A Woman in a Box

 Before I became a woman, they handed me a box.

Here, they said. This is for you to stay safe in.

This box is too small, I said. It’s the wrong shape for me.

But don’t you want to be safe? If you put yourself into the box, everything will be all right. You will be safe– you’ll be a Good Wife, and a Good Mother. This box is the only way to know for sure that your husband and your children are happy.

But what about me? Will I be happy?

You’ll be safe.

So I climbed into the box.

It doesn’t fit, I cried! Look, I stick out over here, and this leg is too long, and my breasts are too large and and I have questions, ideas, things I want to see and do.

From outside the box, they handed me a knife.

Here, they said. This is for you. Cut off the pieces that don’t fit in the box.

I took the knife, trembling.

That will hurt, I whispered.

But it’s the only way to be safe. It’s the only way to be Right and Good. Cut, they cried!

So I cut.

I cut off all the parts of me that didn’t fit. I held my breath and made my largeness small. I made my small tender parts big and tough to fill the empty corners. I pulled the lid down tight, so I could be safe inside the box. 

And I painted a laughing face on the outside of the box.

Grief #3

Grief is a canyon with no bottom. At first you are just falling away eternally, deeper and faster and into thicker darkness every moment until the light is almost gone.

Then at some point you find that you are only dangling over the edge, hanging on by your fingernails, dangerously close to falling, but still somehow attached to solid ground. For now. For as long as you can keep your hands clenched, clawed desperately into the crumbling edge of routine, habit, daily existence. All your energy is focused on just not letting go.

And then maybe, hopefully, eventually you are able to get an elbow up and maybe a knee over the ledge. You might lie, gasping for a while on solid ground. You might be able to crawl away, and then sit on a bench a little distance from the cliff and observe the canyon and remember and marvel at its awful, beautiful depth.

If I could, I would tell you...

Here are some things I wish you heard every day.

You did a good job.

You are a gift.

Your ideas matter.

I am listening to you, I hear you, that makes sense.

You are needed here.

You are right.

That was hard, but you did a good job-- you did the best you could and that was enough.

I am so proud of you.

I can't wait to hear your thoughts on this.

What do you need right now?

This won't last forever, it will get easier, it will pass away.

It's good enough now, you can stop trying.

We've been waiting for you.

You're really good at this.

What do you wish you could hear someone say?

Grief #2

Grief is having all the skin on your body ripped off in one fell swoop. Now you are walking around in your flesh and bone, bleeding steadily from all over your self. Even the slightest carelessly reassuring touch can be excruciating. 

If you would comfort this naked, bleeding wreck of a human, sit quietly a little apart and listen to the story. Don't try to touch them, or bind their wounds, or apply healing salves. If you must do anything; merely breathe, gently, as our mothers did when applying stinging bright red mercurochrome to a skinned knee when we were children. 

But most of all, sit and wait for the weeping, which will come suddenly in the middle of otherwise normal conversation or daily routine. Then just be there. A silent witness to the Thing That Happened; the moment that excoriated your friend.

Grief #1

There’s an initial impact, a blow: what you saw and felt and heard causing such a reflexive flinching back inward, that you find your Self shrunken down to a whisper, far from the windows and doors of your eyes and ears and skin.

Grief is heavy.

It’s exhausting.

It weighs down the back of your neck and your shoulders like a lead scarf, heavy and poisonous. Holding you there, hunkered down in the basement of yourself, so far away, so much burning space between you and the Real outside. You can hear life happening, faintly, from far away. Unable to communicate with the outside world except ineffectually, with great effort.

Will you ever re-inhabit the entirety of yourself? Ever return to fill yourself from the core all the way to the outside edges and have enough Self left to overflow outward to affect the world around you?