Cartwheels

My therapist once (or twice) said, Why don’t you set all that memoir writing down and live your life now?

My daughter once (or twice) said, All you do is write. You also have to do things.

At first, it felt like being told I breathe wrong. I felt caught on the back foot, slightly wobbly and exposed. Criticized for just being me. Truth: I don’t really know how to do things. I know how to write. It’s the way that I flow through the world. A witness, a big eye, once removed from the flow of things so that I can always be able to report — a control strategy of some kind. Other people seem to need to ‘have fun’ — this is my fun. Other people need to paint, make images, build things. This is my making.

I can’t take it off like some old, no longer needed coat that I’ve worn holes into.

It’s my skin.

I won’t punish myself for a quality that has kept me rooted, kept me whole. The very skill that makes me most myself.

And truth? When I was fully immersed in life, living in Manhattan on the Upper East Side, waitressing every day, out dancing every night, somehow squeezing college in between the cracks of all that doing with a capital D — when I fell into bed empty of all I had to give, I still took a moment to stop time. To write down what I could before I collapsed into sleep.

Truth: If I didn’t take that moment, I didn’t remember it — and if I didn’t remember, I didn’t enjoy it as much. It went by too fast for me. Life at that speed was too loud, too bright, too loaded, too crowded. This is the way I slow things down so I can feel them. This is the way I re-member myself.

Back then, we didn’t have a name for people like me. We do now. Sensitives. Introverts. Writers.

Last night, I dreamed three dreams - waking at 3 am, 5 am and weirdly for me, 8:11 — so late. The night before, same. And in all of those dreams there was a baby. Fragile and new, needing care. A baby to be received, carried, transported, rushed to a plane. In all of the dreams, I was not the mother — not exactly. I was however responsible.

My mother was there, too, her voice, her presence. She called to me as I floated toward the ocean. She called to me, as she waited on the plane. She called to me, warning, guiding, encouraging.

In all of the dreams, I knew my job: protect the baby.

for almost a week now, I’ve been stalled. I was releasing one scene of my memoir every day - setting their release for 5:00 am, half an hour before my usual wake time so I could see them there, out in the world, waiting for you to receive and read them. But not this week. This week, I stalled. I released backfill scenes. I began to dither around with the structure. Before long I was taking it all apart - again - revisiting the story.

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I realized that I’d accidentally written my father as a noble, disabled hero and myself as a martyred caregiver. When I saw it I was crestfallen. My father would have hated that - and so did I. It stalled me - because I had to take a hard look at some really hard feelings. It stalled me because I had to stop and ask, well, wait, was that how it was? Or even how it felt?

The stall was important because, reading through my journals I could see that as tired and overwhelmed as I sometimes felt, I did not feel like a martyr. The work felt like love. It felt like devotion. And part of my reservation this week is that that,caretaking — like writing instead of living —- is frowned upon by people who preference doing over whatever it is that I do: writing, remembering, collecting, gathering, sorting, moving puzzle pieces across a wide wooden table.

The other reservation, the older more brittle one is a bone-deep self-admonition to do no harm.

I have been taking care of people for a very long time. I have guarded little ones from a harm that was invisible to anyone but little me. The harm of neglect, the harm of not being important enough to have your diaper changed in a timely manner, the harm of letting a baby cry too long in a crib. I have been negotiating with the cause of that harm which did not maybe seem like harm when it was done by a person who had been so very harmed herself. And while negotiating, I started to take care of her, too. My own mother. I didn’t want her to be harmed by having to do anything but what she seemed to want to do. Paint, write, draw, play. And sometimes, have a martini with a friend. And sometimes, go to a studio where other mothers gathered and do whatever it was women were doing — we know what they were doing now but I didn’t know then.

I was seven, eight, nine - what did I know about women’s rights or art or revolution. While my mother was reading or painting or out raising her consciousness all I knew was I was hungry, my sister was crying, and I was bigger and more capable of reaching the fridge handle. All I knew was the dishes were piling up in the sink and I was tall enough to wash them. This is not a complaint. It’s how it was - what the world was and how one little girl became a woman who liked things to be a certain way and noticed when people were angry, hungry, sad, frightened, cold, sick, uncomfortable, awkward, or just a little bit uneasy and figured out, maybe too early, how to help.

I would walk out the back door on my way to my friend’s house and my sister would come running after me, sobbing, holding onto my ankles, breaking my heart. And I would stop and pick her up and hold her and not know what to do. I just wanted a little time away. My mother would run out behind her and pull her from me and say, You go, Amy, it’s okay, I’ve got her but she would reach for me and I remember or think I remember wondering, why? how do I stop this? how do I help her?

And one day when we were all grown up my sister turned to me in the car, we were parked on a street in the city, I was in the driver’s seat, she doesn’t drive, and I remembererd this sort of ‘at’ her, all in a tumble and she said, ‘you’ve told me this before Aim, I think maybe it’s time to get over it now Im okay’ and we laughed in that way that was, in my body, a little hysterical, like laughter you have no control over, like takes over your body and you are for a minute or two a puppet of laughter as it laughs itself through you and until it is done with you, you are not entirely yourself. You are laughter laughing at you. You are sisters remembering and sobbing reweaving itself into laughter in your cell tissue and bones and when laughter is done laughing you you are free.

I don’t have to do cartwheels before I write the book to protect them from it.

I don’t have to do cartwheels after I write it, either.

If someone asks why didn’t your sisters help more, I can say — they did, in their own way, they maybe didn’t want to help Dad but they helped me, quite a lot in just the way that I needed. Talking and calling and writing back and forth and sharing the absurdity of the situation in the best way we all knew how to share it. My journals are absolutely empty of complaint, of resentment. That’s the evidence. Their help was care of me in the way that when I need or allow help, when I can tolerate help at all, it comes. And that was enough for me then. It’s enough for me now. I have no complaint.

Truth: I enjoyed the intensity of the caretaking. I needed it. It was part of my journey — I chose it, for my own reasons. I was trying to prove something — to myself, to my parents, to Esther. That I loved them. That I could do it.

Truth: I did love them. In ways that only this experience could have revealed.

Truth: I really wanted to help. It is my love language and withholding care would not have been okay with me — it’s one of the ways I say I love you. I turn and lift you up and when you are lifted from my arms something aches for you to return there. So I can hold you, so I can show you, because I don’t have any other way of showing what I am feeling. Because feeling overwhelms me when it gets that wide and deep. And I have no choice but to surrender until feeling is done feeling itself through me.

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I once told a counselor, “I can save the world or I can curl up with my daughter.” “These things feel the same to me,” she said.

I didn’t understand it. Later, I did. Now I do.

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This morning, in the very last dream, everyone was celebrating. We were kissing each other - on the cheek, on the hand. We were smiling. I came to tell you about it, to tell you all of this and I found, waiting for me, my own words.

This poem, which ends with these words:

You will miss most of the sunrises
and nearly every drop of rain.
You cannot possibly gather the star dust that comes streaming over your head every moment of every day.

So, breathe.
in and out,
in and out.

Give thanks in the only way that’s possible: hold out your cup and live.

Photo by Fabrício Severo on Unsplash

I could never actually do a cartwheel. Something about gravity and my inner ear or nervous system if my feet went over my head I came down dizzy and disoriented. Likewise, in yoga, I couldn’t do a headstand or handstand. Same feeling of being tipped upside down the wrong way, the earth not being where it was supposed to be.