There are two words, that taken together, I am trying to love…self and care. Each word is okay individually, but together they’re a foreign concept. I do take a stab at the idea on occasion to imitate my friends who are more mature than I. They tell me that the notion of putting one’s own wellbeing before that of another should not make one cringe or judge. I cringe at myself. I judge them.

So, in an effort to get onboard the selfcare train, I’m making a commitment to daily exercise, and I’ve just hired JT, a personal trainer, to help me. There’s another reason I’ve come to JT as well, but I hold that close to my chest for now. 

I introduce myself and drop into a chrome and black leather chair by his desk.  His studio is a big airy room with scary contraptions. A masculine room. In Athleta leggings and a fitted white half-zip I look a bit like a child who wandered into the wrong neighborhood The walls are either mirrors or windows where a stratified sky, witness to first contact, shimmers in silver, dark blue, and pearlescence. 

Me: “So, I’m here because I spend a lot of time at a computer and I’m getting inflexible. And I’m not as strong as I used to be,” I explain. “I look in shape but that’s genetics.” (I didn’t earn looking in shape, so it doesn’t count.) 

“I looked like I’d be good at tennis too,” I continue, as JT takes notes, “but I could only hit honeybees on the tennis courts in college.  (I’m sorry, bees.) Then early on, as a Navy wife, I tried tennis lessons again. The other wives were much faster studies. Then, in New Zealand, I tried for the final time with my American friend Melinda at a private club. Turns out there are 17 things you must remember just to hold the racket properly. I didn’t have the bandwidth. Melinda was very, very pretty.

“And I tried pickleball before it was a thing. I was excellent at running after the ball. Fast and intuitive—like a Labrador, actually. And I was exceptional at fooling opponents who expected the ball to land in their court.” 

More me: “I looked like I’d be good at skiing too but broke my thumb on the first run at Whisp. And I couldn’t get off the ski lift in Wanaka, New Zealand. The kids yelled, ‘Just ski off, Mom!’ but it was too late, so I kind of fell off and rolled.”

JT: “Okay. Take off your jacket. Let’s see what you’ve got. Give me 12 reps.”

Me: Lifting free weights. “I don’t want to look like Popeye. Those forearms were disturbing.”

JT: “You won’t look like Popeye. Wow! Stop impressing me.” 

Suddenly shy, and now committed to impressing him, I glance in the mirror alert to a new defect. “Are my arms abnormally short?” 

JT: “I’ve seen shorter.  Give me another 12 reps, here, start at your shoulders, then straight up over your head.” 

My arms are starting to tremble. I look in the mirror again.

“Wait, is my neck too short?”

JT: “I’ve seen shorter. Twelve more.” 

Me: smiling at him, my arms now on fire. “This is going to sound impolite, but I might be about to hate you.” 

JT: “And you’re not the first.”

JT has been doing this so long there’s not one thing I can do or say that is original. I came in with my hair down and now need a ponytail tie. JT’s got one. He’s got lots of them. 

I didn’t come with water. He’s got a fridge full.

After lifting a lot of weights, my arms feel like noodles, which I then demonstrate. I think it’s hilarious. JT has likely seen it before. 

Here’s what I don’t tell JT: I’m not strong, I’m not flexible. What I am, is very sad. But when you are sad you can always move your body, right? Do something kind for someone else? I’m on an endorphin search. A fake-it-till-you-make-it quest. 

We take a break from weights and try lunges and squats. I’m struggling with form because the correct position for a squat is the antithesis of ladylike. You know what I’m talking about. JT gets it that I’m a little embarrassed by the neutral scrutiny as I follow instructions. Again, he’s seen it before. Just as I’m sure he’s seen sad before.

Because he’s also intuitive. We like that, too. Back on weights he counts when I don’t think he’s counting, he’s a very sneaky counter, and he knows when to catch the cable pull that I don’t have the strength to release gracefully. I don’t have the strength to release anything gracefully, I think. That’s why I’m here. I’m a clinger. Wait. That’s attachment hunger, right? Or worse, attachment disorder? But doesn’t everyone have that? Can you genuinely love without attaching? Now I’m considering a new foreign, two-word combo: love and detachment. I decide they go together with all the appeal of selfcare. 

So, I say silent mantras staring in the massive wall mirror as I try to lift burden after burden into the air. There is nowhere else to look. I certainly can’t look at JT. That would be awkward. So, I gaze in the mirror, and quote Florence Shinn to myself, “The Divine Design of my life now comes to pass. I now fill the place that only I can fill.”

