This week is a difficult one for me. It’s a week that would be challenging anyway – the first full week in August after BlogHer is one in which I am always drained and exhausted – but this is the second year of it being especially challenging – or the third, although I usually don’t count the year that I privately refer to as Year Zero – because it’s been two years since the year that was the best BlogHer year that suddenly became the worst BlogHer year.

The summer of 2009 was the summer that Katie and I did that awesome cross-Canada road trip with GM before BlogHer, and the year of the first Sparklecorn party, for which Tracey and I plotted the first unicorn cake and the first BlogHer appearances by Twilight stars (cardboard, but still) and the first NPH posters, and it was also the year that I did the Community Keynote, during which I sobbed my heart out and made a weepy ass of myself onstage in front of a bajillion women, but which was nonetheless wonderful in an emotionally cathartic kind of way. But it was also the summer that my dad died, the summer that I came home from BlogHer and found out that sometime during those few days, during the unicorns and the sparkle and the emotional catharsis, he’d died, alone.

And then the rest of the summer was all sadness, sadness such as I’d never known, and dark.

And so it’s been, in both of the summers since, that the first week of August, the week of BlogHer, and after, has felt like it marks a transition from light to dark, from sunlight to shadow, from happy to sad. Last year was complicated, of course, because BlogHer itself was complicated, what with the drama around Tanner, but even that – with its moments of heartbursting joy and its stretches of gutwrenching sad – just seemed to confirm what I was already prepared to assume: that this time of year, for me, will always see my heart drop, just at the moment that it is lifted highest.

This year, there are no obvious triggers for heartbreak – on the contrary, this year August marks a transition into some exciting life changes – but the shadows are there, gathered, lurking, and I’m caught between wanting to just linger with them, and acknowledge their presence and their force, and wanting to deny them, to insist upon looking forward and seeing only light.

But I mightn’t appreciate that light so well, if I force myself to forget, to unsee the dark. So I’ll walk in the in-between for a day or two, and work to keep my balance.

I can still remember, vividly, the day that my father taught me to ride a bicycle. We lived at the end of a quiet suburban street lined with cherry and dogwood trees, our house set back from the cul-de-sac by what seemed to me, at age 5, to be a very long and very wide drive, perfect for small bicycles, and my dad and I spent hours there together as I circled that drive, round and round and round, on my little bike with the big training wheels. On the day that the wheels came off, we left the security of that smooth-paved drive and went out onto the street.

Dad kept his hand on my back as I pedaled down the street, and he kept it there as I pedaled back up the street, and he kept there as I pedaled down again and up again and with every pass the pressure of his hand became lighter and lighter and lighter until suddenly I couldn’t feel it there anymore, and I was flying, all on my own, and I remember that moment, I remember it keenly, that moment of sudden, terrifying, exhilarating realization that I was on my own, that I was doing it on my own, that I could do it all on my own, and I turned my head to see where he was, and he was there, of course, just some distance back, smiling as wide as I would ever see him smile, thrilled, proud, because this was something we’d done together, this thing, this getting me to be able to do this all on my own, and he was prouder of me than I was of myself, and the cherry trees and the dogwood trees flashed by me as I sped along, not looking where I was going, and it was wonderful, wonderful. And then I crashed into the bushes on someone’s lawn, and I cried.

It hadn’t occurred to me until this morning, watching my husband teach Emilia how to ride her bike all on her own, that my own bike-riding lesson with my own father summarized our relationship perfectly, that it did, in fact, summarize parenthood perfectly, if one could overlook the banality of the trope of lifting parental hands from the shoulders of the child, inasmuch as that moment – the banal lifting of one’s hand, figurative or otherwise – is in some ways the moment, the moment that stays with us, parent and child, as the moment during which everything changes and yet becomes – in the very same moment – ever fixed. I can still feel my father’s hand on my back, I can still hear his footsteps running alongside me as I pedal harder and faster, harder and faster, speeding along, speeding away. And I can still sense him there, behind me, smiling, proud, watching me go.

