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Love and Language.

1.

First comes the absence of accent. You hear it before its loss registers elsewhere: a flatness, frosty and far, where there were once warm lilts and bends. Your voice was a carousel, your language a whirligig. It’s since sanded itself, become polished and practiced, indistinguishable.

You are hiding your truths in places you will not so readily find them.

It is easy to tell a man you love him, easy to mean it. But over time, it morphs in your mouth, its meaning multiplying, reducing, clouding. Something is always wanting, in the translation.

You are not clear when you articulate love, because you have never understood men as more than audiences. Perform for them, but keep them distant. Perform for them, but know when to leave, when to grant an encore. The performance must be evocative, but respectable. It must titillate but it must also offer insight.

You are less actress than apprentice. You cannot tell if he is on the edge of his seat or yawning. Men, in this way, are mysteries.

But this is beside the point. Audiences owe so little: attention, at best, and in short supply. The actress owes a world.

No, never view a man you love as something to be acted upon. You mustn’t perform. You will always feel you are earning a keep. You will dance till dawn for a bit of applause and feel empty, wanton, when he withholds it.

Women learn this first with inconsistent fathers. When they are with you, you wish to dazzle them — and you do. For as long as you care to, you do. Find his heart, his preoccupations, his passions. Become conversant in them. And you will be clever and interesting because, at first, you are the most flattering kind of mirror. When he is with you, you offer such forgiving reflections. He is younger with you, time has stood still, a judgment day feels far enough at bay that you’ve nearly convinced him he’s invincible.

But he is often gone. And in his absence, you are building calluses over your needs. First it will be hard and hurtful to articulate them. Then, you will not feel the need to do so at all.

What is love, if not knowing when to keep silent?

The beginning of new relationships is when your accent is heaviest. Love leaves your lips easily, and love on his lips takes a razor to every callus.

I want to know everything, you whisper. I want to tell you everything, he responds.

You hope to dazzle him, and you do. But soon, you will want your distance. And in the distance, the calluses crust over.

2.

My daughter’s speech is muddy, a mix of water and silt. It floats out, as if behind gauze or a veil. I understand her, sometimes, but less than I’m told I should by now.

I am not one of those mothers who begs and borrows and steals to acquire the trendiest literacy aids. I do not own an iPad. I believe in board books and conversation and sunshine.

She watches television. (And I realize, at this point in the reading, someone is sending me to the stocks or the noose in old Salem. But understand, at this point in the reading, that if my daughter did not watch television, I could not be writing this. If I hadn’t watched as much television as I did growing up, I wouldn’t likely have wanted to be a person who writes things down.)

Now that she is closer to three years old than two, I am told her speech should not sound like it is being sifted. She should be clear, responding to questions, asking them, forming simple sentences.

Because she is not in daycare, we have both been spared the intense developmental comparisons we’d find there. But whenever she does get to mingle among peers, I am concerned with her insouciant acquisition of language.

She is no loafer. Story is an empath, a firebrand. She is intellectually curious, musical, startling perceptive. She is creative, a gesturer. She cobbles her own expressive roads.

But she does not speak in ways that are easily understood.

Even mothers like me, neither tigers nor minimalists, know when to be concerned about their children. And for us, it is rarely overreaction.

I worry that she has inherited my ambiguities. I do not often know how to speak, either. Perhaps it is just that the words morph in her mouth in more literal ways than they do in mine.

But here is where that similarity ends: my daughter knows exactly how to love. It is not complicated. It is in the eyes, in invented songs, in laughter, in the folding of her bony limbs and skin around mine. It is all the kisses I give her, returned. It is alphabets and gifts of toys, constellations, saying hello to the moon, to her mama’s smiley-face mug in the morning.

It is not confined to the way her words are formed.

3.

Nearly a fortnight ago, in the basement bar of an East Village restaurant, I slid onto a stool, waiting for a lithe, sparkly-eyed twenty-something to transfigure an excerpt of fiction I wrote last year, in a fit of pique. She was first in a lineup of actors cast to read the works of writers, both established and grappling. I am the latter, of course, the non-resident only in New York for a few stolen hours, the sole writer featured without a published book to sell.

