Back to school I go!

Day One: January 2011

At my first MFA in creative writing residency, Vermont.

I go into the bathroom, unzip my pants as I walk down the hallway, and then leave the door unlocked. Then I remember I am no longer alone. It is not my children who might follow me in here, but adults – this old, new world I have rejoined. I must lock the door. I must bare my soul, but carefully. I must remember the old rules. Grown-ups are not always what they seem. We open to each other, then become afraid of judgment: that we have revealed too much to the wrong person. Then the shutters slam shut. I make friends: I talk too much: I doubt, yet I continue.

“I just want to suck less,” says the young woman from the plains, and we laugh. “So flunk me,” says another, not wanting to be done yet. Others raise a glass to the woman who’s dropped out. I say hello to the gentle soul who’s admitted to her own fears. “Hanging on by a thread,” she says, and I want to reach out and hug her, but cannot. Not yet. I meet another woman I think will change my life. “Don’t I know you?” “Haven’t we met?” We stand and talk, face to face, our different colored faces reflected in one another's eyes, our hair static with cold. We talk about people making other people feel worthless, and its results, about history and the south; about my confusion. My soul is wide open. Come into my garden. Who will come? Who will slam shut the rusted gate?

Slept in my socks last night. It is cold without the bodies of your family to heat you. With my third eye, I see my little girl’s face and my heart knows it needs to stay close; I feel the memory of my little boy’s warm body curled around me. I want to play with them in the snow. But this is another world. I have reentered the strange planet that is the grown up world, that is my own potential, and a hope for connection across the many barricades ‘grown-ups’ construct to keep each other out.

Beautiful silence descending as night falls on snow. Words feeding me, yet not yet entering me quite: the love for my children erecting a low gate between heart and brain: the white iron gate of my own childhood. ‘Be careful. Remember what’s important.’ The power of human invention; grief, joy, amazement, the sometime beauty of the human world revealed. A longing to merge the worlds of mother and writer: a hesitation. And now to sleep alone: so strange after all these nights of interruption by the loveliness that is my new-made family, that is my simple purpose as caretaker of the next generation.

What business do I have here? What gifts can I bring? What receive?