Suffering is a perfect foundation for
happiness. That doesn’t matter in the throes of it, but in retrospect I believe that the pure joy I feel just looking up at the sky might have something to do
with the deprivation of simple pleasures which lasted most of my life.
My longsuffering childhood included sexual
abuse at the age of five and desperately trying to thrive under the care of a
neurotic mother who preferred communing with the voices in her head over
interacting with her children.
I turned to art and poetry at a very young
age to fulfill myself where positive reinforcement was lacking. It ended up
being quite the fix – and I’ve enjoyed the catharsis and healing power of art
and writing throughout my long-suffering life. Many have said, and I agree, that I ought to share all of those adventures in hardship in a memoir. Soon I hope.
A teacher told me all good poetry is born of
loss or longing, I have a collection of more than a hundred poems on the theme
of romantic love – wanting it, celebrating it, losing it – and I think it’s all
quite good so I agree with her. I can categorize poems about motherhood the
same way – longing for an unborn child to leap into my life, longing for the
toddler to grow up and share adventures with me, a sick child, a house in chaos
– could be poems of loss in a sense. Anything you feel strongly can generate a
good poem, she once said. What a life of strong experiences and strong feelings
I’ve had – and what poems I’ve written!
Now in my fifties I am, at this moment, not
really suffering. I certainly don’t count routine aches and pains. The
novelties of making myself a delicious cup of coffee, walking my dog under a
big bright sky, and spontaneously creating some art on a day other than
Mother’s Day or a vacation day… these bring rapture against a backdrop of years
during which getting through any day took monumental effort.
I imagine that millions of people live
similarly – intensely straining to feed their family while fighting to remain
positive; lying in a post-surgery, pain-addled bed without the mental bandwidth
to conceive of the future; holding another human together—husband, child,
boyfriend—as if their every breath was your responsibility. And time. Who
doesn’t suffer at the hands of the clock? When work and kids and housework and
tending to appliances, cars, buttons or toys in disrepair seem altogether like
a magic trick that can’t be teased out by you, while friends and neighbors seem
effortless at it.
Sensing that all of this suffering is
ubiquitous, if not universal, I can celebrate it with you to the extent that
some aspect of it must resonate. So I’m not at all trying to sound like the
queen of it or a rarity, but a poet who’s got hold of a theme, enjoying the
revelation that in this season without suffering I can look back and eulogize
it, inspect it, write an ode to it, and possibly give someone an empathetic
response to theirs.
In my 40s, after all the sex for having kids
was over, I finally found the joy of sex. And in my 50s, after all the sweat of
building a career from scratch had been wrung out, and kids face their
own struggles to support themselves, I finally don’t have to fear the grocery
store, and I finally have time to write a word or two instead of freelancing
evenings and weekends.
But before I write fictional adventures about
a Westie or finish my sci-fi trilogy, I want to write an ode to suffering, the
foundation of solid rock that I build every day on. Not because I suffered, but
because I embraced it and rode it like a wave – a force of nature that could
not be tamed but could be harnessed and ridden, rough as you like, the way millions
of my fellow humans do every day.
Now I’m going to walk down the hall and make
a cup of coffee and really, really enjoy it. I’m going to walk my dog under the
highest sky and breathe free air with pure delight, and I’m going to relish
working my ass off for a boss I love doing work I enjoy. All of this is bliss
because of years and years of every manner of suffering, sacrifice, pain,
struggle and hardship. How grateful I am for every day of it.