You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

The Finder stopped knowing how to tell herself the story of her life. Where there had been a future, or at least the promise of one, there was now an ellipsis: dot dot dot. The ellipsis is where the sentence trails off, where you drop the thread, where the train of thought steams off in some unknown direction. The ellipsis is where you lose your partner, or your parents, or your child, or the idea of a child, or the hope for a child. The ellipsis is where you lose your house, or your job, or your health, or your appetite, or your ability to sleep.

And the sentence could pick up again anywhere. Or it could dissolve into silence for some time.

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

It’s a mistake to visualize the narrative arc I was handed in school—inciting incident, rising action, crisis, climax, falling action, resolution, denouement—and to try to map my life onto it.

Plot is what happened, and what happened is one thing. What the book—the life—is about is another thing entirely.

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. Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was.

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.

This is what it is to be rooted in a place, or to have a place rooted inside you: Every bit means something to someone you know, and therefore, every bit means something to you.

Being married isn’t being two columns, standing so straight and tall on their own, they never touch. Being married is leaning and being caught, and catching the one who leans toward you.

Postpartum depression broke over me like a colossal wave almost immediately after Violet was born, though I didn’t call it by its name, and I didn’t treat it. It’s hard to treat what you can’t—or won’t—name.

I didn’t write for the first year of Violet’s life. Strike that: I couldn’t write. I was sleep deprived and anxious and, I know now, suffering from something with a name. Something I could have treated. The land of poems felt impossibly far away; I could barely make it out on the horizon and had no idea how to get there. Even if I’d known the way, even if I’d had a map, when could I have made that journey?

FIRST FALL I’m your guide here. In the evening-dark morning streets, I point and name. Look, the sycamores, their mottled, paint-by-number bark. Look, the leaves rusting and crisping at the edges. I walk through Schiller Park with you on my chest. Stars smolder well into daylight. Look, the pond, the ducks, the dogs paddling after their prized sticks. Fall is when the only things you know because I’ve named them begin to end. Soon I’ll have another season to offer you: frost soft on the window and a porthole sighed there, ice sleeving the bare gray branches. The first time you see something die, you won’t know it might come back. I’m desperate for you to love the world because I brought you here.

I also remember the other people who said, later, trying to comfort me, “At least you never knew the baby.” Meaning: At least you didn’t meet the baby, hold the baby, name the baby, love the baby. At least the baby wasn’t part of your family. There is a difference between what is built in the body and what is built in the imagination. I’d already considered myself a mother of two. I’d already thought of Violet as a big sister.

This would be our last chance for another child. We wouldn’t put ourselves—and I wouldn’t put my body—through this again. Every day, I scanned the horizon for storms, hypervigilant. I didn’t believe my eyes when they saw nothing. To strip away the metaphor: Every day for nine months, I expected blood. From the very beginning, I expected the end. That sort of thing changes you.

How I picture it: Inside current me, the me who has two children, is the me who dreamed two others. The me who lived in fear, then grief, then fear, then grief again, then fear.

the birth plan became “get the baby out alive” (sort of like, after bringing home a newborn who had colic, acid reflux, and a dairy sensitivity, the parenting plan became “by any means necessary”).

It makes sense, but I hadn’t known it until then: Miscarriage is a predictor for postpartum anxiety and depression. Of course you feel out of control: Your hormones have been all over the place. You’ve been heartbroken, wrung out, exhausted, and scared. You can’t make your body do what it should, and now you can’t make your child do what he should.

If you hurt my feelings, I might have carried that pain quietly, but the quiet was loud.

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

Thank you for the pain you caused me, because that pain woke me up. It hurt enough to make me change. “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.

Fear isn’t inside me, I’m inside it. Anger isn’t something I’m holding; it’s something that’s held me, possessed me. And being possessed is the opposite of being free.

“I feel like I go into a phone booth and I turn into a poet sometimes. Most of the other time, I’m just Maggie who pushes the stroller.”

GOOD BONES Life is short, though I keep this from my children. Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways, a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative estimate, though I keep this from my children. For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird. For every loved child, a child broken, bagged, sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world is at least half terrible, and for every kind stranger, there is one who would break you, though I keep this from my children. I am trying to sell them the world. Any decent realtor, walking you through a real shithole, chirps on about good bones: This place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.

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 could say that suffering equals pain plus resistance, and I’m no longer resisting, no longer holding it in, letting it fester. And why would you expect me, or anyone, to grit my teeth and quietly carry my story? I could say there is a cost to carrying your truth but not telling it.

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.

Maybe this is a story of two human beings who committed to each other very young and didn’t survive one another’s changes.

