Every year, now, around my birthday, I feel a tug to write something, employing words to mark the privilege of completing another ride around the sun. This year’s efforts came in the form of a love letter to my life. Here, below, is an edited version, and though it’s all between me and me, I wonder if you can relate to this need or desire to mark the years somehow, to catalog your journey. Do you write a song, or journal? Do you collect things; a feather, cards, ticket stubs, remnants of days you rushed through, moments you think you’ll never forget, yet know you might?
Dear one,
Last Thursday, we woke to the beginning of our 57th year together. It feels like some things need to be said. Probably nothing I haven’t said before, but I find that I tend to forget things more frequently these days. You, too?
Look, we’ve had our challenges. We rarely seemed to measure up to what the world expected of us. I know that’s just a perspective, but then, so is everything else in life. Conjecture, presumption, supposition….call it what you will, but the truth as I know it is that there isn’t one single way to describe the truth. Everyone sees things their own way, depending on their circumstances, culture, upbringing, It’s the simultaneous bane and beauty of being human , I suppose. But there I go again, digressing. It’s something I’m really good at, at least on paper.
There were times I wished we weren’t together. I’m not proud of this, but I am really, really grateful that you didn’t give up on me.
There were times I belittled you, comparing you to other lives. I know this is a common thing people do, but I also know now it is extremely unhelpful. We get what we get, don’t we? It’s how we look at it, what we do with it, how we react to it, that matters.
There were times, too many to count, that I was blind to our abundance, our cup spilling over with blessings. Now we live in a world that has perfected the art of showing and telling the endless and collected horrors and incivilities and the ways we harm each other, the ways in which we hoard while others starve. Now, it is impossible to ignore the inequity, and it feels criminal to imagine we lack a single thing, you and I, or that we should not be grateful and share generously. Perspective.
At nineteen, I knew my life would be one grand adventure. I’d travel, and give birth to poems and stories, and mother them with a loose and loving abandon. If you’d been clairvoyant, and told me I’d all but neglect my writing, for years and years, throwing it just enough scraps of food to keep it hanging on and hopeful, I’d have been horrified. I’d have told you, in no uncertain terms, how confused you were, and how unfaithful.
I could go on, dear Life, and on some more. I’m good at that, remember? But here’s the gist, here’s the heart of it: I love you. I love the way we’ve unfolded together, warts and scabs and miseries included. I loved our adventurous young adult years, and I’ve grown to love these plodding middle years, too. I love the way I’ve evolved; once a fearful, quirky teenager who knew she didn’t want children, and now a mid-life woman, quirky still, whose days are saturated with mothering, and it’s nothing like I imagined. Things so rarely are.
I love the patience and tenacity you’ve modeled for me, helping me grow my own. Also, Life, I am so grateful for the way you’ve pointed quietly to the journal, the keypad, over and over again without lecturing, allowing me to find my Poet’s voice again. I respect the way you just know we are going through the landscapes we must, with the company we need, at the times we should.
I will never abandon you, dear Life. I know we are in this together, for we are nothing without each other. And here I am , down on my sometimes achy knee, asking you for your hand. Here I am, promising, promising to make all kinds of love to you, with my whole self. Here I am promising to be true to you, which means being true to me, for all the days we may be gifted in this flesh, this venue.
Let’s be what you’ve always known we could be—a helper, a blessing, a teacher….and do what you’ve always known we can do—make poems, and art, and stories, and keep guiding a special young woman towards her own life, which will someday be untangled from mine. Let’s take the raw, rough dough we are offered and throw in yeast and punch it down and let it rise, punch it down again and trust it will rise, be transformed by the heat of all the fires and become something that will nurture, and nourish, and sustain.
Happy Birthday to us.
–Melinda Coppola
Eloquence as Legacy