I had completely different intentions for what to write when I sat down this evening. In the process of trying to recall a date of a particular thing, I went to Facebook (the digital scrapbook for baby-brained, single parents)(I’m still the former but not the latter.)(Not single, that is. I am still a parent.)(Why are all of these parentheses necessary? See “the former.”) and made a quick change of plans.
Quick, as in: it took me ten times longer to craft that whole opening mess than it did to change my plan.
It turns out, on this day 11 years ago, I posted a drawing. The drawing was from 1999. I’ll limit my number-nerding to just the re-cap: I drew a thing in 1999; I wrote a post about it on FB 11 years later; another 11 years after that, I am posting this.
These 22 years later, I’m in the early days of participation in a collaborative art project that involves 12 other women from around the world. We’ve been brought together by a shared acquaintance who had an idea/desire and asked who was interested in joining her to bring it into reality. I, lover of connection and maker of things, was a one-word, all-caps “YES!” from the start.
My first work as a collaborator in this group was both a meditation on the color “plum” and a re-visioning of the 1999 drawing. I’m sure I had doodled it many, many times before that year. In notebook margins. In wet sand. It’s virtue and vice of our grey matter that just a quick swish or crescent or shadow can conjure a whole story. In the case of this “Elizabeth,” she was the more confident, wind-in-the-hair spirit that I wished (at the time) I could just… be.
What struck me tonight, seeing the memory pop up, and having spent time
recently re-visiting this E… is how much I would not want to be that 1999 projected version of whatever it means to be wind-in-the-hair. I love the plum woman. I love who she is and how she got there. I love her especially because if it had been up to teenage E, she would definitely not have experienced all of the scrap and collections calls and litigation and infidelity and starting-over and humility and adventure and depressive episodes and so-absurd-you-couldn’t-have-made-it-up-if-you-tried and holding of loved ones hands while they died and reckoning with the despair when she broke the news to her kid that yes, she would also have to die.
The old projection looks discontent to me now… because she doesn’t know any of those things. She doesn’t know who she has become by the grace of choosing to be with and because of those things, not in spite of them. Plum does. She knows all of it. And she knows the virtue of the not knowing. Because if we knew up front what it was going to take to become the self we love to be, I’m not sure who among us would choose it.
I know I wouldn’t have chosen to lose you. I wouldn’t have chosen for you to end so abruptly. I also know enough, at this point, to pick up what is and let it be with me now. And not because I have a belief that you dying is for some planned and greater purpose. It’s because I know how to take even this hurt and put it to use. This is my story, whether I would have written it this way on purpose or not. And I do not know how I end either. But I work every day to honor my learning that there can be virtue in the not knowing.