Yesterday afternoon I wrote a poem, I thought I would post it today, but now I feel perhaps it’s better to leave it where it is and go back and look at it some other time.
The beginnings of another one came to me in the shower, now I don’t know what to do about it.
What happens to sadness if you push it away?
Does it fester in the dark, like words never written?
Does it burrow its way into your soul
and feast on what it finds there?From the surface, you brush away the dust,
shake out your feathers
and get on with life.You won’t let it hurt you,
you’ll face the new day,
and the next, and the next.
Slide into the mask
and smile for the camera.Then thirty years later
Linda Rushby 17 May 2020
you look at that smile,
and remember, remember,
the pain that those moments
were trying to cover.
Well, there you go. I finished it (I think). That’ll do, anyway.
Yesterday I came across a photo from 1987 and posted it on Facebook. I remember that time as being amongst the most miserable of my life. We were living in Dallas, I had given up my career to be an ex-pat wife, and found myself sitting in the wreckage of the fantasy that at last I would have time to do some ‘serious’ writing. I had left behind my family and friends; I was getting hardly any sleep, struggling to cope with this terrifying new role of ‘mother’ for which I felt utterly unprepared and unsuited; wracked with guilt and shame for having those feelings; convinced that my son would grow up to hate me because he cried constantly, while I was incapable of meeting his needs; totally dependent on and in awe of my husband who, as well as doing a full time job, was able to understand, soothe, and care for the baby with endless patience and all the parental instincts which I so badly lacked.
And needless to say, I was far too ashamed to seek outside help, even if I had a clue where to look for it. The few ‘friends’ I was able to make were other young mothers, all much more well-adjusted than me, all making it seem so easy, so how could I own up to any of them what a monster I felt inside?
With all those memories, I looked at the two smiling faces, my own and that of the perfect little child, standing with hands holding onto the coffee table while I sat on the sofa supporting him under his armpits.
Oddly, when I look back over my life, it seems that ‘motherhood’ is the one thing I somehow got right, the one project of my life whose outcomes – two wonderful, loving, caring people – I can look at with pride (or maybe that’s down to their father’s contribution, rather than mine).
I don’t know why I wrote this. It’s not what I expected.