What does the reader need? What is the poem insisting upon? When you consistently leave something—or someone—out of your poems, that’s a conspicuous absence.

felt that the fourth member of the family rowed away from our island to work, and then rowed back to us, but we three lived there. That was daily life. I’m careful to say “I felt,” because there is no one truth to be told in this regard. It feels invasive to even consider what it might have felt like to be the one in the boat, oars in both hands. To go away and come back, again and again, and to miss so much living. It is a kind of estrangement, maybe, to be the one who works outside of the home. Estrangement as in “to be made strange,” to feel apart from.

Toward the end, my husband and I were distant, and the distance makes sense. If you feel that someone is being unkind or unfair to you, you don’t want to be close to them. Then you aren’t close to them, so you grow further apart. More unkindness, more distance. It’s a vicious cycle, and breaking it requires deep work.

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.

One day, it hit me: The best things to happen to me individually were the worst things to happen to my marriage. And then, this: But the best things remain.

How I picture it: Marriages are nesting dolls, too. We carry each iteration: the marriage we had before the children, the marriage of love letters and late nights at dive bars and train rides through France; the marriage we had after the children, the marriage of tenderness but transactional communication—who’s doing what, and when, and how—and early mornings and stroller walks and crayon on the walls and sunscreen that always needs to be reapplied; the marriage we had toward the end before we knew there was an end, the marriage of the silent treatment and couch sleeping and the occasional update email. 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.

But soon Rhett would turn six, and even he knew five was gone, four was gone—or it was somewhere nested inside him, part of him. You carry the past with you, but you can’t go back.

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?

A few months after my husband moved out of the house, I was trying to calm and reassure Rhett, then six years old, at bedtime. He said, “I know, I know. I have a mom who loves me, and I have a dad who loves me. But I don’t have a family.” I felt the wind go out of me—felt myself emptying, falling, a balloon drifting down from the ceiling—because he was right. He still had all of his family members, but our family unit, our foursome, was gone.

When my marriage ended, I could picture my life as a time line from a history textbook, eras bracketed for each relationship, one after the other, no space between them: my first serious boyfriend (high school) my second serious boyfriend (end of high school through college) my husband

It was a full-circle moment, and there would be many of them. Because time is recursive, because we repeat ourselves again and again, because all the things I’d done married I would now do unmarried. Because I was the same and completely different.

At the end of one run, I stopped, bent over, my hands on my thighs, and laughed. Really belly-laughed, just standing on the sidewalk in front of my house. I didn’t know my body could do that. There is joy in surprising oneself.

How can I tell mine if I can’t find it? If I’m still out with lanterns. If the questions are burning, burning, burning—and the omniscient narrator, the one with all the answers, is nowhere to be found. What I’m living and experiencing is my life, but what about the rest? If I know so little about the life I’ve called my own, if there are blank spaces I can’t fill in, can I still call it my life? Can I still claim it as mine?

“A memoir is about ‘the art of memory,’ and part of the art is in the curation. This isn’t the story of a woman who fell in love again and therefore was healed and lived happily ever after. This is the story of a woman coming home to herself.” Next question.

The second time we spoke, Kathryn began by asking to access my energy. She said she could feel the blockage—it was in my chest. The line was so staticky, I couldn’t hear her, and she couldn’t hear me clearly either. She said sometimes that happens when the energy is particularly strong, and she’d do some quick clearing and I could call back. We hung up. I waited a minute, breathing deeply to calm myself, and called her back. This time the line was completely clear. No, I can’t explain that. And no, it doesn’t matter, not really, if it was coincidence or if everything I was carrying—the black, the gray—interrupted the connection, a kind of electrical storm inside me. That clearing felt true even if now, in hindsight, I’m not sure it was real.

Is this why we write? To bronze the baby shoes? To save all of it? The zippered coats, the somehow endless buckling and unbuckling of car seat harnesses, the sticky hands, the fought naps, the acorns secreted into my pockets and purses, the crumbs on everything, always?

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

There are so many images I can’t access now, stories I can’t tell and retell, because the person who was there isn’t here. He made himself disappear. How did he do that?

I’ve tried to love them as if there is a right way. No, I’ve loved them without having to try at all, because 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.

Caroline said what I was doing was like tugging on a rope: I pulled, and there was tension on the other side. The only way to stop the tug-of-war was to let go of the rope. I needed to put the rope down.

when I think about my dream partner, what I want in that person is so basic, so low-bar, I’m almost ashamed to say it out loud: Someone who’s happy to see me. Someone who smiles when I walk into a room. Someone who can be happy with me and for me—

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

How I picture it: For years we lived inside a sort of snow globe, protected. Something had crystallized, gemlike, around us. I believed we could withstand the snow globe being lifted, shaken, and set back down again. I believed we would withstand it. Things would change, but we would still be us. It’s as if I had lived under a spell, dazed by the falling snow and how it sparkled, unaware of the reality of my own life. But I did not call it a spell until it had been broken. I did not call it a spell—I called it marriage, family, life.