In Baltimore, it is easy to forget who you are. It is not so often affirmed. In New York, if you are literary, neither affirmation nor criticism are ever in short supply. You are among kinsmen fluent in the language of representation and publication, professorship and craft. You are among people who amass rejection and do not identify it as masochism, but as love.

I had never heard my work publicly read aloud by anyone besides myself, let alone performed. New York is the only place where I’d want to.

The audience waited for the first line, spoken by a seven-year-old twin to her conjoined sister: “Do you think Mommy loves us?” It’s a play on an age-old theme, a lifelong wonder. Are we allowed to interrogate love? And when we do, will we ever be ready for the result?

The girls are black, sharing organs at the lower torso. One is developmentally delayed, the other fairly precocious. In this scene, they are in conversation. It is difficult to imagine this going well. The actress is white and grown, her body positively un-twinned.

But the language is universal, her interpretation thoughtful and quiet. She draws the attention of our intimate crowd, pulls them toward the words, and for a moment, they are not my own, and she is no longer there. There are only the twins, those susceptible twins, and their questioning of a mother’s love.

My friend Shelly, who co-organizes the event, tells me witnessing this often makes writers as nervous as if they were reading their own words aloud. Indeed, it is a foreign thing to see something intended for silence enlivened. It is strange to surrender a sliver of an incomplete novel to a room, to see the way your own words land on other ears.

This is is what readers do all the time, Shelly reminds me. They take our words into themselves, add their own inflections, superimpose their experience. They gasp, perhaps chuckle, and occasionally, they call into question their loves.

It is risky to be let in on this process. Day to day, we understand the words we write as spores, floating out and off and overhead, but rarely touching down.

Here, I was watching cupped hearts catch them. I could see them sink into the loam.

I had my answer, then, about the way I communicate love. Mine is an adoration mapped with words. For the utterance of a loving word is the loudest act there is.

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The Risks.

That whatever warming light he brings is sourced by more than wisps of filament. That the light will not burst when you’re brooding or silent. That he himself is light and will not darken, upon exposing you. That he will see your shadows, welcome them, find in the silhouettes something singular, invaluable. That you are your genuine selves. That he will wait. That you will. That patience isn’t foreign to you. That whatever needs to heal in him, in you, will mend in its time. That you will yield. That he will. That truth hums on his lips, long and low, a melody never quite too abrasive for ears. That this ache that comes in when he’s honest spurs honesty in you. That you will not lie to spare one another. That you will not become someone uncomfortable. That you will be spared. That the word “appease” has no translation here, in this subtle, dying dialect. That things will change. That he is right: it will not always be this way — whatever way this is. There will be more, not less. That this is not rehearsal. We are not curtained, cordoned. That this is more than a stage. That we have not roused a promising love, just to let it roar and starve and rot. That this distance is imagined. That indifference is imagined. That we’ll find each other walking, in the dark.

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Stacia in the Press: Freshly Pressed, The Atlantic, The Takeaway.

It’s been a crazy half-month. Last week, my blog entry, “How the 3/5ths Live” was featured on WordPress’s Freshly Pressed page, drawing more traffic and comments to this site over a four-day period than it’s seen in the five years it’s been around. If you’re a new blog subscriber via Freshly Pressed, welcome! I’m glad you’re here.

Fair warning: I’ll be moderating my comments rather closely from here on out. I appreciate and welcome all respectful and productive feedback. But I’m doggedly anti-troll.

After this site saw that sudden surge in activity, I was invited to write a piece on unmarried motherhood for The Atlantic. I know. Pretty amazing, yes? Still pinching myself over that. In addition to being a creative writer and adjunct English professor, I’m also the founder of Beyond Baby Mamas, an online support and advocacy community for single parents of color. If you know anyone who could benefit from joining our fledgling group, send them to our Facebook page, our Tumblr, our Twitter, and our website.

The Atlantic piece has now led to what’s going to happen tomorrow (March 27) morning: I’ll be joining a discussion on unmarried motherhood and why talking to unmarried mothers is a critical part of interrogating stats on single parenthood. The discussion takes place on The Takeaway, a co-production of WNYC Radio and Public Radio International, syndicated nationally. If you’d like to listen live, I’ll be on around 9:45 am. I’ll update this post with an embedded audio clip, should one become available.