This is what a father gives to his daughter, what a parent gives to a child; this what I saw my husband give to our girl this morning, this encouragement to fly, this promise to always keep his hand ready to catch her, this covenant of letting go and holding on, this pact of saying goodbye and never parting. This lived promise that is family, that is love.

I can still feel my father there, I said, and that’s true. I can no longer see his smile, because he’s gone, but I know that it’s there. I can still feel his hand on my back.

Today I saw my daughter’s father put his hand on hers. This is how life goes on.

———

(If you have HBO, you need to watch or DVR this film today and share it with the dad in your life. It’s a wonderful, heart-lifting and heart-yanking meditation on fatherhood and parenthood and the love that we feel for our kids and as I said last week at the film’s HBO premiere, it’s the kind of film that reminds you of things that you didn’t think you needed reminding about. Like telling your kids that you love them. Your parents, too.

It’ll be out on video next month. I’ll remind you about it then. You’ll thank me.

Now, go hug the dad in your life.)

A few weeks ago at SXSW in Austin, Texas, the lovely Karen Walrond sat me down and asked me a few questions about heartbreak. Not about the sad and the terrible and the woe-is-me of heartbreak, but about the beauty of heartbreak. And it was a wonderful and, I think, important conversation, because there is beauty in heartbreak, such that it’s actually misleading to call that exercising of the heart a break. The heart never really breaks. It pulls and stretches and moves and expands, and that movement can hurt terribly, but it’s not a movement toward breaking. The heart is not bone or ceramic or glass, Debbie Harry’s assertions notwithstanding. The heart, as I’ve said before, is a muscle. Its movements are extraordinary, even when they hurt. I needed to remind myself of that.

There are things that one knows about one’s self, and things that one doesn’t. I know, for example, that words make me happy and that I love my children and that I can, when I try, be very funny, and that I am introverted (yes, really) and that I am good at philosophy and at making soup and that I love the smell of lilacs. I know, too, that I am prone to anxiety and depression, but that I am able to cope with these with the help of the love and support of my family and by writing and with a certain quantity of pharmaceuticals. What I don’t know is how big a role my proneness to anxiety and depression plays on the stage of my psyche – whether it is a starring role or a bit part, whether its strutting and fretting defines the production in some critical way or is just a nuance, just theatrical flair – and whether, or the extent to which, it shapes who I am. What I also don’t know: how much it effects how my children regard me, and how they will remember me.

My paternal grandmother was, to use the vernacular, crazy. To the best of my knowledge, she was never diagnosed with a specific mental condition, but according to my parents, she was bonkers. My use of words like ‘crazy’ and ‘bonkers’ is inappropriate, I know, and a practice that I deplore in others, but ‘crazy’ was how I understood her, my Dad’s mother, as I was growing up. I never met her – my mother told me, later, that she had been terrified to let her babies, us, within ten feet of her – and my parents were, of course, very careful in the language that they used to describe her to me when I was growing up, but I’d gotten bits and pieces of the story by eavesdropping and asking annoying questions – Dad had been afraid of her, Dad had left home very young to get away from her, she’d died when she set her own house on fire – I understood, I read through the lines. She had been crazy.

Later, when I became aware of my father’s own struggles with mental illness, my understanding of my grandmother became more complicated. Throughout my teens, Dad had what were at the time called ‘nervous breakdowns,’ and it seemed to me that those breakdowns of nerve, those collapses into nervousness, were very probably my grandmother’s fault. Dad had demons – to use the language of our church – and all I knew of his demons were that they had something to do with his childhood, with his mother, and so I blamed her. I blamed her for the fact that he had breakdowns; I blamed her for the fact that he would go sit in the garage and weep (which terrified me all the way down to my bones, such that they would ache with my fear); I blamed her for the fact that his voice would break when I would ask him about his childhood and he would say, I’d really rather not talk about it, sweetie; it’s not a happy story. I blamed her for the fact that he didn’t have a happy story.

