If you can believe it, we’re down to the last ten posts in this practice. And for these last days, I’m going to look back a bit at the past year–a year in which I joined my selves together–past, present, and future. Mary Gordon said it so well in The Rest of Life (212).

She would be who she is: the past inseparable from the present, but not dominating it, as the hills that rise from a lake and the lake itself make up a whole bordering each other, joining without separation.

~

 365 true things about me
why this daily practice

april 2015

september 2015

So I’m down to the last hundred posts in this year of catching me–this year of looking at the photos, digging up memories, finding the words to fill in the spaces. I’m taking up more room these days. And I’m more comfortable. I’m discovering things and remembering things. I’m starting to understand how I got to this moment. I will probably always be a private person but from now on, at least I will know who I am.

She sees that she has before her an important task: to understand that all the things that happened in her life happened to her. That she is the same person who was born, was a child, a girl, a young woman, and now she is old. That there is some line running through her body like a wick.

–Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life

~

 365 true things about me
why this daily practice

When my youngest child entered high school and I could see that in four short years I would no longer be tethered to this house and to the school year, for the first time since my early twenties, I began to think about what kind of life I wanted.

Have I mentioned that I had children at home for 31 years? That is a long, long, long time. I know there are exceptions, but for the most part, if you do something for 31 years, you’re going to be tired of it. I was.

And I had a life all those years–I was an attorney, I travelled by myself, I kept up my French, I did four sprint triathlons, I produced a cookbook, I started writing, I went to writing workshops, I started this blog, I got my MFA, I was an editor at two different journals…

I wanted something different. To start with–place. I wanted to spend more time near the ocean. I had been going to Provincetown for writing workshops, and each time I went, I loved it more. I had always loved New England–from my days of camp in Vermont.

Graduation was at the end of May, and on June 2nd I went to Provincetown for the first time just to hang out and write, and I stayed for the first time in one of the cottages at the top of this blog (that had been at the top of this blog for four years by that point), and I fell in love.

With the air, the water, the sky, the light, the cottage–everything.

The way I feel now is as if I have emerged from something and I want to turn around, look back, and figure out what happened. As Mary Gordon wrote in The Rest of Life, “I’m trying to understand what it means to have had a life.” And I want to understand it now while I’m still living it.

Although I do feel as if, over the years, I lost my own mind, I don’t feel lost. I just feel like I need to get my strength back. I feel less like I’m flailing around and more like I just need to keep on this path, following the bits of bread that I managed to throw out over the years–picking up the crumbs and letting them expand.

~

 365 true things about me

Why do I want to come back? For proof I was here. For clues as to who I used to be. I just want to stay long enough to…

I think this place has something to tell me.

I remember friends I made here, but I no longer keep up with them. It’s this place I miss, not the people who were here. Is it this place or the person I was here?

I was my best self here. I learned how to be myself here. It was my first time away from home for a long period of time–eight weeks that first summer, nine the others. Each summer I got closer to me.

The metal rings holding the flag clang against the pole. The water of Lake Champlain laps against the shore. People spread cloths on the picnic tables. A motor boat zooms past a large sail boat that seems to linger in the moment.

Writing about it again this morning for this post, I finally get it. It’s the continuous life. That’s why I’m here–to understand that the girl who was here in 1970 is the same woman who is here now. I’ve been tagging these posts all week with those words without seeing it.

As Mary Gordon wrote so well in The Rest of Life:

“She sees that she has before her an important task: to understand that all the things that happened in her life happened to her.  That she is the same person who was born, was a child, a girl, a young woman, a woman, and now she is old.  That there is some line running through her body like a wick.  She is the same person who was once born.  All the things that happened to her happened to one person…’I’m trying to understand what it means to have had a life.’”

“Do you remember the lake? she said, in an abrupt voice, under pressure of an emotion which caught her heart, made the muscles of her throat stiff, and contracted her lips in a spasm as she said “lake.” For she was a child, throwing bread to the ducks between her parents and at the same time a grown woman coming to her parents who stood by the lake, holding her life in her arms which, as she neared them, grew larger and larger in her arms, until it became a whole life, a complete life, which she put down by them and said, “This is what I have made of it!  This!” And what had she made of it?  What, indeed?  sitting there sewing this morning with Peter.”

This grappling with the fact that we are now the same person we were when we were a child reminds me of the passage that so struck me in Mary Gordon‘s The Rest of Life.  With one important difference.  Here, the narrator, Mrs. Dalloway, appears to be judging her life and finding it coming up short. This was in 1925.

Almost a hundred years later, so does Clara in Dani Shapiro‘s 2007 Black & White:

“…invariably Clara walked away from them feeling that there was a secret club of motherhood, complete with a password no one had ever given her.  Why did this all seem so satisfying to them–the cupcake baking, the constant scheduling, the endless games of Candy Land?  And what was wrong with Clara, what psychic disease caused her constant yearning for something more?”

“She sees that she has before her an important task: to understand that all the things that happened in her life happened to her.  That she is the same person who was born, was a child, a girl, a young woman, a woman, and now she is old.  That there is some line running through her body like a wick.  She is the same person who was once born.  All the things that happened to her hapened to one person…’I’m trying to understand what it means to have had a life.'”