UPDATED: I can’t figure out how to embed the audio player, but here’s a link to the audio.

If you came to this blog for lyrical, moving writing, fear not. The next post will be a return to form. Periodically, I do update readers on my writerly news, publications, and developments. But this is, first and foremost, a creative nonfiction (and fiction/poetry) blog. That it will remain.

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The Writer, In and Out of Love.

Whether you keep record of the glorious or the grotesque, beware the lover whose first impression of you is forged through your work. The suitor who falls, head first, for your words — their beauty or strangeness; their raw, vein-opening properties; their subtle choreography across a page — will never truly know you. He may think you part-goddess, a sorcerer, a changeling, confusing your rare talent with an unattainable affection. For him, your heart is only to be apprehended in increments, a collection of short, amorphous fictions. For him, you are slightly more than mortal, a creature to be loved but held aloft.

He is not wrong. You do possess a particular power; all women do. But for the writer in love, words are an amulet of impregnable potency. Carefully composed, your words can bear him up. They can be lowered into pits, dropped like ladders from the sky. They can carry him elsewhere. But they can also be a murder, an acquittal, an asylum.

Maddeningly, what they meant months or weeks or mere hours ago may not be what they mean the next moment.

In this way, it is more possible for the woman-writer to destroy something essential in a suitor than it is for any other construct of woman in existence. It is right for the men we love to treat us gingerly.

If we are idealized, it is, at first, not entirely unwelcome. We intend, however quietly, to be adored. Here is our secret: we do not feel mortal, not always. When we are with the work, in solitude, we are transcendent. And when we emerge, we covet the worlds of our making, disappointed when we look up and find ourselves tethered to a reality we cannot so easily bend. No, we do not expect to die; our words, should they reach the eyes of future generations, will regenerate us.

Writers may be more reclusive — may appear more enigmatic — than actors, but we court a similar importance, perhaps especially in our romances. We may come to our lovers as casks filled with nothing save our insecurities, and expect that they empty us then refill us with affirmation. We may find ourselves unable to fully invest in their conversation or emotion, so preoccupied are we with capturing the moment for later freeing on an empty page. We may pummel them with a deluge of missives and demand that they respond in kind. And if our dealings with them begin to breach that most sacred of spaces — the space within which we create — we will grow to resent them.

It is unsurprising, then, that the layman who falls for a writer often feels he has gotten both more and far less that he’s bargained for.

But woe unto the woman-writer who becomes enamored of one of her own. They will be as two tempests in battle, each on quests to throw the brighter bolt of lightening. Whether hot or cold, they will gasp under the weight of all their words. The lava and the avalanche are equally likely to consume them.

None of this is to say that we should resolve ourselves to solitude. It is simply a reminder. We must never let our power corrupt our ability to care. We must remind ourselves that the bone and the breath, the warm inner skin of a palm, belong to a person and not to one of our paragraphs. If we are to love at all, we must understand our limits. Though our words may grant us second life, it is only this first in which we are able to truly live.

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Becoming Gazelles: A Mothering Story.

Story, age 2.5, and I. Photo credit: me.
Story, age 2.5, and I. Photo credit: me.

Years before I had her, I snapped a photograph of a majestic, whimsical girl’s bed in a discount furniture store and immediately began to dream of the daughter whose slumber it might bear. Tiny but preternaturally strong with hair the color of starfish and sand, she had eyes that saw even when they were closed, even when she was sleeping.

The bed cost over 600 dollars. It was not worth this much. Shaped like Cinderella’s pumpkinesque carriage, its framing was forged of thin, cheap metal. It did not come with the shimmering sheers that would’ve completed its transformation into a thing fit for a dream-daughter. Still, its price forced me to imagine a life in which paying for such a thing, its fancy so fleeting as to be outgrown in five or fewer years, seemed possible.