I don’t blame her anymore; I know more of the story now, and although it is a truly hair-raising story, I know that it’s a story of mental illness. But in a way that knowledge has made it worse: she wasn’t a monster, she was a woman with an illness, but that illness is something that she might have passed on to her son. That she might have passed on to me. That I might pass on to my children. This terrifies me.

This terrifies me, not only because I fear for my own mental stability – if this is genetic, is it beyond my control? am I genetically fated to be crazy? (the research calls this ‘self-guilt’) – and for that of my children – are they genetically fated to be crazy? – but because it colors my memory of my father, who, although he struggled with anxiety and depression and, really, just a whole lot of sadness, was a light in my life and a source of great joy to me. He was gentle and kind and wise and although I always knew that he held a very great grief in the deepest part of his heart, I also always knew that that grief was overpowered by love. But when I dwell in anxiety about my own mental state – my own griefs, my own fears – and the genetic heritage of this state, I lose this part of him; my memory of him becomes achromatic, desaturated, a fog of gray and sad. I hate this. And I fear that my children will inherit it, that they will someday fret over their mental wellness and that this fretting will cast a pall over the memories of their childhood and that they will see me that way, in a fog of gray and sad.

I hate this, I hate this.

I fight this.

I fight this by fighting my battle with anxiety and depression, and by endeavoring to fight it out of their view, but I worry about this, about this concealment of the gray and the fog and the sad. My paternal grandmother lurks in my memory like a shadow, a sinister one, and she does so because I did not know her and did not know her story and by the time I learned her story, and my father’s story of her, she had already settled into her spectral shape. The details, now that I know them, are secondary; brushstrokes of oils over an image whose paint has already set. My father never explained to me why he struggled, beyond the barest sketch, and so I just colored in between the lines, and sometimes over them, and I worry whether my children will do this, too, that if I conceal my own story, or keep it deliberately vague, they too will fill in the outlines of that story with their own colors, or uncolors, achromatic grays and blacks, and regard me through that fog.

So what do I do? Do I reach for as much honesty as I think that they can handle, even now, when they are so young? I discuss grief with Emilia – it is necessary to discuss grief with her, when it keeps so close to us – and she has learned, already, that there are different kinds of sad and different kinds of worry and that not all of these, perhaps not any of these, are ‘bad,’ but do I – can I – extend that discussion to those times when Mommy has a headache / Mommy is tired and break for her that code that conceals the truth of Mommy is anxious / Mommy is sad? Or do I wait until she – until they – are older, and then explain in more detail this experience, this thing that I struggle with, this thing that may or may not have anything to do with the thing that my dad struggled with, with the thing that my grandmother struggled with, with those things that are not monsters, not necessarily, not if you drag them out of the closet and sit with them in the light?

(Thank you to award-winning author Linda Gray Sexton for sponsoring this series, which is inspired by her memoir Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide. I was selected for this sponsorship by Clever Girls Collective which endorses Blog With Integrity. To learn more about Linda Gray Sexton and her writing, please visit her website.)

Today is All Soul’s Day, or the Feast Of All Souls, which is a name that terrified me as a child, because I imagined that it referred to a sort of buffet of ghosts, which, really, is a discomfiting idea at any age. But it’s not a ghost buffet, thankfully (or regrettably, depending on how dark your interests skew): for Catholics, it’s the rite of The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed, which means, basically, it’s the rite of remembering and praying for those we love who have passed and who have not yet – yet – reached what Catholics call the Church Triumphant (Heaven) and the ‘beatific vision’ of God. It follows All Saint’s Day, which celebrates the souls of the just who have reached the Church Triumphant and are, presumably, getting down with some celestial karaoke and partying with the Lord.