JT can’t hear what I’m thinking, of course. So, he tells me to lie on a bench and adds five more pounds. “I am fully equipped for the Divine Plan of my life. I am more than equal to this situation.” My arms are going to break, and I don’t care. I hope something does break. Something visible.

I whisper, “All doors now open for happy surprises and the Divine Plan of my life is speeded up under grace.” 

JT repeats, “Still impressing me.” Of course, I try harder. 

He stands behind and over me now ready to catch the weights I could easily drop on my own head. “I’ve got you,” he says. “Let go. I’ve got you.” And it’s strangely intimate. I like thinking someone is standing behind me who is going to keep me from hurting myself, while I’m hurting myself. 

I sit up and tell JT I write a column and he’s going to be in it. He hasn’t heard that before. “My sisters will tell you this is an unfortunate liability of being my friend,” I explain kindly.  I do noodle arms again to make us laugh.

Before I leave, I hold a plank until I think I will die and say to myself, “My heart is a perfect idea in Divine Mind and it is now in its right place, doing its right work. It is a happy heart, a fearless heart, and a loving heart. 

And I head home. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

It started with my boyfriend from my freshman year at Washington College—a boy with whom I’d driven down the flat country roads of Maryland’s eastern shore after dark with the sunroof open to the light of distant stars. Stars whose photons had been traveling billions of years to reach us as we flew along on the edge of night. Stars that were already gone.

Recently, decades after graduation, he got in touch and said he was sending along some photographs and letters from that year as he digitized his albums. How did he find me, I wondered, then paled. I’m unphotogenic. And I couldn’t imagine what on earth I’d written at the age of 18 that anyone would keep.

When the pictures arrived, they weren’t so bad. My hair was the longest it’s ever been—no style–just hanging to my elbows, which I guess was the style. But the letters. They were vacuous and self-absorbed. Embarrassing. But hang on, this is worse. I was surprised they were vacuous. I thought of myself as ‘deep’ then. Tragically meaningful. You’re just going to have to forgive me. It’s the rule now that we’re all grownups.

People I haven’t heard from in decades are showing up in my inbox or texting lately. Case in point, I also heard from my boyfriend’s roommate, and that was astonishing because we barely knew each other. Our relationship was indirect. Adjacent. So, it was both a surprise and a delight to hear from him. And then a girl I’d known somewhat briefly in college who’d been kind enough to throw me a bridal shower messaged me, and a guy on whom I’d had a slight crush in high school but never dated. Why does this move me so, reconnecting after decades with our people-points-of-entry into the world?

Maybe it’s because these are the people who were with us at ground zero. Closer to lift off. We hadn’t jettisoned even the first-stage rockets yet.

We were still powering up for the ascent.

Then Bob got in touch. We met working at a Cape Cod conference center one summer with a bunch of other college students. I’d applied for a job on the waitstaff but when I got onto the Cape that June the only remaining position was pots girl. Pots girl scrubbed heavy frying pans and massive casserole dishes all morning in a bustling kitchen where salad girl tied one arm behind her back to keep from impulsively sticking her hand in the lettuce slicer, and pots girl learned that if you rinse with blazing hot water you don’t have to dry but you’ll probably get burned. Pots girl also rocked a hairnet over her ponytail, all of which was a humbling drag, but the whole staff switched to bathing suits and hit Craigville beach in the afternoons. On the sun-drenched shore of the Atlantic pots girl got very tan and fell in love.

So, all these years later, I was shocked and charmed to get a text from Bob. I’d always wondered what had become of him. We swapped some photos of our families and agreed we’d talk on the phone. He wanted to reminisce about that summer. But something told me I wasn’t going to have a lot to add to his memories because after the initial delight of reconnection it occurred to me this guy had broken my heart.

He was supposed to be driving up from Atlanta to spend Thanksgiving with my family when instead, he sent a letter ending the relationship. Weeks later, I asked this winsome US Naval Academy Midshipman I’d just met to join my family for the holiday instead. He became the father of my three kids, so this turned out all right. Maybe in ways we can’t anticipate, all roads lead home.

