You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

Where there had been a future, or at least the promise of one, there was now an ellipsis: dot dot dot.

I don’t get 2001: A Space OdysseyI—fine, I can live with that. But my own life? It would be nice to get it.

Being married is leaning and being caught, and catching the one who leans toward you.

This is also true: I was—am—loving, honest, dependable, funny, compassionate, and loyal. But I was not my best self in my marriage, at least not toward the end.

Likewise, parents are not wise oracles—they’re just people trying to shepherd other people through the world.

“Wish for more pain,” a friend’s therapist once told her, “because that’s how you’ll change.” It has to hurt so much that you have to do something differently. The pain forces your hand.

It’s easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. —Joan Didion

I wonder: 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? I’m dog-earing a realization in my mind now: I don’t think fathers are asking themselves these questions. Fathers don’t feel guilty for wanting an identity apart from their children, because the expectation is that they have lives outside of the home. I’m starring and underlining this fact for future reference.

“Who’s calling this laundry dirty, anyway? It’s just lived-in.” Next question.

Meryl Streep can read your poem, and it can be in an episode of a primetime TV show, but your life is still your life—mothering and dog-walking and working. The things we call “life-changing” are and aren’t.

And he was home doing my work. To be fair, I treated it that way, too. I had internalized that. He was “covering for me,” as if I were a coworker who’d gone on vacation and left my cubicle-neighbor with all my tasks while I was away.

I didn’t feel missed as a person, I felt missed as staff. My invisible labor was made painfully visible when I left the house. I was needed back in my post.

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

I wanted to save my marriage, but I wanted to save it without anyone knowing it needed saving. That is some serious firstborn-daughter energy right there.

I couldn’t be the person—or the writer, or the mother—I wanted to be in my marriage. The “deal” wasn’t working.

I don’t have all the answers—there is no manual for how to do this—but I do know this: I will guard my kids like Fort Fucking Knox. From everyone. Including myself.

The long pink line where my daughter left my body, then my son, tells a story. A door opened, then shut, then opened and shut again. But I have stood ajar since the moment I became a mother.

I was remembering how to be. Not a mother, not a teacher, not even a writer. Just me.

Sometimes it feels like each poem I write is a draft of The Poem I’m trying to write—that singular, golden, impossibly definitive poem. The one poem I’m trying to live. Or the one life I’m trying to write. The mine.

The year I wanted to cut a hole in the air and climb inside, and the year I didn’t want that at all. The year I decided not to disappear. The year I decided not to be small. The year I lived.

This is the story of a woman coming home to herself.”

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

My mind runs constantly. If I’m quiet and still, I can almost hear the old-appliance hum of it.

I have to trust this: If what I give my children is love, then they’re receiving it. If I seek to understand them, then they will feel understood. Embraced. Fathomed.

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.

BUT HERE’S THE THING, WALT Sometimes I’m tired of my multitudes.

I said, “I’m so proud to be your mom.” He said, “I’m so proud to be your son.”

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

I don’t just want to have kids, I want these kids. Though dammit, I wish they had an easier path to travel. I wish we all had an easier path.

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.

Everything we learn, we learn from someone who is imperfect.