Committed

by Elizabeth Gilbert

I believe that many modern women, my mother included, carry within them a whole secret New England cemetery, wherein they have quietly buried—in neat little rows—the personal dreams they have given up for their families. June Carter Cash’s never-recorded songs rest in that silent graveyard, for instance, alongside my mother’s modest but eminently worthy career. And so these women adapt to their new reality. They grieve in their own ways—often invisibly—and move on. The women in my family, anyhow, are very good at swallowing disappointment and moving on. They have, it has always seemed to me, a sort of talent for changing form, enabling them to dissolve and then flow around the needs of their partners, or the needs of their children, or the needs of mere quotidian reality. They adjust, adapt, glide, accept. They are mighty in their malleability, almost to the point of a superhuman power. I grew up watching a mother who became with every new day whatever that day required of her. She produced gills when she needed gills, grew wings when the gills became obsolete, manifested ferocious speed when speed was required, and demonstrated epic patience in other more subtle circumstances.