I think it’s that the people who disappear from our lives become mysteries. Books we borrowed and had to return unfinished. Time ran out. Someone else was waiting to read that title. Then, unexpectedly, we get to pick the volume up again and learn how the plot unfolded long after our character left the story. And when it has ended well, we are just so grateful—because whatever flirtation might have come before, or conflict, misunderstanding, estrangement, or rift–we’ve evolved to being able to hold the past in a different, more generous, and all-encompassing love. We finally know what it means to be happy for someone else—to feel joy for their joy–even for someone who may be living the life we meant to live. And that of course, is the most difficult. And that of course, is why you are here.

Then there is this. I think reconnecting with your past impacts you more profoundly when your family of origin was fractured in some way—death, divorce, parental depression, moving a lot, alcoholism, illness—there are a lot of ways in which the container that held your original self fragments. When this has been the case, your sense of self becomes ill-defined. Uncertain of who you are, you become what other people need you to be. That’s a thing, right? You appear to be participating when you’re actually observing. You become a writer. Or something better.

So, when people reappear from the time before now, they are evidence that the past that seems to be someone else’s distant memory, was real. That you are real. Sometimes we need reminding. Sometimes we need to be reintroduced to that girl or that boy who knew they could do or be anything they wanted to be.

I used to think that making a new friend was one of the greatest joys in the world but recovering an old one is even greater. Because when people from your heart’s long-ago reappear, they do not come alone. They bring you with them.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

This is a story about sound, loss and love. Are you listening?  When I was ten, I contracted a severe case of the mumps. My mother worked for the State of Maryland matching adoptive parents with available children. My sisters were in school during the day, so I stayed home by myself for two long weeks with a fever, headache, and cheeks as plump as the class hamster’s. I’m sure I was told to rest, but 14 days is a long time to roam a silent house isolated on a country road when you’re in fifth grade. After going through both sisters’ personal belongings, (sorry), and trying on their clothes and makeup, (sorry, sorry), I gave up and got back in bed with a hand mirror, so with an occasional glance at its surface, I could pretend I wasn’t alone.  My companion was a restless, moderately resourceful girl with the mumps.

Since getting sick, spring had come to the river. Yellow forsythia ran riot against the fence, flowering dogwood was a lacy understory along Eagle Hill Road, and the breeze from the south carried the faint scent of Georgia peach blossoms. The world was coming back to life, and I was finally returning to school. But the night before I was to catch the bus in the morning, a wave of dizziness hit so violently and unexpectedly, I was literally knocked to the floor from where I perched on a stool talking on the phone to my friend Sally. Unable to stand from the cascading waves of vertigo, I inched my way up the stairs on my hands and knees and into bed where I was found hours later in a darkened room. The mumps had been followed by a viral inner ear infection which blazed through, as they often do, without medical intervention. 

In the humid heat of a Maryland July, my mother would ask the audiologist as they conferred in his exam room, whether things might have been different if she’d brought me in earlier. He wore a white lab coat, she, a flowered blouse, and a pastel skirt. I watched him say no as he touched my anxious, pretty mother on the arm. 

We had been referred to a Baltimore specialist because since my recovery, my left ear felt weird, numb, different from the right. And I was aware of a constant ringing in it. From a soundproof booth behind a glass window and wearing earphones, I was instructed to raise my hand every time I heard a tone. Highly motivated to please, I wanted to pass this test and most of it was quite easy. Then, not so much. 

The doctor’s assistant and I locked eyes as she manipulated the audiometer and I strained to obey her instructions. But the ringing in my left ear was making it impossible to distinguish the machine-generated tones from the sound already there. Confused, then panicked, I must have raised my hand when she wasn’t producing a sound, and that must have looked like I was lying, messing around, wasting her time. All I know is she narrowed her eyes through the window, opened the channel between us and said, “Do I have to get your mother in here?” I certainly heard that, and the unspoken second half of that sentence as well, “to straighten you out?”  I sat there mortified to have been disciplined by a stranger.

Classmates, teachers, friends couldn’t tell, and no one can tell now, but I had been compensating with exceptional hearing on my right side for some now-verified loss on the left. Tests demonstrated that I could hear the low tones of male voices but women’s less well on that side, it being primarily higher frequencies that had been compromised. And from the time I was 10, this has been an invisible burden I’ve unconsciously mitigated.  I read lips without realizing it. At cocktail parties when many people are chatting at once and standing very close, I might find myself gazing intently at the lips of strangers on my left–a form of paying attention which may look like flirting.

