You Could Make This Place Beautiful

by Maggie Smith

I am out with lanterns, looking for myself. —Emily Dickinson

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’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.

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