When Hope and Disappointment Collide
Which is, perhaps, all the time?
Last night I received word that my thesis for my MFA in Creative Writing passed final approval. Here is proof:
Here are the reasons, beyond the normal ones, that this is remarkable:
I’m a single mom with full physical custody and a “co-parent” in another state.
I work full-time. And work another job part-time.
I’m short and it’s hard to find pants that fit right.
I started an MFA over twenty years ago and wasn’t able to finish because of stuff.
I thought that my dream of being a writer was over and out-of-reach and impossible and impractical.
I’m 46. And, word on the street is, this year I will be 47.
So I am proud of myself. And if you asked me how do it all, my only answer is, I’m not sure. But also, maybe ADHD.
There is a couplet from a particular poem that I’ve had tucked in my mind all these years. The poem is titled “The Ghost in the Picture Room”1 by Adelaide Anne Proctor and here’s the bit that I carry with me:
No star is ever lost we once have seen,
We always may be what we might have been.
I believe that: We always may be what we might have been. It gives me hope.
At this same moment that some of my long-ago dreams are coming true, I’m also facing the reality of chronic health issues that are really bumming me out and some really difficult stuff with one of my kids. I spent most of yesterday in random, hiccuping sobs.
For some reason, there’s a part of my brain that believes someday I’ll reach a point in life where I am simply happy. Where I’m not always carrying hope and disappointment, grief and joy, success and failure.
But if life has taught me anything, it’s that emotions don’t ever come in the singular. There isn’t a magic moment where we can feel only our grief, process it, and then move on to joy. It’s always a mumble and mess of everything at the same time. I would prefer something tidier, but it just isn’t tidy, is it?
So here I am: happy and sad, thrilled and disappointed, fulfilled and confused, content and nervous.
Even with these heavy binaries, I’m ready to keep looking for hope wherever I can find it.
If I can always be what I might have been, then so can my kids.
And so can you.
May that hope easily find you, wherever you are.
Note: You can easily find this couplet all over the internet attributed to random famous writers. I haven’t seen it tied to Abraham Lincoln yet, but there’s still time.
In the interest of faithful provenance you should know:
Proctor’s poem is part of “The Haunted House,” a portmanteau story written by Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Sarah Smith, George Augustus Sala, Adelaide Proctor, and Elizabeth Gaskell. It was published as a Christmas special in Dickens’s periodical All the Year Round. This particular story was written in verse by the poet, Adelaide Proctor. It relates the legend of a young nun, once the pride of her convent, who falls from grace and later receives forgiveness through a miracle.
From the Victorian Short Fiction Project
1. You’re a boss and a marvel.
2. I’ve been noticing this in the last five years — the persistence of mumble and mess, the way that your best moments can be so tangled up with your worst moments, it feels wrong somehow, though I prefer this to the periods of my life that felt overwhelmingly dark.
I wonder if it’s related to our devotion to/instinct for binary thinking * — which you’ve referred to. I remember an English professor talking about that being a unique feature of western thought and philosophy. I’ve never stopped thinking about that and the way it makes things seem so “wrong” or counterintuitive — our discomfort with contradiction and the way the brain glitches when faced with paradoxical ideas.
I think (? Maybe?)that it’s helped me to realize that binaries are organizational tools, but philosophically and emotionally primitive. Reality is far more complex and tangled.
Accepting that feels a little like falling off a cliff and landing in the incomprehensible expanse of space, so it’s a limited sort of comfort…but I think it’s where truth lives, so it helps me contextualize the brain hiccups.
You, my friend, are able to convey such things with beautiful and spartan language and imagery. When you write about it, you convey this HUGE IDEA, followed by a shrug and a comforting hug, so your readers aren’t left hurtling through space.
*… and also linear thinking which is its own rabbit hole to fall into. 🐰
Congratulations! Getting that MFA with children to raise is no easy feat, but so well worth it, as we both know. But no matter what letters you now have after your name, you are and have always been a bona fide writer. You always write, and beautifully. And as I am now 60, 46 and 47 both look pretty damn young to me.
Sorry about health and child concerns, I remind myself with my five kids that they are on their own journeys, per Khalil Gibran in the poem "On Children" in the book "The Prophet." I do all I can to support them but they were born with their soul's agenda. That doesn't make it hurt less, but reminds me not everything is always all my fault.