And I hold the phone to my right ear although sometimes when you’re talking, I shift it to my left just to confirm to myself that I can hear from that side, it just requires some concentration. But it is tricky to distinguish the direction of sound. Friends call to me in a parking lot, and I turn in the opposite direction like a puzzled pup. Or I hear, but incorrectly, sometimes answering questions that weren’t asked, or commenting inanely on what I think you said. Yesterday a client on speaker phone told me her husband Matt had just had surgery. I thought she said cat and asked if he had to wear a cone on his head to protect his incision. 

Why am I telling you this? Because I’ve been brought to my knees in gratitude for this loss.  I could have lost so much more. An invisible virus, rampaging through a child, could have stolen my life as I know it. Could have left me unable to hear an obstetrician sing out, “It’s a girl!”, to hear the receding hiss of waves racing back down the beach to the ocean. Or distant fog horns on the Chesapeake.  I could have been left unable to detect danger: the sound of the ice on Gray’s Creek cracking beneath my skates, footsteps accelerating behind me on a darkened street. All of these abilities are easily still there. 

So perhaps loss gave more than it took. The gifts she brought are subtle but profound. Because when you speak, I am fully present and being fully present fosters an intensity, an intimacy, a connection that feels like love. And without thinking about it, because it’s become part of me, when I listen to you tell your stories, I’m also reading your face, and decoding your tone of voice–which I’ve learned is a far better indicator of what you feel than your words.  

When you lose something no one can see, you learn that some deficits are invisible, actually most of them are, don’t you think? When spared by a stroke of luck, you say thank you to the power that threw the dice, knowing loss is an intimacy that seldom comes to call empty-handed.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

Clustered around two tables at a Chinese restaurant, I am one of 12 women ostensibly here to have lunch and to learn more about feng shui, the Chinese art of rearranging your possessions to change your life. In reality, it is the promise of a personalized forecast for the Chinese New Year that inspired most of us to ante up the $40 fee. 

The predictions are nested in little boxes of tokens left at our place settings like gift bags at a birthday party. I bypass the red silk ribbon, jasmine candies, and the fake coins to reach for my reading. 

I was born in the Year of the Snake, I discover. It is unappealing by western standards but then the woman to my immediate left was born in the Year of the Rat. Is that any better? We Snakes are the most beautiful women in the world my reading claims. How can that be true? I glance around the table wondering who the Snakes are. 

The workshop leader is wearing red, which suits her warm smile, while I am wearing black, which I’m pretty sure is not the best feng shui color to have on but I think I look better in it. 

Look, I’m a Black Snake, I joke to the Rat.  

My companion doesn’t respond, her focus is riveted upon our hostess who explains that everything in the material world rests spatially next to something else. Therefore, where I place each object in my home impacts the energy flowing to me. The result?  Proper arrangement of my belongings can facilitate the realization of my dreams.

Many of my dreams have already come true: my dog, who was once prescribed Prozac, has never actually bitten anyone. My children’s father has 1) become a gourmet cook who 2) thinks cooking for others is fun!  But if feng shui is both art and science, I have one nagging question. Where can I place the past so that it does not interfere with the present?

 What if now I want to say yes to being “Room Mother?” No to working all weekend?  Yes, to taking Advanced Conversational French with Mrs. Proccacini?  No to the 80’s?

What if I wish I’d gone on more vacations when the kids were young, danced at my own wedding? Been braver, less self-absorbed? What if I want to do it all over again—career, being a parent, being a sister, being a friend, being human– knowing what I know now?

Our instructor can’t hear what I’m unable to ask, so she offers more specific instructions. I should put something gold in my prosperity corner and add a plant with friendly round leaves. I’m advised to keep water near my fireplace and to aim all sharp-cornered furniture away from my bed.

Servers arrive laden with bowls of steaming, brothy soup. Silverware and china clatter as the restaurant fills with the bubbling conversation of other diners. A water feature in the lobby creates the sound of perpetual rain and I lean forward in order to hear as our instructions continue. 

I should bury a red string in the front yard and write down everything I want to bring into my life and everything I need to release. My gift box includes two small pieces of paper on which to do this. They are thin and delicate, emblazoned with gold leaf symbols and red Chinese lettering I cannot decipher. When this task is accomplished, I’m to burn them. 