I have never wanted to be wealthy. At turns, I’ve dreamt of life on a converted schoolbus or in a fully furnished RV. When I imagine a home, I think of modest two-bedroom apartments, of cheap and unloved houses of the type that are all but abandoned in favor of the plywood monstrosities that keep popping up and displacing the deer in my community. I dream of a dwelling that does not further alter a city’s ecosystem.

This has not changed much with motherhood. I have not been struck with a sudden compulsion to amass everything ever invented for the modern American child. Despite the occasional twinge of guilt over what material things I must forgo, I understand those things as the ephemera they are. That tiny, strong, perceptive girl I once pined for at a furniture store display exists now. And mothering her looks far different in practice than it did in my imagining.

What is sure is that she deserves all I am capable of giving her.

But what has become most important for me to give her is not a bed that will compel her to buy into our rampant princess culture, is not a life of excessive and bottomless longing. What is essential to her inheritance are the things only I can provide for her — and those things cannot be procured with mammon.

We do not yet live alone. For her whole life, we’ve had company. First, there was her granny, my mother, boarding in my one-bedroom space in the Midwest. Now we, all three, are boarding with my grandmother in a two-bedroom place back East.

This has its certain magics: that my daughter can tear barefoot ’round a corner and be caught in loving arms while I write; that at any moment, I might overhear her sharing conversation with a woman 68 years her senior; that I can leave home with her seeing me off at the door rather than from behind the walls of a daycare center. But this multigenerational home-life also has its downswings, not least of which is the feeling of deference our domicile tends to elicit.

In the homes of others, I have always assumed a silence, a compliance with the established rules and roles of the owners. And this is doubly true when I am among foremothers. I have never learned to stand steel-backed before them and say: I have grown. I am not just womanish but fully a woman, no longer a post-adolescent girl over whom one must hover, dispensing stray insights.

Among grown women, stray insights are best held on the tongue till solicited. The wisest women solicit often — but they also know when to stem the tide.

I am still learning this wisdom but it is critical to raising the girl I have birthed. More important even than finding the means to afford us rooms of our own is the ability to stand sure-footed in any room and to declare that which is and is not acceptable to say or do to me and mine.

Boldness is bought with a price I was unwilling to pay before becoming a parent. The cost of being too often disliked was greater than the satisfaction of feeling assertive. I have rarely born well the rejections of those who find themselves surprised, displeased, or disappointed with me, after I’ve staked some claim or held some ground they would rather have seen me cede. Always, respite from the expectations and approval of others has been easiest for me to find when I am farthest away. But a mother should not have to become a vagrant to infuse her own voice with certainty.

Assertiveness is the gift every girlchild needs most, that quiet self-possession that can state without tears and with total composure: this is the line you will not cross.

Yes, more than money, bedtime carriages, or even our own home, it is an unshakable sense of herself I work hardest these days to preserve, and an unshakable sense of my own self I work hardest to provide.

In so doing, I’ve discovered there is no greater need for these gifts than in our interaction with each other. For we are gazelles, alternately locking horns and spurring each other toward swifter, surer, and more graceful gaits.

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What Comes of Falling for a Fantasy Buff.

For you, the erstwhile Tender, a good bar serves mead and counsel to common men, and bawdy talk to strangers is but a prelude to battle, a toast to what may be one long, last ride. You, as if by unspoken vow, are a keeper of tallies, of wagers, of secrets, a steadfast sage often mistaken for a mere villager.

For you, Baltimore is but one of many kingdoms, its harbor a passage to freedom, to war. Yet your wanderlust has been waylaid and you’ve felt tethered, as if by some sorcerer’s edict, to home. Though a firstborn son, a namesake, an heir, you do not seem as interested in these familial vestments as you are in the many storied marvels that lay months away from your own hearth, as you are in worlds written into the endless reams of parchment you are able to consume in far less than a fortnight.

You are someone else; you are more, meant for a life beyond the hills of druids, beyond fair Canton’s shore. You’ve an earned nobility, if not a noble’s name, an unused valor, and purposes as yet unmined. You are most at peace among large, intimidating tomes that foretell unspeakable futures as well as untenable pasts. You are warm, even in winters of the soul, when the hearts of lesser men grow coldest. You deserve to slay dragons, to gaze on citadels of light, to stare into the eyes of sirens without succumbing.

