Holding Our Stories
(joy, terror, and becoming a matriarch)
“Love is the mystery inside this walking. It runs ahead of us on the road like a dog, out of the photograph.”
–from “Kinds of Water” by Anne Carson
Love is the nieces and nephews who know I am one of their own: the toddler snuggled against my chest and the young adult showing me his soft underbelly. Love is my sister holding my hand and my brother asleep with his head on my lap. Love is reaching towards my children, and it is also their propulsion forward, tumbling more deeply into adulthood. Love leads the way, like a game of chase, always drawing us out further than we think we can reach, one horizon showing us the road to the next.
The other night, I dreamt my mother. I dreamt her my age, sitting at a table, her chair on the edge of a precipice–a gully that held a stream that fed into a lake. She wore a large pendant, the profile of a cream-colored hen, her tail feathers the color of old blood. Strung across the hen’s breast were seven tiny chicks, my mother’s children. Five of them living, one dead, and one never born. I was annoyed that my mother had never shown me the pendant before–where had she kept it? I knew every tangled chain and single earring in her jewelry box, and not one of them did I want. But this pendant, I knew, was mine.
There is a matriarchal lineage, passed from oldest daughter to oldest daughter. I thought moving 2,000 miles away from my family was an act of subversion, a way to avert becoming my mother–frozen and in denial about the truth of her marriage to an alcoholic. I still hear her voice. If I believe your sister, then my entire life is a lie. I confused becoming a matriarch with perpetuating the helpless rage and petrification I witnessed in my mother. Since my mother’s death, I have a better understanding of what it means to become a matriarch, even as I’m not yet sure what it means to be a matriarch.
This week I asked my students to contemplate the connection between terror and joy. I asked them to tell me if one is possible without the other. Most agreed that you can’t separate the two. Younger students talked about the exhilaration of amusement park rides and snowboarding. Older students talked about their children and the fear of turning them loose in the world. Reading their responses, I kept seeing the image of my mother sitting on the edge of a gully, one small movement away from slipping down its steep slope. The space between the edge of the chair and the deep drop of the gully is shrinking, and all of us, everywhere, are one disaster away from disaster. It is the specter of loss that makes moments of connection so sweet.
My godmother, who loved my mother as only a dear friend who has known you for over fifty years can, has not lost her home to the Eaton fire in LA, but their bags are packed, and who knows what the winds will bring. The fires erupted the day after I left my family in Texas and while I was in Albuquerque visiting my baby sister. I sent my godmother pictures of my sister and her toddler. Each picture was a buoy held fast by the cord that connected her to us, to our mother. I wanted to hold her like she held our mother during her visits to Texas, sharing with Mom, before everything melted away, the stories of their youth.
Nights in Albuquerque with my baby sister, when the house was quiet, and we were alone, we drank tea and watched British cozies. She painted my toenails the color of an easter egg to remind me that spring would come. Everything felt glitter-coated, as if I could see the memories forming while we were still inside each moment. I knew they would end: the toddler would wake up; I would go home, and I would miss them when I left. I know the next time I see her, my niece will be a whole new person, exploding with new understanding and experiences, and we will have to begin again that dance all toddlers do with new people: do I know you; do I want you to hold me or even look at me? Just as our visit was ending, she woke up looking for me, sought me out, and when she crawled into bed with me that last morning before I caught a plane home, I wanted to cry with joy. There will be a next time and a next time and a next. And each time, she’ll remember me a little more, and each time I’ll feel the same aching knowledge that this time, too, will end.
I’ve been home from Texas and Albuquerque for less than a week, and I still feel the achy heart-bruising that happens every time I leave my family. It's the same kind of ache that makes me long for the Camino. In her essay about walking the Camino, Anne Carson writes, “It is an open secret among pilgrims…of this travelling life that you become addicted to the horizon. There is a momentum of walking, hunger, roads, empty bowl of thoughts...” Love is the walking, and love is the road. Love is the longing I feel for days filled with movement and those glittery moments that are outside of time. We stopped walking two months ago, but still, I am reaching, tumbling, like my children. I can’t live always outside of time, I know, but there is a kind of holding in the practice of walking day after day that has something to teach me about being a matriarch. The way the road holds stories and shares stories. I miss being held by the Camino, and I think it must be close to what my tiny niece feels when she lays curled tightly in the curve of my belly, and not unlike the trust my nephew must feel when he opens up about his life late at night on his father’s couch and reminds me of how scary it can be to step into adulthood in a world that feels unhinged and out of control.
This holding is love showing me how I want to live. How to become a container for the stories of my family, how to alchemize those stories into whatever evolution they are making towards liberation from the past. I know those moments outside of time–the sister painting my nails, the toddler snuggles, the pilgrimage–I know they feel shiny and perfect because they can’t last. And maybe part of being a matriarch is understanding the endings of things. People grow up. People die. Whole communities are burned away. Joy and terror are inseparable because, in the moment of joy, there is always the specter of its ending, the loss it holds.
The torch has passed from my mother to me, and this is the kind of matriarch I wish to be: reaching always towards the horizon. Like the dog on the road. Like the relief of knowing your people are yours and you are theirs, even when the work of healing together gets messy.
Workshop Reminder
There are still a few spots left in our upcoming workshop series, Joyful Practice for Dark Times, which starts in February. If you are interested in being a part of this generative writing community, you can learn more and register here: Joyful Practice for Dark Times. Please share this link with your community!
The image of that pendant will stay with me.