I start to write. I want my children to remain happy. Healthy. I want to do good work in this world. I want to live with transparent authenticity. I want to be instinctively generous. Compassionate. Thoughts come faster now as I suddenly feel as if it’s all true: I can change the past and forge a bright future, so it is imperative that I leave nothing out.  I want to live up to my potential, to know that love honors our intentions, forgives our mistakes; that a benevolent force is at the heart of the universe.

The woman next to me glances over as I cover my second paper’s surface. “Is that all?” she asks dryly, but I’m not finished. Rotating the page, I write in the tiny margins. 

I want to know that I am not alone, even when I feel alone; that in some way we have yet to rightly imagine, all is well. 

At home, I step outside. Pulling the two small pieces of paper from my pocket I kneel against the winter wind.  A match flames against each fragile corner and I lift them skyward. As I watch, regret disappears, at least in this moment, and all I still long for rises like hope in the pristine air.  

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

This is a story about memory. New evidence indicates that it’s not what you think it is and even photographs don’t tell the whole story.

In the earliest snapshot of a childhood Christmas, I’m nine months old and my parents have placed me in an open gift box under the tree. My two older sisters kneel next to me on the braided rug posing as if I’m a present they’ve just opened. Sharon, the oldest, dutifully holds the wrapped lid of the box with gentle goodwill. My sister Andrea looks stunned with disbelief, so I’ll say it again. I’m sorry I wasn’t a pony.

In a later photo I’m a happy diaper-clad toddler packing a six-shooter in a holster. My western ensemble includes a red neckerchief, a cowgirl hat, and a gigantic emergency-room bandage taped to my forehead. I’d fallen down an entire flight of wooden stairs, hit the landing with unstoppable momentum and tumbled headfirst down the remaining steps where I’d cracked my head open on the coffee table our father had made in his basement workshop.

As I write this it occurs to me that a resigned, pony-less cowgirl may have dressed me up in her Annie Oakley outfit to compensate for having been unable to stop my unsteady approach to the top of the stairs.

I don’t remember the fall, but I do remember being on an exam table where a kindly male doctor with white hair pinched the profusely-bleeding wound closed with butterfly clamps instead of stitches to avoid leaving me with the large scar I now have. I remember being asked how many people were in my family and knowing the answer, five, although of course that is a trick of memory and not possible. But in my mind at least, I identified us on my fingers by name if not number, and the doctor gave me a grape lollipop for each member of my original posse.

And then there’s the photo above of my sisters and me in angelic white choir robes with red bows at our necks, gathered around the piano. I’m nearly three now. Sharon is poised with her hands above the keys playing carols and we all are singing. At least our mouths are open and we’re holding sheet music, but in my memory, we’ve been instructed: “Just act like you’re singing and stop hitting each other.” On the back of that photo my mother has written, “The girls love to make music together!” Did we? Could Sharon play then? I don’t know.

That’s the thing about memory. Neuroscientists have discovered that every time you remember an event from the past you change it. So, the more you recall an experience or relationship, the more you distort it. Researchers did a test with 9-11 survivors. Each time they told their stories the details changed until just one year out from the event their accounts of that morning were significantly altered. Imagine what a lifetime of remembering does to experience. And what is true? The event or the memory you make of it?

I remember my sisters slipping our presents to each other under a tree we’d cut from the woods, while the others hid their eyes on Christmas Eve. I remember the ringing of a strand of red, green, and silver bells, passed one to the other, to signal that it was time for everyone to look, to gasp at the magical transformation, the growing abundance. With each ringing of the bells and moment of revelation, the little heap of presents grew.

I remember a midnight worship service in a white clapboard church where a flame was passed candle to candle to the accompaniment of “Silent Night,” until the countenance of an entire congregation was bathed in light. And I remember three jostling sisters crammed together at the top of the stairs on Christmas morning while my sleepy parents opened the curtains so the river could watch, lit a fire in the fireplace, turned on the tree lights, and poured their coffee before we thundered down the steps.

The December dawn cast its soft rose light over snowy swans in the icy cove as we opened gifts, but were they there? I don’t know.

If memory can’t be trusted, what of our Christmas recollections is true? Maybe this: the unbearable excitement of believing in the unseen, in miracles; in thinking that just for one night the impossible is possible. Reindeer can fly, and if you believe, love will heal the world.

(I’ll see you back here January 1st.) Happy Holidays.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

I didn’t always want to be a writer. Besides being an archeologist and paleontologist, I wanted to be a healer, then an actress. I wanted to use words to change minds, soften hearts.  But I only wanted roles in which I could be pretty.  (I know. Don’t judge me. I’m already judging myself.) 