Though I suspect I am able, I’ve no desire to turn you to stone.

When I met you, you were full of tales, of lives interrupted, of grounds both gained and lost, and you looked at me as though I were a great ship’s bow, a star pointed eastward, a vast sea itself. Would that I possessed the power to knight you. I would see you kneel this very night. I would hear your solemn oath.

But none knight men like you, save God and Self. You are your own, and everyone you serve is better for it.

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How the 3/5ths Live.

From an outsider’s perspective, say, from the purview of a citizen whose great-great-grandfathers were land owners, voters, arbiters of the unamended Constitution, we spend a lot of time lamenting. We deflect our own savagery by blaming it on their ancestors. Our hearing turns conveniently selective when they insist that they are not their ancestors. They know full well that, after our brief exchange — wherein they will glumly wonder, How can black people be so unforgiving? — they will go home and turn a key in the lock of a house they’ve either purchased outright or will pay off before the age of 30. They know how easily they qualified for their low-interest mortgage. They know their parents’ pristine credit, ensured by their grandfather’s investments and assets, inherited from their great-grandfathers dividends, insured by their great-great-grandfather’s land ownership, made that possible.

And they know our great-great-grandparents — both of them — and their six- and seven- and nine-year-old children worked that land with no pay. They know neither generation had anything to hand down to our grandparents. They know we inherited not assets, but in most cases, debt. They know that if our parents benefited from the Cosby-fication of a Black Middle Class, it was as recently as the late 20th century and was not achieved without the splintering of entire communities. They know our gains can often be threatened — nay, ravaged — by the strong winds of a single recession.

They know that, when we are poor, it is not often because of bad breaks, bad investments, or passing on the right kinds of plentiful opportunities. It is because we were written into the annals of this country’s history as 3/5 human and, centuries later, we are still seen by many as such.

It is because they get to deny this, even as it profits them, even as their satirical publications bandy about their particular brand of ironic hipster racism and they get to laugh, defend it, and call us (and our nine-year-old youngest-ever Best Actress Oscar nominee) oversensitive and incapable of comprehending satire — incapable, of course, because we are missing those vital two-fifths of humanity that house the white man’s funny bone, presumably.

And look at what white folks’ humor hath wrought: renderings of our president, his wife, and their daughters as apes, as Hottentots, as savages; ridicule of our athletes as animals; co-opted use of an incendiary racial slur as a synonym for friend; rampant Islamophobia; incessant hypersexualization of our men, women, and children.

Forgive us our straight faces.

From our own vantage, we are exhausted. Too often, we are winded, expending so much oxygen on explaining in detail to those who surely must already know how our humanity has been impinged and why we are deserving of verbally unmolested heroes and schools that do not subscribe to a playground-to-prison pipeline for our children. We’re positively spent, managing the endless task of finding and heralding more First Black _____s to Ever ______, spent after having to point out that, if all things were equal, we would’ve stopped “pioneering” in fields they’ve dominated and from which we’ve been historically barred, ages ago.

If we decline an opportunity to attend their “healing racism” initiatives, if we remain silent when they ask us why we don’t have to wash our hair daily, if we sigh with deep exasperation when they say they “don’t see race” — even as nooses are still being hung at schools, crosses still burned on laws, sentencing still disproportionately favors harsher penalties for minority offenders, and the few black actors we’re allowed still can’t enjoy their nominations and awards the rest of us having to wonder if they’ve only been offered them because they played criminals, slaves, pimps, or domestics — we have our reasons.

And no, if you can’t possibly imagine what they are, we’ll waste no further air elucidating them for you.

We have our own means of navigating what this country has apportioned us — and they are intricate, communal, and, at times, quite deeply flawed. But if we are to always be treated as abstractions, having the form of humanness but not the entitlements thereof, we will continue to keep our ways clandestine and our cards close to the vest. We will accept their apologies as publicly as they issue them, while being as slow to trust their sincerity in private as they are to believe we’re owed them in the first place.

