I Broke My Ass- On making true nonsense

If you check in here regularly you might have noticed a pause, and that pause was the sound of me falling down the stairs. It happened on my kid’s birthday and it was dramatic- the whole house waking to the sound of me screaming as I skidded down 8 steps, the final thud of my head like a kicked in drum. What could have been a day of guilt (ruining my kid’s birthday) or despair (everything is terrible) became a day of maybe the truest connection and capaciousness that I’ve felt in a while.

Capacious is a word that I learned from Kate DiCamillo in her novel Flora and Ulysses which is a sacred text for me and my kid, and so many families I know. In her Newbery acceptance speech she said:

We have been given the sacred task of making hearts large through story. We are working to make hearts that are capable of containing much joy and much sorrow, hearts capacious enough to contain the complexities and mysteries and contradictions of ourselves and of each other.

We are working to make hearts that know how to love this world.

Right?? She is a fucking sage and really the only public figure I want to hear from in this moment in history. Capacious, complexity, capable—- these terms seem to have been banished from the lexicon of public life, from the script being typed before us by shadowy derelict knuckles, fed to us like an arsenic Twinkie, lying to us despite what we have seen and felt with our capacious hearts.

Falling is real, breaking a bone is real. My kids heard the crack from their beds. As much as I wanted to lie to them and make jokes about their clumsy mom, there was no room for spin. There was only room for truth and trusting that through truth my children and I are building something better, more sturdy than comfort. We are building a life in which we can face what is difficult and find our own true language for what hurts. A life that is capacious.

Kate DiCamillo also wrote in a letter to Mathew De la Peña:

E. B. White loved the world. And in loving the world, he told the truth about it — its sorrow, its heartbreak, its devastating beauty. He trusted his readers enough to tell them the truth, and with that truth came comfort and a feeling that we were not alone.

Before I fell, I was in a parent book group where we talked a lot about being our true selves and showing up authentically and bravely for our children. In the beginning there were many tedious, tentative moments where it seemed like we were parroting language from memes and tik toks to talk about our experiences/ “toddler mom life lol the struggle is real.” Or sharing struggles which we had already emerged from whole and clean. Then a mom started telling us a story that she hadn’t yet found words for, and it cracked that whole conference room in half under the weight of our listening and feeling what she felt. She said over and over, “I don’t know how to talk about this.” But we understood. Our group became capacious.

I hope that you have a place to not know. (Lord increase my bewilderment). I hope that you have a place to scribble/speak/dance nonsense.

I hope this for all of us because I would rather listen to someone stutter and stumble over the enormity of what they don’t know than spend a second with any text or conversation that uses its algorithms to cleanly summarize, to blot out our own knowing.

Which is maybe why I’ve always preferred the messy unfinished poem or painting that shows its seams, the hungry fingerprints of the person who made it. I’ve always rejected the sterilized and hyper edited poetics, distrusting the author’s need to control and subjugate their material, and resenting how this is called “mastery.” But even more so now.

To quote another sage:

“Don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining.” (Our queen, Judge Judy)

In one of my favorite children’s board books, Snow, the news anchors and radio hosts all say “no snow” but the little boy in the book sees a single snow flake and keeps pointing to it. Snow he says, until the city is blanketed in white.

When we picked up the kids after I got out of the hospital, my oldest was beside herself. She told me that when she had been crying and worrying about me, a well-meaning grownup told her that she was overreacting. She was left alone in her worry. Together we retold what had happened, allowing room for all of our truths, and for the fact that yes, this day fucking sucked!

And then we went to Chik Filet and sang happy birthday, me sitting on a large foam donut, with the people I love most in this world, being my whole damn true and broken self.

My dear friend gave me a tiny book of Emily Dickinson poems for my birthday and I opened it to this page.