Like on Halloween. I was an elf, a baby (size large), a devil, but a super-cute one with a pitchfork, and an angel. But in second grade when Olivia McClure dressed as a witch and showed me with glee that she had blacked out her teeth, I was horrified. Not pretty! And by choice! Yet I was also impressed. What substance this girl had! I would have followed her onto the field of battle under fire. 

My perspective on appearance has always been highly subjective and hugely self-critical. I know this because I was having lunch with my friend Cheryl at the Severn Inn the other day, and after bemoaning how hard it is to regard yourself mirrored for hours on Zoom, I mentioned I’d recently had a revelation sifting through decades of family photographs.

“Looking at those photos was like observing someone else’s life,” I said. “I was so amazed at what I had had, what we had made.  I think I was sleep deprived, stressed out and distracted for about 20 years. I didn’t realize in real time the magnitude of the gift I’d been given.”

Because in truth, scattered in snapshots all over the bed in the loft that afternoon, I saw this beautiful family—a family I wish I had known. A family I’d give anything to have back now that I’m awake and present. But that’s not how this works. That family has now dispersed into the world to become whatever it is that families become when love overflows its banks. 

I squinted into the light on the restaurant’s sundrenched deck wishing for a hat and a glass of wine. “And this will sound bizarre, but do you know what else I suddenly realized that I never, ever knew?” I asked.

And without missing a beat, my friend replied, “That you were pretty.”

And I can’t tell you how stunned I was to hear my most-practical, least-romanticizing friend confirm without hesitation the same revelation about her own past. That our self-images had been distorted for years. Probably all our lives. By our own hyper-critical expectations. I would have cried if we hadn’t been laughing. All those decades spent thinking we needed to improve, to be better than we were, both inside and out.

When I was in graduate school, one of my instructors told me that when her father was dying, she’d gone to visit and had spent an entire day joking, reminiscing about her childhood, talking about his career, going for a walk, reading to him, and when it was time to leave, he had clasped her to him and said with such loving sincerity, “You seem like such a nice girl. I wish I had known you.” 

It’s like that, I said to myself as I drove home thinking about the woman I’d seen in those photos. I wish I had known you. 

And it makes me wonder what I am not seeing accurately now—what else I’m not grateful enough for, as is. Because I know now that come tomorrow, these will be the days for which you would give anything.  Because at some point the tide of possibility stops rising. 

Proximity to those you love lessens, primacy shifts. You are no longer your kids’ next of kin. And your relationships reach a point of stasis. It’s that moment of slack water, where the river has no velocity, poised to reverse the flood tide for the ebb tide, as it sighs back to the sea. 

I remember the day I realized that time had come for my mother—surely it happens in marriages, too. And in friendships. And between fathers and sons. That moment when you realize that what you have between you is all you’ll ever have. For whatever reason, further growth, further change, has become impossible. 

Mom and I were on the phone, and I needed her to understand something about the way we related. She was probably responding with unwarranted anxiety to some piece of news I was sharing. (Oh gosh, do I do that to my kids? She stops typing to stare out the window with furrowed brow.) And suddenly I knew the conversation was too complex. Mom was 89, had increasing dementia, and could neither take in what I needed nor ask for what she wanted from me. I stood there in the kitchen, pork chops on the counter, understanding that our relationship could be more of same, but it could never be something more. The tide was rushing out now. 

And I hope that is not going to happen to me—that I’ll remain able to change—that I’ll keep trying to see things from other points of view. That I’ll be able to empathize with people I dislike. And then, of course, like them. See? There’s so much easy magic in this world. 

I hope the only role I’ll want to play is me and that I won’t need to be pretty. And I hope you are on stage with me in this glorious pageant with a million speaking parts because I think this is the truth: if you are reading these words, we are in the same play, only you are the lead in a simultaneous performance. 

I hope that it won’t require a look back from the future to recognize in this holy moment how beautiful you are, how beautiful we all are.

How very beautiful we have always been. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

One of my writers just had a story rejected and we’re both thrilled for her. Why? Because the journal can’t use the story, but they love her work and suggested she send something else.  Fist bumps all around. If only all rejections were this good. 