It is not so difficult, overcoming. You need only have ancestors whose flesh was cracked open like melon rind and torn from their limbs by hounds. You need only have children who can continue to smile when adults, hiding behind anonymity, call them the kinds of names they are never allowed to repeat. You need only have the grace to accept “heartfelt remorse” from people whose ability to produce such was made suspect the moment they thought to offend your children, in such particularly callous ways to begin with.

We’ve grown good at it. It is the one thing privilege cannot buy.

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In Memoriam: Hadiya Pendleton.

It’s so likely I saw her, amid the Frederick Douglas and Sojourner Truth reenactors, among the surviving Tuskegee Airmen, and the surprisingly soulful Isiserettes from Des Moines. It’s likely her performance, marching and shimmying as a majorette with the other band members from King College Prep got a shoulder-shake out of Sasha, a mellow head-nod from Malia, a slightly offbeat soul clap from the president.

The most prolific photo of her, splashed across websites under headlines regarding her death, looks like it may have been taken for a school ID. Her smile is faint, but her eyes are soft. At a recent news conference, her father addressed the at-large gunman, saying, “Man, you took the light of my life.” With just a glance at her, so incandescent with promise, it is easy to understand how true that must be.

I watched the entire Inaugural Parade at home with my daughter and my grandmother who, after two solid hours of pomp and pageantry, still managed to say with rapt satisfaction, “God, I love to watch people march.”

Hadiya Pendleton was among those proud marchers, many of whom were black. I do not exaggerate when I tell you that day was among the most blackness-affirming days I’ve ever witnessed firsthand in this country. Our first  biracial president entered his second term in office. The great civil rights stalwart and matriarch Myrlie Evers-Williams brought forth an invocation. He was serenaded by this generation’s most spectacular black pop star. And in his parade, droves of black folks beat drums and channeled black civil war soldiers and performed the soul songs we grew up hearing our mamas play while cleaning on Saturday mornings.

For us, comparatively safe in our living room, it was a good day to be black in America. But it was not a day of ceasefire. Even in DC, just miles from the celebration, someone, somewhere, faced his or her customary threat of gun violence.

The same was true of Pendleton’s native Chicago, where for years, the president lived and worked before moving to another predominantly black city and where daily, our own die at some indiscriminate bullet’s behest.

In inner cities, homicides don’t pause to honor inaugurations, not even of a black president who “should” — by the logic of some — make them feel such a spike in self-esteem that they begin to belt their pants at the waist, tell kingpins they’d rather work at McDonald’s for that good, honest minimum wage, and turn their guns over to nonprofits in exchange for canned goods and GED prep courses.

In inner cities, no one ever says to reporters, in the wake of multiple murders within minutes, “I thought we were safe. I never dreamed this could happen on my block.”

Even Hadiya Pendleton, whose school was in a relatively safe area and who sought shelter in a park not known for violent crime, must’ve known how possible it is for an unarmed child to be killed without provocation in her own city.

She was an honor student.

It’s true that I may have seen Hadiya marching across my TV screen last Monday, may even have glanced at her as I do so many of the young black girls I teach, and wondered how closely her look and her life resemble what my own daughter’s will be when she’s older. But I wouldn’t have needed to to understand what’s happening to her.

Rather that traveling across the Atlantic to Paris as she’d planned, Pendleton is traveling through the national news circuit, no longer a girl, now a disembodied reputation.

Rather than having the luxury of unqualified mourning, those who survive her have to spend these irretrievable moments of reflection and grief stockpiling reporters with Hadiya’s “positive” attributes and exceptional experiences. Those who survive her feel the need to insist that she is different than some of the other black Chicago bodies that are reported as little more than large and senseless homicide numbers. No gang affiliations. No bad grades. No “wrong crowd.” Beautiful, built for greatness. 

She didn’t deserve this.

It is fitting that Hadiya’s connection to the president is being used as her narrative hook: gun control reform is an issue that’s risen to prominence in recent weeks. Addressing it was one of the first orders of post-inauguration business. It would be difficult to write about this girl without twisting the knife of irony: she lived and died in the place where the president began his political career, yet had she not performed in his D.C. parade, no one outside of their city — which has been slowly burning from within for years before recent mass shootings in suburban areas forced the government’s hand on gun laws — would know her name.