This is one of the teachings of the Church that caused me to wander away, confused and frustrated. It seemed to me to make Heaven out to be some kind of super-elite after party to which one could only be admitted if one had made all the right connections and got the invitation and the directions and followed them to the letter and knew the secret password – in Latin, of course – and had their name on the guest list and also was wearing just the right outfit and also probably knew the bouncer. Which somehow just struck me as wrong. What if someone was a good person – really, truly good in their heart and in their soul – and just hadn’t been hip to all the rules? What if someone were really truly good but had become disillusioned by the sometimes very dodgy mortal politics governing entrance to that party and decided to not participate in what sometimes amounts to nonsense and other times to very grave harm? What if someone were really truly good and had just gone about getting to know God in their own way and had really believed that they’d established a relationship with God and that God would totally have wanted to party with them in Paradise, or at least just grab a coffee and chat? What then? Would God just say, oh, hey man, you didn’t get that secret password from those dudes in the robes? Can’t let you in! Yeah, I know some of them were sometimes skeevy and some of them maybe burned some women as witches and maybe some of them launched the occasional violent Inquisition or two but still: they’re my posse. You’re not down with them you don’t get in. SORRY.

I’m not sure that I like that God. And I’m not sure that I want into that party.

But I’m still Catholic enough to pause every year at this time and to wonder about who got in and who didn’t. Last year, when All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days came just months after my father had died, I locked myself in the bathroom and cried for hours. What if he didn’t get in? What if he didn’t get in?

I tell myself that it simply cannot work that way, that a just and loving God would not deny souls entrance to Heaven on the basis of technicalities, that Paradise – whatever that means, whatever that looks like – would not be run like a country club with obscure rules and high barriers to entry, that the ‘beatific vision’ would be offered to men who burned women as witches at the stake or who protected child-molesting priests and not to Plato or Gandhi or my dad. I tell myself that the God that I was raised to believe in would have no criteria other than the goodness of hearts, no standard other than love. I tell myself that if that’s not how it works, then I am right to turn my back on it, that this is what so troubles me about organized religion, about the organized religion that I was raised in and that I wring my hands about, constantly.

I am telling myself this today, as I wait to hear the bells from the Catholic church down the street, as I sit and think about death and souls and the beatific vision of God, dwelling, as 1 Timothy says, in unapproachable light. And as I remember my dad, who was good, who was so good, who was so gentle and loving and wise and just and sweetly eccentric in the most beautiful way, and who I know – I hope, I pray – can feel the warmth of that light.

I am telling myself this today. And I am believing it, or trying to.

My dad wore Brut aftershave, the kind that comes in that opaque green bottle with the fake gold medallion. He didn’t wear it a lot, but it was the only aftershave that he used when he did use aftershave, and so it burned into my psyche – along with cigarette smoke (Players) and aged leather – as the smell of my dad. After he died, and I went to work cleaning out his home, I spotted a bottle of it in his bathroom, tucked at the back of a medicine cabinet, coated with dust. I thought, that bottle is probably fifteen years old, and then I shut the cabinet and went back to sorting through his things.

He had, as I’ve mentioned before, a lot of things. I hired a dumpster that remained parked in his driveway, and the process of cleaning out his home was one long cycle of sorting and deliberating and carting and tossing. Some things were easy to sort and toss – the ancient tins of soup and boxes of spice and broken furniture and old bedding that was too worn for Goodwill – but other things were more difficult, like the little plastic baggies filled with clover leaves – he was determined to find his four-leaf token of good fortune, it seemed – and I found myself, too many times, hanging over the edge of the dumpster, second-guessing something that had been thrown away. I didn’t get in, though. Not until I remembered the Brut.

I don’t know what made me think of it, or why I suddenly found myself in his bathroom, looking for it, but there I was, scrambling through the toiletries that had been pulled from the cabinet, looking for that dusty green bottle, desperate to open it and just inhale, just breathe deeply and smell, knowing that it would smell like him, knowing that it would be an immediate and undiluted hit of memory, stronger than that afforded by his shirts and his jacket and his musty old leather hat. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t there. I had thrown it, or my mother or my uncle had thrown it, into a garbage bag and into the dumpster, or maybe just directly into the dumpster, who knew? I had to find it.