So, I wrote a book in a year in which I was living mostly alone. Kids all launched at quite a distance, husband in Europe. I’d quit teaching at the University of Maryland thinking I’d be traveling to Europe as well, then changed those plans, and literally overnight, I was jobless and home alone in a very quiet 4-square. 

 When I finished the book, I sent a query and proposal off to 10 publishers.  About a week later, I got a call from a small, independent publisher in North Carolina. He loved the description of the book and the next thing I knew, the pasta water was turned off, dinner on hold, and I was having the most exciting conversation of my life with Frederick B. Diehl.  

We talked for an hour–about how large the first print run would be, (small), whether or not the book would be available online, (no). An advance? (No, again.) Royalties? To be determined.  But published! By someone not-me! He told me to send him the entire manuscript and he’d get back to me by Friday. This was Tuesday. 

I did what I always do in a situation that cautions objectivity.  I became instantly enamored with Mr. Diehl, his publishing company, his wife and children, and his labradoodle. Soulmates! I Fed Ex’d him the entire manuscript the next morning. 

But Friday came and went with no word. Two long weeks after our conversation, just as I was walking out the door to teach a writing workshop at St. John’s College, the Fed Ex guy tossed a package onto the doormat containing my entire book. When I opened it, the cover page wore a tiny stick-on note that simply read, “Not what I was expecting. Fred Diehl.”

I was gut punched. This was rejection-rejection. Not good rejection. Rejection with the added sting of surprise and confusion. And loss that is perplexing is always harder to release than loss that is understood. 

But I had a class to teach. So, I drove over to St. John’s and as I organized their manuscripts for discussion, I gave 17 writers my embarrassed sorrow. We all laughed at the fact I’d practically moved in with the Diehls and I confirmed they were off my Christmas list. Then we moved on to the group’s work and as they shared the fruits of their imaginations and memories, I thought, I can choose how I feel about this. I don’t actually KNOW that getting that contract would have been in my best interest. How many times in my life has a disappointment turned out to be the best possible thing?  (And yes, I’m talking about you Robbie Eaton). Maybe there’s no such thing as good news or bad news. If I take what I think I know out of it…

 It’s just news. 

Just news.

And the feeling caught the wind, and the sails of equanimity billowed and by the time I walked from Barr Buchanan to the car that night, I thought, Maybe good fortune is winging its way to me right this minute– over mountains, over cities, over rivers and roads–streaming down from the stars overhead. Maybe a miracle is in transit–out for delivery to my life (or yours)–right this minute. We don’t know that it’s not, so imagine it is. An excellent lab result, the coveted job, the healthy child, the restored sense of wellbeing in place of despondency.

In the morning, I woke up, and as is my practice, said thank you for this new day before my feet hit the floor. I blessed Frederick Diehl. (Goodbye, Fred. Goodbye!  I’ll miss you and the life we could have shared!) May he be happy and successful, I asked, may he sell lots of books and may his dog live many years. I said thank you to the universe on principle for this disappointment because thank you shouldn’t be selective any more than love, should it?  “Thank you for this loss,” I thought, “for being in it with me. Make of it what you will.”  

I poured a cup of hot coffee, added some milk, turned on my computer and saw an email from Penguin Random House sitting in my inbox. One of the five biggest publishing conglomerates in the world. The acquisitions editor apologized for the delay in responding to my proposal. It had been routed to their Indiana headquarters instead of to their New York editorial offices and had been delayed by two weeks. 

“Is this book still available?” the email read. “I’d like to offer you a contract.” That contract included an advance, royalties, online sales from 20 countries around the world, multiple reprintings, a long shelf life in every Barnes and Noble in North America and a publicity firm for a year.

Plenty of things have happened in my life and yours that defy any other way of looking at them than as misfortune. Loss. Heartbreak. And I’m not a fan of “everything happens for a reason.” Stuff happens that hurts. Inexplicable, unfair stuff happens to the innocent, to people we love. Evolution itself is one accident after another.  

But it feels to me that if you ask, presence can be called to join in the experience with you and that’s often transformative. The secret sauce is thank you on principal, unconditional thanks. Thank you on trust.  Because in the moment, you don’t know good news from bad news. 

It’s just news.

Your work is to untie the knot that binds you to disappointments you don’t understand by becoming clear about them. Then acknowledge this: we don’t know the endgame; we can’t see the goal line and we don’t even know the rules. 

But if you ask, (and maybe even if you don’t), you are never alone on the field. And you can only catch a miracle if you’re looking up. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.