scuba diving in the river
metaphorically speaking
How dare the daylilies bloom persimmon already? And how dare my sweet children turn one- and three-years-old this month? Can you believe those baby bunnies, already looking quite teenagerly, approaching the size of a softball? The audacity.
I just wrapped up five years of working for a botanic garden in Maine. Throughout each summer, I felt simultaneously delighted and distraught by the plants’ opulent displays of impermanence. Snowdrops, daffodils, redbuds, rhodies, peonies, poppies, lupines, lilies, irises, dahlias–each putting on a spectacular show and then much-too-quickly wilting to mush.
Earlier this month I left my job to start another job–fundraising for an environmental org in Boston–and then changed my mind. After a dozen nights of heavy journaling, walks in the forest, conversations with Matt, technical spreadsheets and four-column pros-and-cons lists, I sent an apologetic email informing the new nonprofit that I have decided to be a stay-at-home-mom instead. On the one hand, this feels like the most irresponsible thing I have ever done. On the other hand, I’ve decided to spend my days caring for my children, and that is a pretty responsible thing to do, right?
As my husband and I have been saying, “ life is not a dress rehearsal.” Our kids are growing up so damn fast, and this feels like the exact moment to be raising them full-time. They are so wise and playful and beautiful and FUN, and I feel grateful and excited to be starting this chapter.
This is also the first time in fifteen years that I haven’t been working a job, or looking for a job, or both. This, unsurprisingly, feels like a vacation for my brain. Suddenly when I have a moment of pause, I am not thinking of some work-email that needs responding-to, or what I should have said during a recent high-stakes conversation. I am thinking of my kids, and my family, and the world, and the beauty, and the suffering, and ideas much bigger than me. I am processing more, I am reflecting more, I am writing more.
Bless my husband, Matt, who has listened to me wax poetic about wanting to be a poet for years. He knows, more than anyone else on Earth, how desperately I long to be “a writer.” Obviously I lack the attention span to pen anything long-form, but for decades my notebooks have been filling up with poems, songs, “essays” (read: rants), and drafts of children’s books. Matt has insisted all along that I am an artist and a writer.
One day recently he put it to me very simply.
“Let’s say you want to be someone who scuba dives in the river,” he said, gesturing toward the Charles. “Well, what you’d have to do is: start scuba diving in the river. You start scuba diving in the river every day, and people will start saying: ‘now, that’s someone who scuba dives in the river.’ And eventually, you would start to see yourself as someone who scuba dives in the river.”
He is right.
Is it cringe to write about writing? It certainly is. But here we are. And here are some poems that I’ve written in the past couple of days. I hope that you, too, are scuba diving in the river, whatever that means for your hopes and dreams.
