You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

Because I’m trying to get to the truth, and I can’t get there except by looking at the whole, even the parts I don’t want to see. Maybe especially those parts. I’ve had to move into—and through—the darkness to find the beauty. Spoiler alert: It’s there. The beauty’s there.

The truth isn’t easy, but it’s simple.

A FRIEND SAYS EVERY BOOK BEGINS WITH AN UNANSWERABLE QUESTION

This is good to reflect on as a I think about what question am I trying to answer in my own life that’s unanswerable

When you lose someone you love, you start to look for new ways to understand the world.

How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go.

I still carry these versions of myself. It’s a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.

(Is that what a memoir is—a ghost tour? I’m confronting what haunts me. I’m out with lanterns, looking.)

cleverly disguised as one of the least visible creatures on earth: a middle-aged

aged mother.

good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

How will my children feel if they think that being seen as a mother wasn’t enough for me? What will they think of me, knowing I wanted a full life—a life with them and a life in words, too?

But most of the time, “good” and “bad” aren’t so easy to discern. In stories there are good guys and bad guys. In life there are people in pain, people who are broken and making decisions from a place of brokenness, people living with wounds we can’t see—and these people, these fallible human beings, are our mothers and fathers, our husbands and wives, our sisters and brothers, our children, our teachers.

but your life is still your life—mothering and dog-walking and working. The things we call “life-changing” are and aren’t.

Spoiler Alert: I still haven’t solved the mystery. Not all of it. Where is that omniscient narrator when we need her most?

Marriages are cocreated. Whatever ours looked like, we built that together. We inherited parts of it, too.

invisible labor—how there are gears turning inside the machine that no one sees, but if they stop turning the whole thing grinds to a smoking halt.

Somewhere at the center is the tiniest doll. Love. The love that started everything. It’s still there, but we’d have to open and open and open ourselves—our together selves—to find it.

Maybe when we long for our “old lives” in middle age, what we’re longing for is our young lives. The reprisal of a past role? A curtain call?

I want to cut a hole in the air and climb inside.

If who I would have been is not who I am, then where is she?

There is so much I would wish to undo, if I could go back, go back, go back. But back to where? Where was it safe?

Writing is work that can hold up its head with all the other kinds of useful work out there in the world, and it is genuinely work.

The year I decided not to disappear. The year I decided not to be small. The year I lived.

I loosened my white-knuckled grip on my life and instead of feeling panicked, I found myself being more playful, more spontaneous, less tethered to order for order’s sake.

I thought that I was vanishing, but instead I was only coming true. —Clive James

I don’t have fond memories of the middle school cafeteria, do you? A blanket in the sun with people you’ve known all your life, and no worries about where to sit and with whom? I’ll take it.

I’ve wondered if I can even call this book a memoir. It’s not something that happened in the past that I’m recalling for you. It’s not a recollection, a retrospective, a reminiscence. I’m still living through this story as I write it. I’m finding mine, and telling it, but all the while, the mine is changing.

As if you have to break someone’s heart to make them strong. I could say you don’t get to take credit for someone’s growth if they grow as a result of what you put them through.

how to live with the mystery

Less than they deserve but all I have to give.

A scar tells a story about pain, injury, healing. Years, too, are scars.

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

The way you’ll be remembered is the way you’re living now, I tell myself. If you don’t like it, change it.

The nost in nostalgia means “homecoming”; the algia means “pain.” Hundreds of years ago, nostalgia was a diagnosable medical condition.

This is something I grieve: the severed tie to someone who knew me since college, the cokeeper of our memories, the person who could tell my kids what I was like during those years, the person who could tell me what I was like, the person I shared my life with. All of it, disposable.

Do our separate memories grow on their own into two different things, unrecognizable to one another? Do we?

I’m their mother, and the love is not work. Parenting is work: the cooking of meals, the washing of clothes, the tending of wounds, the taming of cowlicks, the helping with homework, the driving to soccer, the packing of lunches, the finding of missing things (water bottle lids, baseballs, library books, mittens), the consoling to sleep. The love? It’s not work.

I want to forgive, but first I need to feel everything that stands between me and forgiveness. Even my therapist notices: I can use the vocabulary—I can say I’m angry or anxious or sad—but I don’t seem to be any of these things.

Am I feeling or simply describing feelings?

During our first session she talked about the contracts we have with others. In every relationship, she said, there are the things that connect us—things we have in common, things we like about each other. But the contract is like a secret handshake under the table. It’s subconscious. It often has to do with the wounds we carry with us from childhood, our attachments, our traumas, even the ones we haven’t articulated to ourselves.

“You’re whole and strong,” she said. “You have very clear boundaries. You’ve outgrown the contract. You’re done with it. But now you have to weather him coming to that, too. It could take years.”

The thing about this life: If we knew nothing of what was missing, what has been removed, it would look full and beautiful.

“How much is caregiver part of your identity? In what ways might you be keeping others down in order to stay up?”

“Do you need to remain the parent, even in adult relationships?”

We are nesting dolls, carrying all of our earlier selves inside us. I feel so full of the life I had before—the life I have already lived—how is there room for anything new? We feel and feel, and live and live, but somehow we’re never full. This life is elastic, impossibly elastic. There is always room for more experience. Our lives expand to accommodate anything.

My chance at a golden anniversary, at growing old with someone who knew me when I was young,

I floated through the house, practically transparent. Is this what living is—trusting the string to hold?

I’ve become a student of my own pain, my own grief and suffering. In this way, he has been my teacher? Everything we learn, we learn from someone who is imperfect.

I’m trying on so many metaphors, pushing toward understanding. I’m trying on so many lines written by others but through which I can see my own experience.

now? I am out with lanterns, looking for myself. But here’s the thing about carrying light with you: No matter where you go, and no matter what you find—or don’t find—you change the darkness just by entering it. You clear a path through it. This flickering? It’s mine. This path is mine.