I raised Indie on my own, and her leaving meant that the one person I had shared my life with for eighteen years would be on her own soon, and so would I. In 2019-2020, as Indie’s senior year of high school began, I wanted to catalog the year, to trace, in real time, the moments before she left home for college. I consider them a record-an artifact even. ![]() I dedicate the books I write to my daughter, Indie, as an extension of this desire for her to know me, and to know how I saw and see us. ![]() When my mother died in 2018, my grief was compounded by how much I didn’t know about my mother, of my mother, and when I had a daughter in 2002, I knew I wanted my daughter to know me, the girl I had been, the young woman I missed, yet often regretted, and the woman I am, as me, as Jill, the woman beyond her mother. I remember watching Terms of Endearment, the film adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s novel, in the 1980s every time it came on cable, identifying with Emma’s longing to escape her my mother’s insistences, too young to understand that the conflicts between she and her mother would always leave Emma missing her mother when she was miles and states away, the cords of their landline phones a tether. One year, I gave my mother Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club in hopes that the novel would speak for me, say what I couldn’t say- I could understand you better if I knew you more, if I knew what you went through, before me. Many works of literary prose-novels, essay collections, memoirs-portray relationships between mothers and daughters who embrace the complexity of their respective identities and personalities, of their own and of their mothers/daughters. More often, literature reflects troubling, toxic, or estranged mother-daughter relationships than they do healthy, positive, even inspiring ones. We might long for what we, ourselves, never had. And we will.When reading about mothers and daughters, we might feel grateful we didn’t have to endure such conflict and trauma. And I want to tell you this often: That despite being so human and so terrified, here, standing on this unfinished staircase to nowhere and everywhere, surrounded by the cold and starless night-we can live. ![]() I want to stay there until the building burns down. I want to leave the party through the window and find my uncle standing on a piece of iron shaped into visible desperation, which must also be (how can it not?) the beginning of visible hope. I want to use it to talk about my obsessions and fears, my odd and idiosyncratic joys. But I still have my body and with it these words, hammered into a structure just wide enough to hold the weight of my living. A place where I can be as honest as I need to-because the fire has already begun in my home, swallowing my most valuable possessions-and even my loved ones. ![]() What happens now?, the poem, like the fire escape, as feeble and thin as it is, has become my most concentrated architecture of resistance. And yet, in a time where the mainstream seems to continually question the power and validity of art, and especially of poetry, its need, its purpose, in a generation obsessed with appearances, of status updates and smiling selfies bathed (corrected?) in the golden light of filters, in which it has become more and more difficult for us to say aloud, to one another: I am hurt.
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