. And this is not one of them. And so we can go ask Alexa. We can look it up. We can talk our way through it. It may be that there is an answer that I don't have. Or it may be, in the case of so many things that they have questions about, there isn't, in fact. It's sort of like multiple choice, and all of them are partially valid, and they have to find their way to the answer that just sits and feels like it's the right shape for their belly where it has to rest. And the answer that feels right in their body may not be the answer that feels right in mine or in their sister's or in their dad's or in my mother's or whatever. And that that's okay. And so I think when we don't sort of treat our kids as receptacles of information or knowledge, we're giving them agency to figure things out for themselves. Maybe scary, that is. I think it is also empowering to be like, Oh, I get to make my own way. Like, maybe there's not a right answer. Maybe the way that my mom lives her life isn't the way. Maybe the way that my grandparents... Raised their kids isn't the way, maybe there are different ways to work and live and move in the world and they just have to kind of figure it out for themselves. So I've gotten really comfortable with ambiguity and in some ways ambivalence. And what has happened is we have great conversations, because then I get to hear instead of just accepting what I tell them. And then shutting it down, I get to hear kind of what they're grappling with, which is much more interesting to me than what I have to say about it.
Yeah, I, it feels like there's a context that that question can come within, you can't just ask anybody within any context, I don't know, what do you think? But in the context of your relationship with your kids, where... You made an intentional decision to you say something like love you in a boring way and stay here, right? Just keep doing the thing like I interpret that as them having a sense of stability and certainty with you. And so that allows for then some exploration, some agency, some working it out for themselves.
I think that's right. Yeah. I mean, someone who said to me years ago, parents are sort of like a gas station and the gas station doesn't follow the car. The gas station stays put in the car goes to the gas station when it needs something. And I do think of myself in that way. My kids always know where to find me if they need me. I'm here but I actually don't sort of chase them around or I do my best not to like I want them to have their own life, their own friends, their own stuff,
it feels like the place conversation to me, like the parent becomes the neighborhood. Yeah, you know, it will change and grow and be there and it's just painfully human as part of it, that I found really resonant is the way that you talked about you could start your story at any given place. And it would shape a different one and. I think one of the true artistic flows that you have in this particular book is that you start each time, like in this chapter and this one, it has its own thing. And I, I think about that in my own life. I could talk about where this part of me began or that part of me began, but there's always another way to see it, an inkling sort of coming to us. And I think it's a skill to say you're sort of always remembering who you were and finding that. And I'm curious about telling those stories from different places. is it unlocking you when you start from a new place? I've always told it this way, and now I'm going to tell it that way.
I love that, like the shift in perspective, sometimes even just writing a poem, I will feel or think differently about the topic if I shift it from first person to third person, or if I shift it from present tense to past tense, or if I decide actually I don't really want to tell this story so close to the bone, I'm going to the end. Sort of cloak it in myth, like, well, what if this is happening to Penelope and not to me, or what if this is happening to the grandmother in Ride Riding Hood and not to me? And so, just as a writer and as a person, those shifts in perspective always sort of like crack open some kind of new seeing for me. The thing about writing it was not therapeutic, but it was the most deeply contextualizing writing project I've ever undertaken. Because I've never written a book of poems. I just write one poem at a time, and then after a certain number of years, I realize, oh, I think I have enough. Let's see what I've got. And then I find the poem in the stack. I basically am carving away everything that doesn't belong in that book, and I find the book that I've been unwittingly writing for years. Poem after poem, but there's no project, right? And so the memoir was different because I knew it was a contained project. I had a deadline. I had a year to write it. I got up every day and sort of like went off, clocked in at my desk and sort of undertook this big project. And I didn't have any idea really, when I started, how different pieces of my life were connected, or different times of my life were connected, or how X relationship actually had echoes in it of Y relationship, and I think it's because I never had the occasion or opportunity to sort of step back from the painting that I had been painting for my nose an inch from the canvas. And when you step back, you're like, Oh, that's the shape of the thing. That's how these things are related. That in my childhood or my teen years was a seed for this pattern of behavior that Thing that happened in my career. I had no idea because we don't have the benefit necessarily of foreshadowing in life as we do in books and film, like, oh, that was where things started to kind of like pull apart at the seams, despite it not being therapeutic, it was helpful to be able to sort of step back and see the shape of my life in a new way, and I was