And that was I found myself, one very hot day late last August, standing in a dumpster, rifling through my father’s discarded things, sobbing, looking for his aftershave. I don’t know how long I stood there – crouched there, actually; bent, awkwardly, sifting and sorting through old cans of tomato soup and flat brown pillows and cracked floppy disk cases as the sun beat down on my shoulders – or for how much of that time I cried, but it seemed an eternity, and I chastised myself mercilessly – this is ridiculous, ridiculous, it’s gone, it’s just aftershave, it’s just a smell - before finally giving up and climbing out and laying on the grass by the cedar hedges and thinking, that was stupid. And then crying some more.

“Everything okay?” My uncle, my dad’s brother, was at this point accustomed to finding me curled up in random places around Dad’s house, crying.

“Yeah. No. I don’t know. I think I threw out Dad’s aftershave. I didn’t mean to. I wanted to keep it a while.”

“The Brut? Oh, I saved that. I figured I should set it aside in case you wanted it.”

I never loved my uncle more than I did in that moment.

I eventually ended up throwing the bottle of Brut in the dumpster myself, but not before I’d huffed it about a thousand times and sprinkled it over one of Dad’s sweaters, which I kept. Oddly enough, it’s not that sweater that I go to, now, when I want to feel my dad; I go to his old leather hat, which I keep on top of the cedar box of his remains, and which still smells faintly of Brut and cigarette smoke and the ineffable fragrance of Dad. The aroma is faint, and grows fainter every day, and I tell myself that when it becomes imperceptible, I will open the box with the Brut-splashed sweater and let myself drown in the scent. But then again, maybe I won’t. Maybe I will continue to cling to the fading smell of the hat, fighting to hold on to the last molecules of its perfume, diving deeper and deeper into the dumpster of my heart, searching for the memories that I know are buried there.

(Leave your thoughts on sense-memory – share your sense-memories – here. I have to close comments on this one, just because.)

I labored over a post about this, about this dark anniversary, about how this year has changed me, about how I still cry. But the words were confused, the sentences messy, the paragraphs long, the ideas incoherent, and it occurred to me that I do not need to struggle to put everything into words. That not everything can be captured in words.

I said goodbye to my father a year ago. I am still saying goodbye. I am still sad.

I am still sad. I will always be sad, about this, this loss. There will be other sadnesses – and there will, of course, be many, many happinesses – but this, this sadness will stay.

It will not color all things, but it will be there, always. I just need to learn how to bear it, and how to accept it.

It took me a while to figure why I was crying, why I kept bursting into tears at silly, random things, like an excess of dryer lint, or a dearth of toilet paper. I had just figured it to be hormones, or a passing mood, you know, the kind that you fall into when you’ve gone too many nights with too little sleep and then you open the cupboard and there’s not enough coffee for a full pot and you slump against the counter and you cry.

It wasn’t that. I wasn’t crying about coffee.

My dad died a year ago this week. I say, this week, and not today or yesterday or the other day or tomorrow, because I don’t know when he died, exactly. Nobody does. The coroner had to make a guess. “Sometime between July 30th and August 2nd,” he said. “But we have to pick a day. Any of those days significant to you? We don’t like to set the date of death on the same day as someone’s birthday or anniversary.” July 31 is my husband’s birthday. So we picked July 30th as my father’s death day. That was last year. A year ago, that he died.

The thing of it is, though, that I know that that date is just some random date that we picked because we didn’t know the real date, because we didn’t know when he died, really, and I can’t shake that knowledge. It haunts me that we don’t know, that we didn’t know, and the not knowing is a constant reminder that he died alone and that I was far away and that we didn’t know, we didn’t know, and for some reason that seems really, really important. And it doesn’t help that there is another death, coming – not today, not tomorrow, but far, far too soon – and that there exists the possibility (a possibility that I have to extinguish, stamp out, kill) that that death will not be a good death, the best possible death – if there is such thing – there is such a thing – a death at home, surrounded by, comforted by, love. That can’t be allowed to happen. I won’t let that happen. But in my darker moments, I worry that it won’t be up to me, that I won’t be able to make things be the way that I want them to be. I didn’t want my dad to die alone. It happened anyway.

