if you've burned down low

writing like a mother

Every month I wake up to the possibility that I will once again be a writer. I tell myself, this month, now is the time, carpe diem. I tell myself the only way to be a writer is to write. And the days then burn around me, a forest of time that lights all at once. It’s May, it’s May, the year is almost half-gone…

In Forgiving God I felt myself alight with the words. I wanted to know, I was desperate to know what remained, what could withstand the burning down that is the NICU, the fire of decisions, signing a heartbeat past the surgery doors, pacing the same linoleum squares. I wanted to remain, and I wanted to transform. But I wanted to remain, more.

God gave me transformation.

I am sitting in the middle of it, the butterfly not yet free of her cocoon, but fighting with it. Can I fly, yet? Will I ever be able to? Would I have ever chosen this change, for myself? And does it matter, really?

But the change aches. The words feel stopped up, I long for them and I cannot find them. Writing about my son was clear. There were things to say - the images to give you, like this one that rises up before me like a ghost daring me to walk back through: the feeling of a notebook full of metaphysics on my cheek as I fell asleep in a class, running on the night shift version of sleep, my son in the care of strangers with degrees in unpronounceable concepts. My own unpronounceable concepts - the A and B theories of time - completely useless to my son. I can feel my face falling onto the table in an attempt to take notes. I can feel the prickle under my skin that says my milk is coming in and my son needs to feed. I can feel myself locked in a stall in the second floor women’s bathroom, wondering if I will ever come back to life.

All of that was clear. I could - I still can - give it to you.

But it’s been seven years, and my son is growing, and I have the uncomfortable sense that I want to tell you a different story.

The story of leaving the country of academia. The story of the first time I mounted a horse or felt the trot rise up in me like freedom. The story of all the things I never thought I would hear God say, and God still said.

In my mind what I write from within the cocoon should be kept hidden, waiting until it’s the better time or the moral of the story is set free. But then a flicker of the same light that kept me awake at three in the morning with the hope of putting onto paper something of my life says -

Write, Hilary.

Write like a mother.

Write from inside the cocoon and from before the moral of the story.

Write the time that you first felt Joy groom your hair as you stroked her neck, breathing in the dirt and the hay and the flies and the sweat, and the realization that she accepted you, this horse who speaks love in this language. Write the time you drove home with the windows down and the Texas primroses bloomed alongside the car.

Hilary, write. Write the stories that mean something but you don’t know what yet. When you heard your son reading to himself, when you had no reason to sit on the back porch and look for the song of the Carolina wren.

I am still in the cocoon. I don’t know what will emerge - book or blog or essay or poem -

but I will write.