Everything I loved more than anything

When your child is moving across a continent, an ocean, and 9 time zones

I had another post all ready to share here. It was flitting around the edges of the topic of feeling unable to engage in the things I usually like doing, such as writing.

It landed on some explanations that were possible but not as troubling to me as others it danced around. And then.

I have been participating in

Jeannine Ouellette

’s Visceral Self: Writing Through the Body. I don’t know how to begin to summarize all of my issues through, with, and about my body, so I’m not going to try, but curiosity about writing-body connections, coupled with the depth and richness of Jeannine’s writing about writing—along with her authentic support and the generous, uplifting community she has created—made me think that there might be something in this experience that I need.

This is week 3. I spent the morning the materials posted working on my other post (the one I’m not sharing), avoiding the work of writing through my body.

Finally, when that other post was finished, I read the materials. Within a minute of beginning the body exercise, a dam broke, flooding me. I understood, then, that I haven’t been able to write because I have been carrying within me such a vast boulder of old and anticipatory grief that no words could get out from around or under it.

In the other post, I shared a photo I took recently of my daughter:

She is in our front yard, studying Swedish, accompanied by my grandelephant, Princess Ellie. Next to her is a vest she is embroidering for her husband, who is in school in Sweden.

These are the facts I shared in that other post. Here are some facts I didn’t share:

For the past two years, she has been living with us while waiting for a decision on her application for a visa that will give her residency in Sweden and a path to citizenship there. In March, she finally received the answer we have all been hoping she would get. She will move there in August, and likely begin school herself in the fall. Her long limbo is finally ending.

I have known (but rarely said, even to myself) that either outcome (visa or no visa) would break my heart, just in different ways. I have been telling myself how lucky she is, we are, I am that the lesser heartbreak—the outcome we’ve all been hoping and wishing for—is the one we’ve gotten. I’ve been telling myself it is not heartbreak at all, that it cannot be heartbreak when you’ve gotten what you wished for.

That is a beautiful lie.

I have been lying to myself, and I think we all know that liars can’t write anything worth reading. Not about anything that really matters.

Writing is like feeling: Just as you can’t shut off one kind of emotion without dulling all of them, you can’t shut off one kind of truth without distorting all of them.

Jeannine’s workshop consists of body exercises and writing exercises. If you’re a skeptic like me, it can all sound a a little woo-woo, but less than a minute into Week 3’s body exercise I was crying. Hard tears. The kind of tears that seem to snag in your throat, probably because they’ve calcified while you’ve been holding them in, hoping they’ll never get out.

And then I wrote a first (rougher) draft of this:

I remember stretching my left arm back from the front seat, shoulder twisted like a tetherball rope, and her sticky fingers gripping my dry ones. How many miles did we travel this way, her father steering us past fir trees that blurred through the Suburban’s side windows as we hurtled up and down our mountain highway, the air inside thick with Goldfish dust and the must of stale toddler socks and spilled juice? “My eyes, my eyes,” she once cried as afternoon sun shone hard on her face, her lashes dark, wet clumps spiking out from shuttered lids. “Shh, shh, shh,” I soothed, arm straining, my fingers stroking the back of her seemingly boneless hand. “We’ll be home soon,” I crooned, never thinking to tell him to pull over, to hang a blanket over the window, to take a few moments to solve the problem of her pain when it was still so easy to do. I suppose I could only see the many other things we thought we had to get to.

There is more I might say about all of this. Maybe if I did, these words would make more sense to those who haven’t had a child move across a continent and an ocean, leaving her geography, her language, her family, her earlier dreams, to build a life in a place where your early morning will always be her late afternoon.

I could write about what it means to be the mother of a young woman in my country right now, where the stripping of women’s rights is happening so quickly and openly that those of us paying attention are reeling.

I could write about my own decision to move away from my family when I was the age she is now, and how I have longed to return to them for almost as many years as my daughter has been alive.

I could write about the trip we took in 2019 to her great-great-grandmother’s birthplace on a small island in Croatia, where I understood for the first time why my great-grandmother had been such a hard woman to know and love.

I could write about how I’ve come to understand that all immigration is trauma, no matter how much you love or need what you are seeking.

I could write about how shockingly short life has turned out to be.

Earlier this week,

Mary Hutto Fruchter

¹ shared a poem from Ada Limón:

Instructions on Not Giving Up

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

~Ada Limón

Some days—today—I miss the baubles and trinkets of my life with a longing so deep I cannot put words to it. I miss the woman who spent years riding every day in a vehicle with her arm stretched back to her girl, her limb tethering both of them. I miss that girl, her skin sweet as cherry blossom petals. I miss those years, fleeting as spring blooms.

I miss them. I miss them. I miss them. The words croon and spin inside my head, like tires kissing highway asphalt again and again and again.

Those years are so short, and the time of the plodding green skin feels so long.

Still, in spite of all that, like the tree accepting the leaf unfurling like a fist, like the mother I was who rode for years with her shoulder twisted to hold her daughter’s palm in her own, I’ll take it.

I’ll take it all.

Just as you can’t shut off one kind of emotion without dulling all of them, and you can’t shut off one kind of truth without distorting all of them, you cannot protect yourself from the spent confetti of your life without sawing off all its branches.

So many things are all or nothing, and this truth is why I choose it all and would again and again and again—all the mess, all the hurt, all the empty—to have once held a palm-full of everything I loved more than anything.

And to have the hope of doing so again.

Enough about me…How are you doing?

I would love to hear all about it. Please feel free to share whatever my words bring up for you by leaving a comment.

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1. Mary’s publication is just delightful. I highly recommend clicking over there. Another piece this week that helped make this post possible is “Let Me Be Enough” by

Elizabeth Beggins