still making connections very late in the game, there's a point in the writing and publishing process where they really just want you to be making Corrections that are wrong. Like, backchecking, and like, is this spelled wrong? They do not want you in third round of pages to be like, rewriting paragraphs? Or changing the titles of things? And yet, I couldn't take my hands off of it, because even late in the game, I would be reading And I would have to read aloud because that's how I work. I'd be reading these things aloud. And I remember very late, just as an example, very late in the process when I should not have been touching anything, I realized I had used a shark metaphor in that book. Like, it just feels like there's a shark under the boat. And the scariest part in Jaws is not when you see the shark. The scariest part in Jaws is when he goes under the water. And you know he's down there, but everything seems calm, that sense of dread and foreboding, because you know there's like an hour left in the movie, and it's it's not just going to be people sunning themselves on a yacht and then you see the kid's legs under the water kicking and you're like, this is not good. So I'd written this shark metaphor for what it felt like, even when things in my divorce were calm. I was always waiting for like the next email, the next text, the next something from a lawyer. it was always something. That was what it felt like. And then, very late in the process of editing the book, I was saying aloud something about my white dishes that I had registered for for our wedding. And it suddenly occurred to me, Oh my God, those white dishes were Pottery Barn Great White. The name of the dishes was great white, like my wedding dishes were jaws. And I thought, I don't care that they're going to be mad at me. I'm absolutely writing that into the book. And I did, I inserted it because I was still making connections and I swear, I'm not reading this book anymore unless I go and give a reading from it. But I don't think I'll ever stop learning things about my life and about myself from it. I think that will continue to happen.
There's so many strong threads all the way through that book, A callback, Oh, there it comes again. iT's interesting to me that in the formation of a poetry book though, for you, you're carving away, you're not finding threads. Yeah. It's bird by bird.
Yeah. It is a bit. I understand the bird by bird and I, I, I get that. I get the reading out loud. How did you get up every morning or most mornings with that perseverance? That energy behind you, but how did you get up every morning and face it?
Uh, I had a deadline.
But like, we all have deadlines of some kind, right? because I think that probably the shark is still under the waters as you're writing. Yeah. Oh, it absolutely was. Like let's be honest, divorce is constantly unfolding for the rest of our lives, our children's lives, sickness is always unfolding, that the sharks are still in the water, and you know it, and you're still sitting at your computer every day, or your notepad, or wherever you're sitting. What gave you the strength to, I mean that's a talisman, like what gave you the strength to sit there and do it?
You know it's, it's weird, I wouldn't say that writing the book was, Fun, which you've read it, so that makes sense, but it also wasn't not pleasurable. I think it actually was pleasurable for me, even though I was writing about experiences that were not pleasurable. Even though I was, in some cases, some days it just felt like I was either picking a scab or pressing a bruise. There were definitely days where I felt like I was sort of re offending. Like, Any amount of healing that I might have done three weeks ago, I've now undone that healing because I'm having to go back in to those, very soft, tender, pink places and, get in there and do the work. But that said, it still felt incredibly satisfying. To get it down the way that I wanted to get it down, again, it's that sense of it being amorphous in my mind and keeping me up at night and I had years of stuff just sitting in like in my mind and in my body, just absolutely filled to the skin with this stuff, this material. And unpacking it and giving it a form and finding those threads and coming up with metaphors that help me kind of articulate it back to myself. Fun isn't quite the word, but was satisfying. And frankly, it was a lot less painful. I mean, somebody asked me once, how did you write that all day long? And then like, have a smile on your face when your kids came home from school at three o'clock in the afternoon. And I said, well, I had a smile on my face when my kids came home at three o'clock in the afternoon through the worst of it. So the writing of it after the fact was not as hard as the living it and having to have a smile on my face at 3 p. m. Um, you know, like in 2018 or 2019, 2021 felt like at least. There was some distance, but, writing, it's for the same reason, like, I love listening to sad music, even if it makes me feel sad, there's something like deeply satisfying and maybe slightly masochistic about that. Writing about difficult things, somehow giving that thing form, giving it a shape, sort of confronting it. And finding a way to say it to yourself, like forget readers, like finding a way to explain it to yourself is, you know, healing is a term makes me nervous, but it, it is in a way, I think, healing to do that for yourself. And then when you shove it out of the nest, and you hear from people weekly, I feel so seen this is so close to my experience. I went through something very similar, or I went through something very different and it felt just like this to me. And I haven't had the words for it or I've never read something that described my grief in the way that this did made the sort of bravery test of it worth it for me.
