Wobbly Perch

My writing muse has escaped me for a few weeks now and I miss her terribly. When I sit at my computer these days, nothing comes to me. Just crowded thoughts about errands and to-do lists and a general overwhelm of “yep, here I sit, not sure what to write about.” I screw up my face, bite my lip, tap my foot. When I have this trouble, I often pull a random book from my shelf, open it up to any old page and scan the paragraphs for a single sentence that tugs at me in some way. Sometimes it’s a sentiment that has fluttered a heart string, but most often it’s a simple sentence that drops the reader – in this case, me – directly into a moment. I type out the sentence verbatim and then promptly put the book away.

Returning to the plagiarized sentence blinking at me expectantly from my laptop, I stare at it for a few moments considering, and then simply start typing. Oftentimes a story begins to mold. I can see the outlines of it taking shape like a boat slowly emerging through a morning fog. Once the boat has its framework , the story is now my own and has little, if anything, to do with the story from which I stole the opening sentence. So, not wanting to shamelessly lift material from another writer, I go back and alter that first sentence. I restructure it, change the setting, flip the gender, add words, omit words or delete it altogether. The borrowed sentence served its purpose. I don’t need it anymore.

 

            I don’t need it anymore.

 

            That sentence takes my breath away. It fills me to spilling with simultaneous excitement and fear. How thrilling to stand firmly on my own two feet. But how incredibly sad to simply discard the root source of my inspiration as though she were nothing more than a gum wrapper, or cellophane that I’ve roughly torn from something I’ve just thoughtlessly consumed. I’ve abandoned her, dismissed her, carried on as though she never was my crutch, as if I never stood on those stalwart shoulders so that I could get a glimpse over the garden fence. As if I were tall enough to see over that garden fence entirely on my own from the get-go. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t tall enough; you and I both know that I didn’t really go it alone.

            It’s alright, I remind myself. It’s okay. We take turns in life. I’m a mother now three times over, and more often than not it’s me who is the scaling wall. Someone else is standing on my shoulders, grinding their weight into the tender muscles of my neck, laughing from their wobbly perch as they sweep their eyes further up the road. We take our strength, our sustenance and our courage, from each other. That’s the way it’s always been, that’s the way it has to stay.

            So why does this leave me feeling so sad, choking and sputtering on my own words? Likely because that muse is a damn bitter pill that I don’t want to swallow. It’s a pill that leaves me with images of sprung abandonment, beautiful forsaken-ness and, ultimately, lonely death. We walk up the steps of great cathedrals knowing absolutely nothing of the laborers who dug the foundation, heaved the stones and hoisted the beams. We burst through doors hung by other men; spring from the aprons of mothers generations back whose names are no longer recorded; launch from stacks of information compiled by other people whose image is entirely unknown to us. We take flight from the efforts of others. I understand that it has to be this way.

            Yet, even though I understand this natural way, I think of my mother - dead now. I think of my sister, also dead now. I think of my father - not dead yet, but eighty years old and fighting his third, untreatable cancer. I didn’t want to lose my mother and sister, but I did. I certainly don’t want to lose my father, but I will. Did I appreciate my mother and sister in real time? Most often not. Did I love them even so? Most certainly. I loved them in that fleeting, “I’m running out the door, sorry – no time to chat now,” kind of way that we love all the people we take for granted.

I learned from them, took from them and then I sprung away from them.

I have a different opportunity with my father. Similar to the losses of both my mother and sister (the former from alcoholism, the latter from breast cancer), I also know in advance that he is slipping away. I know that our time together is limited. But, because I have now suffered the loss of both mother and sister and wizened up just a little in the process, my real-time appreciation and real-time loving of my father is not so fleeting or distracted. It’s lingering. It’s hovering. It’s casting a backwards glance even as I continue to step forward. Because step forward I must. I have no other choice and wouldn’t want another choice even if given one.  

But I’m not sure I want to launch yet. I rather enjoy the view from the stalwart shoulders that serve as my wobbly perch. I can see a little further while still remaining safely rooted to my original source. My original inspiration, my first breath. For that is what our parents do, what all people do who have lived and worked and loved before us. They toil so that we may be inspired. Their efforts are well worth a moment of pause – nay, several moments of deliberate, sweetest pause – as we prepare to strike ever forward.

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Cartwheeling