Now that we do know it — now that the president knows it — we expect him to amplify it the way he’s so often done when children from the quiet alcoves of the country have been slain. We expect it, if for no other reason, because Hadiya marched and raised her own voice for him.

But he may not. And even if he doesn’t, we have our own imperatives. We have our own voices to raise, our own unctions to march. We are, after all, the ones we’ve been waiting for.

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Mother as Mountain, as Sky.

When he surfaces, so long after you’ve abandoned imagining that men like him exist, you are flummoxed, but only fleetingly. You do not realize at first how ready you’ve been.

You thought you would be more hesitant, that your years since becoming a mother had morphed you into martyrdom, a voluntary consignment: its length the duration of your daughter’s childhood, its berth too wide to breach.

He enters into view and as you regard his easy grin, it occurs to you how long you’ve been blocking your natural flow of endorphins, denying estrogen surges, enabling a kind of psychic sterilization.

You believed you would spend a full 18 years depriving yourself of new love.

But in that flash between flummoxing and pardon, an iron gate has unlatched. You, remembering suddenly that you are all woman, as well as all mother, hear an echo, a flutter: I am no martyr.

If you were, you wouldn’t be hastening toward him. You wouldn’t be brushing your cheek against the course range of hair on his face and purring like a cat who’s found a home. You wouldn’t entrust him with your hands, wouldn’t gaze down at the half-moons scalloped under his fingernails and wish on them.

Your gait is neither measured nor wary; you rushed to him. It has been too long since your heart hoped for more than the half-love that co-parents can sometimes rekindle, for more than the comforts of a companionship not unlike broken in boots or limb-stretched sweaters. You’d nearly forgotten how it felt to steal away when all was quiet and whisper feverish nothings to someone who does not yet know you well enough to discard or destroy you.

It is new, the nerve endings snapping to attention again, the trail of thoughts that lead far away from nursery rhymes and apple juice boxes, and even the guilt you feel at leaving behind the illusions you’d held so long of one partner, one family, some structure you’d hoped could be retroactively whole, the guilt at shattering what’s left of the glass.

It is all so new.

When you tell your ex, he is stunned; he could no more foresee it than you could. You realize you were grasping at the selfsame straws. You realize how empty of half-moons your hands have been.

There are fears you are holding at bay, but rather than repressed, they must be purged. You will not enter this new house haunted. For your daughter must understand her mother as a woman who can handle complexities, who can cast an alchemy of friendship and motherhood and romance that sates us all. She must understand that we do not only receive one chance, one love, one faltering per lifetime. We are a species that thrives amid opportunities; it is only when we bar ourselves from seizing them that we truly fail. She must know that love can be the most nourishing opportunity of all; the more you let in, the larger you loom–and right now, her mother is a mountain, is a sky.

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Holy, Holy, Holy.

There is a sign at the sight of Thee. There is none beside Thee.

This year has been a reckoning, a humbling. Each day and every breath, a reminder of your mercy and our own mortality. This year, we have lived our own Massacre of Innocents. In advance of this holiday, we were informed anew of the cruelty inhabiting Earth and of the compassion it will take to overcome it. In every telling of your origin story, the most improbable point for me has been that a king would slaughter many in an effort to obliterate one, that a man of great might could feel so strangely threatened by children.

I need no longer imagine.

This year, You have been a sickle, gathering unto Yourself those we’ve loved. Though we know there is no better place for them than with you, exulting in this has not been easy. Even as we commemorate God’s infinite love made manifest in You, we, like the parents of Bethlehem, are haunted by loss.

It is our charge, then, as this trying year begins to finally recede, to restore our faith in the Incarnation, to reclaim whatever wonder has slipped from our grasp.

The beauty of your birth must never be blotted by our sorrow. That You have come to us and that You continually pine for the renewal of our faith are gifts whose value cannot be measured. That You are able, morning by morning, to transmute our misery and usher in the kind of love we could no longer imagine, is the reason we rise each year on this holiday and proclaim you holy.

You are what we cannot be.