These thoughts press upon me, and I fight them off, batting at them as though they were so many black flies, when really they’re not at all like black flies, they are so much denser and heavier and more persistent and when they land upon me they bite harder and more viciously than any mere bug. And I cannot stop them landing.

I try to ignore them. I can’t.

And ignoring them isn’t helping me. Telling myself that I am crying about dryer lint – because, who hasn’t cried about lint? – when, really, there are these dark, heavy things beating their wings upon my back just weakens me, just leaves me vulnerable. There is no strength in self-deception. I need to face them.

I don’t know how to face them.

Unless…

“Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.” — Rainier Maria Rilke.

Dragons, yes. When I was blathering on about black flies that are really much, much bigger than black flies, with big, heavy wings that can knock you to the ground, I think that this is what I meant. Dragons. Monsters, with wings and hot breath. Monsters that might be princesses, in need of rescue, in need of help, in need of love. The Sleeping Beauty kind, obviously, rather than the Jasmine or Pocahontas kind, although here Rilke’s beautiful analogy starts to fall apart for me, because I am too influenced by Disney, and isn’t the dragon in Sleeping Beauty really the bad fairy, or some such? I need to revisit my Bettelheim.

Perhaps dragons are really bad fairies, and bad fairies really princesses, corrupted, in need of rescue from their corruption. Or something. Does it matter? Turning and facing the dragons is hard, because it is scary, it is so scary, and that is why I am putting tutus on them, but even that, even that, seems, in the darker moments, to not be enough.

Still, it’s all I that have. It will have to be enough.

(Please wear a tutu on Friday. Or any day. If only to make a point about fairies and dragons and facing scary things and the incredible, inestimable power of tulle. It’s a point, I think, that needs to be made.)

… is unparalleled.

Happy Father’s Day, you.

*****

(And for my dad, best of men, always loved, always missed, this.)

This – the post below – is something that I wrote a few years ago, when I was still in the first joyous and anxious flush of new motherhood. It’s one of my very favourite posts, although one that has gotten buried in the sands of WordPress, and time. It’s also a post that I’ve been thinking about a lot, not least because of my sister’s ongoing struggle with the prospect of saying goodbye to her son (a struggle that extends to all of us), but also because of my father’s passing, and my keen awareness, in the long process of letting him go, of how difficult he found it to let me and my sister (and, in a completely different context, my mother) go, of how difficult he found it to let anything go. And then, last night, I saw a film (about which I will write more at length, once I can do so without crying) that touched all these nerves, and more, and reminded me that what I thought was a unique experience of motherhood is, in fact, an experience of parenthood, one that fathers share no less for being fathers. And that, perhaps, it is an experience of love generally – of the necessity of giving love air to breathe, of the inextricability of loss from love, of the impossibility of holding on to those we love too tightly – of the undesirability of holding on too tightly – of the inevitability of goodbye. So I am revisiting it here. I am not sure, yet, what I have learned from revisiting it. Other than, maybe, that I need to meditate more upon the cruelty and beauty and necessity of letting go.

*****

One of the most difficult things about pregnancy, for me, was that it forced me to confront myself as a biological creature. It forced me to experience myself as a body, as a being put entirely into the service of nature. My every wakeful – and not so wakeful – moment was spent in a state of hyper-consciousness about my physicality: I was nurturing a life, and that life depended upon my physical being, and no force of intellect or imagination could alter or facilitate or intercede in that dependency. And as a person who had spent all of her conscious years in her head – and someone who was well-trained in a school of philosophical thought that emphasizes the absolute primacy of mind over body, reason over appetite and base sense – this was very, very hard for me.

So I was anxious – anxious beyond measure – about birth and new motherhood, which I perceived as a broadening and deepening of this experience. I didn’t fear it, exactly: I wanted the experience. Every fibre of my physical being strained toward this experience, and demanded that my mind follow – this, in itself, was disconcerting. The thing of it was, rather, that I doubted my ability to stay the course: how would I ever, ever find my way through this dense thicket, this overwhelming jungle, without maps, without books, without the compass of my intellect? How would I survive, if I had only the thrum of my senses to guide me?