Have there been moments where maybe at night, like your sleeping meds wear off or your heart skips a beat and you start to ruminate about all the stuff that you've been through over the last four or five years or so, where you say, Oh, wait a minute, I've made meaning out of this already. And this is how I've thought about it. Have you used your writing as a resource to try to make sense of the ruminations that may become up for you still?
The real blessing, I don't want to curse myself, but the real blessing is this year has not been a ruminating year for me, and part of me wonders if it's because I did so much processing for the memoir, and then talking about the memoir that I've sort of exercised it in a lot of ways from myself, so I don't have the kind of sleeping issues that I did for years and years and years, but I will say, I find myself actually going back to my book, Keep Moving, a lot. , because when I'm struggling with things or feeling unmotivated or just feeling like, oh, what is the future going to bring? Or, oh, this isn't turned out the way I, I mean, I still have those moments of my life doesn't look like I thought it was going to. And like, now what? And what is 10 years? From now going to look like and am I going to be alone when my kids go off to college and my dog's not going to live that long and it's just going to be me, you know, and I do have these moments of just. Still feeling really frustrated with the way that things have turned out and just frankly sad like I'm still grieving it and probably will be grieving it forever. Not so much even the person, but just the loss of the life I thought I was going to have and the upbringing that I thought I was going to have for my own kids. And I go back to that book because I remember writing that from the very messy middle and offering myself advice during that time. And I'm like, Oh, I already wrote about this. Like, I'm feeling this again, but like past me has some wisdom to share with current me and probably future me. And so I'll go back to keep moving and we'll flip through just to any page. And I'll read one of those quotes and I'll think, yeah, yeah, that was true then and it's true now and I can do this, and it's almost like past me sort of did present me a solid, you know, without even realizing. And I think about that a lot too, what kind of work can I do in my life now? You know, writing, yes, but also just with my friends, with people I love, what kind of good can I do now that will end up in ways I cannot imagine laying some kind of foundation that will be there for me to catch me? In five years or 10 years or 15 years and we don't know
two weeks ago, my son's teacher sent home this form and it was something I had to fill out for his updated IEP plan. And, the last page of this packet I had to articulate a vision for his life. Which was like, yeah, it was pretty big. It was a big thing. But as I started to write, I realized it was, it was, but it was sort of just like pouring out of me. And at the same time, I'm doing some work for the vision for my life. So, as I finished it, I reread the last sentence, which is actually summative of that page. And I realized what I had written for him was exactly what I wanted for myself. so I was just wondering, maybe, is there a sentence or two in the terms of a vision that you have for your kids lives Peace. that maybe also you have for yourself. Like right. Yeah. That's
it. Peace. I mean, I wrote about that in the memoir. Really, what I want is peace. And whatever form that takes, you know, contentment, ease, lack of struggle, Accepting yourself, think that can take many forms. It's kind of a shape shifting quality, but peace. That's what I want for them. That's what I want for myself. and I think so many of the choices I make for myself in my life and that I sort of encourage them to think about those choices are around or in service of that? Like, okay if I take on this work, that seems interesting, but it's probably going to make me feel stressed out. Is that going to bring me more peace or less peace, Is taking like four AP classes for my high school student going to bring her more peace or less peace? There are ways that we can really, even with the best of intentions, overextend, and like, what's going to bring you the best quality of life? Not just like in 20 years, but like now, because now matters. You don't know what life's going to be like in a week or two weeks or three weeks. So I don't like The idea of current pain being for future peace, I'm not that interested in that because I'm like, well, there's no guarantee in the future piece. All I know is like I don't actually want to feel bad now. So what can we do to bring peace on a daily basis for ourselves? And so, I find myself parenting in a way that is, is like very low pressure, like, do you have homework? Okay, do it. Maybe you've actually studied enough. Maybe you don't need to take all honors classes. Maybe you don't need to do 50 extracurriculars because you really just want to go take walks and skateboard with your friends. Like what is going to make you feel good? Like, let's do that.