Suffering

On Mother’s Day, the kids and I have a tradition: we go on a hike by the river. I wish we did it every Sunday. But our weekends are so completely hyper-scheduled with games and practices and obligations.  I spend more time sitting on the sidelines with people I barely know who happen to have had kids at around the same time as me than I do with the people I gave birth to. I have tried to incite a revolution when it looks like some other parent is feeling a similar frustration. But so far, that has gotten me exactly nowhere. And it’s not as though I’m railing against a system of oppression.  People voluntarily pay money to be a part of this machine.  No one is making us do it.  And really it’s no big deal. Life goes on. But man, traipsing through the woods with my kids is such a simple pleasure.  I  really wish I had more of it in my life. And it makes me sad that I don’t. 

I’ve been writing and thinking (and talking, because hearing other people’s ideas is always part of my research) about suffering. How much we compare suffering, see ours in comparison others, feel ungrateful and small when we acknowledge that something sucks. Especially something that is, in the grand scheme of injuries and suffering, not a big deal.  I see it in the hierarchy of trauma, in the news cycle, in the sometimes god-awful shitshow that is my Facebook feed. Stuff can suck without being the worst EVER.  I’m not taking up collection or asking the Red Cross to divert funds to me over this issue. I might not even talk about it (except to you, dear reader, of course).  But I can admit that it bums me out.  And when I do, I can deal with it, and maybe even change it.  The danger of minimizing the importance of the little things that are causing us grief is that it makes us a bunch of sleepwalking, complacent cows.  The water goes from uncomfortable to scalding one degree at a time–we must pay attention or risk being boiled alive by our own silences.

The poem below is not exactly related.  I just like it.  I like both the ease of floating and the balance it requires.  If you’re absolutely in search of a prompt here, I ask you to remember when you felt most like yourself.  And consider making space for that in your life.  And send me some damn poems.

The rented lakes of my childhood

by Marge Piercy

I remember the lakes of my Michigan
childhood. Here they are called ponds.
Lakes belonged to summer, two-week
vacations that my father was granted by
Westinghouse when we rented some cabin.

Never mind the dishes with spiderweb
cracks, the crooked aluminum sauce
pans, the crusted black frying pans.
Never mind the mattresses shaped
like the letter V. Old jangling springs.

Moldy bathrooms. Low ceilings
that leaked. The lakes were mysteries
of sand and filmy weeds and minnows
flickering through my fingers. I rowed
into freedom. Alone on the water

that freckled into small ripples,
that raised its hackles in storms,
that lay glassy at twilight reflecting
the sunset then sucking up the dark,
I was unobserved as the quiet doe

coming with her fauns to drink
on the opposite shore. I let the row-
boat drift as the current pleased, lying
faceup like a photographer’s plate
the rising moon turned to a ghost.

And though the voices called me
back to the rented space we shared
I was sure I left my real self there—
a tiny black pupil in the immense
eye of a silver pool of silence.