I learned, of course. This education came with difficulty: I spent weeks, months, trying to beat back heavy, fear-dampened branches with dog-eared tomes of advice on navigating the brave new world of motherhood (tomes written, no less, by only the most theoretical of explorers, explorers – men – who had only scanned this landscape through spyglasses, safe on their ships, far from these strange shores), only to discover that while these might force the branches back for a moment, it would only be for a moment, before the branches would lash back and knock me off my feet.

I put the books away. I put the books away and set about listening to the thrum of my senses, and discovered, slowly, that doing what felt right kept me on the clearest course. I navigated my way (with no small assistance from others lost in the same wood, shouting encouragement and direction) through breastfeeding and swaddling and sleep and sleep and sleep and crying-it-out and the first signs of spiritedness, guided by my senses and by the gentle prodding of the sympathetic hands of fellow travelers. I found my way. And now, even when I lose my way, which I still do, I know to trust myself and the kindness of fellows in finding my way back. I know what to do.

The knowledge came, however, in more than the form of a sense of direction. I came to know the the unparalleled joy of allowing myself to embrace my biology, my physicality – and the unparalleled bliss that comes with bonding oneself with, binding oneself to, another creature, and having that creature be bound to you, so tightly, so deeply, that you are really are as one, one physical being, with one bonded heart and one bonded soul. We know something of this bond in love, in erotic love, but only ever fleetingly, in the sweet interstices of romantic companionship; we are never fully, physically bound to our other, no matter what we think Plato might have said, through Socrates, about our souls’ other halves – we are complete souls, we adult beings, and although our greatest happinesses come with allowing our souls to join hands with others, we never merge souls, not really.

Except, that is, when we have a baby. Then we know – if only for a moment, for one long, sweet moment – what it is to be more than one, to be one plus, to have split open and spilled out our blood and our viscera and our spirit and gathered it all back up again in our arms and held it, tight, pressed it to our chests, felt it throbbing and squirming and to have known, to know, what it is to hold one’s soul in one’s arms.

And then to have it pulled away. Because this is what is inevitable, this is what the books can’t tell you, this what no mother can escape: from the moment your child, your soul, is handed to you, whether that child has been pulled from your gut or yanked out from between your legs or flown from across the sea, whether your soul comes to you in gore or wrapped in white cotton sheets, your possession of it – of him, of her – is temporary. Mind-spinningly temporary. Every second, every heartbeat, that passes from the moment you clutch your second soul, your little soul, in your arms, takes that soul away from you. Every moment is a moment of growth, and every moment of growth loosens your grip. And you must keep holding, you must keep your arms outstretched, but you can’t, you mustn’t, fight to hold on.

This, then, is the art of motherhood, and it is not an art of the mind: to hold on and let go, at the same time.

We are constantly letting go: when they are pulled from our arms for the first time, when they stretch out their arms to someone else for the first time, when they first say no. When they first push themselves out of our arms, when they crawl, when they walk, little feet carrying them away. When they wean. When they wave bye-bye without shedding a tear. When they fall down and they hurt and turn to someone else for comfort. When they grow, when they live – with every step that they take they are moving away from us. And it is our task to navigate this ongoing, this infinite, this inevitable, this necessary separation with love and with grace.

But once you have learned to know with your body – to have reached far, far beyond carnal knowledge and the intoxicating wisdom of the flesh – to know, fully, what it is to be a body with a soul threaded, literally and figuratively, to its heart, a soul that can give birth to itself, take form, be held oh so tightly and then let go – once you have this knowledge, you are, truly, naked, vulnerable, exposed, open to untold hurts, to infinite pains, to the unshakeable awareness of loss. This is knowledge, and this knowledge thrills, and stings.

So it is that we mothers are ever walking out of the Garden, cursing and praising the heavens, grasping at roses, pricking our heels on thorns.

So it is that we all of us are ever walking out of the Garden, cursing and praising the heavens, grasping at roses, pricking our heels on thorns.