Poem of the Week, by Judith Viorst
Last summer my family and I were waiting for a new family member to arrive. I was in Boston with my daughter and son-in-law, hanging out. Making dinner. Watching movies. Writing. Teaching. Waiting, waiting, and hoping: for an uneventful birth, a quick recovery, a healthy baby.
In me as I waited were shadows, worry ghosts haunting me. Worry my daughter’s birth would be as hard as mine were, worry the baby would not be ready for the world, worry my daughter would suffer but keep it to herself. I tried to cope with these ghosts the way I cope with most things, by silently tripling down on determination.
It wasn’t until a few months after the baby was here that I understood the scared ghosts in me were remnants of my former self, that overwhelmed girl who never told anyone she couldn’t cope and just struggled through. And now here is this new presence, making us all laugh and smile, fixing us with those bright brown eyes. Sometimes, if we’re lucky, we get a chance to comfort our past selves.
Between Mother and Other
My heart is younger, higher than
at any time since I held
your beginning life against it.
The mirror does not lie,
I am as my mother was,
as I, of course, would never be.
On this day of days, time is gracious.
It has, I think, a special fondness
for first-time grandmothers
and so leaves one thing unchanged –
I love your daughter as I loved
the daughter cradled in my
arms, that long ago yesterday when
I was you, and you were she.
Today’s poem is by Judith Viorst, poet and author of books for adults and children, including Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad.
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Sometimes I feel so sad for men. All the unspoken rules. All the ways our culture tries to train boys out of their openness, their gentleness, their human need for hugs and touch. I think of the multiple men I know who have told no one but me the ways they were sexually abused as children. I think of my giant of a father, and the look on his face when he told me how his mother used to scream at him when he was little. I think of all the men I know who depend on the women they love to translate the world of emotion for them, to navigate the nuances of relationships. I think of how sex sometimes seems the only acceptable way for a man to give and receive physical affection, the only time they can let down their guard. 
Here in the Time of Covid, my younger daughter and I have figured out how to maintain her complicated haircut. She does the back and sides with her electric clippers, and then I take over with my scissors, layering the sweep of black hair we refer to as “the plume” and lock by lock trimming and blending the rest. 
From my porch, which is all windows, people walk by in pairs or threes or solo. Some of them stop by my poetry hut and take a poem. Some keep their heads down and never look up. Some are slow and wandery, holding hands and scuffing their feet. Others stare straight ahead and laugh while they chatter to the person on the other end of their earbuds.
Relaxation is not my style. My style is more making long daily to-do lists and then crossing items off one by one. Sometimes I can trick myself into relaxing if I turn it into a task and add it to the list —rest and read–which when you think about it is kind of pathetic.
Twice in my life I’ve started down a road and kept going, even when the road narrowed and turned into thorns, brambles, impenetrable darkness. A symbol of my refusal to accept that I had made the wrong choice in the very beginning. Years later, when I read about the theory of “sunk profits,” which describes a past investment that shouldn’t but still affects your decisions about the future, I knew it was what I had done in those situations. Kept going, because with so much invested, it felt impossible to let go, even though that
Mama passed, honey. That was the subject line of my friend S’s email to me last week. S had been by the side of the woman who, though not her mother, was close enough to be. S had helped Mama out of this world into whatever comes after. Before work, after work, on weekends, she was with her, a steadying presence full of love and jokes. When Mama told her she was hungry, S would feed her little bites of avocado, apple sauce, ice cream. S was with Mama when she finally said goodbye to the world. Mama was in her 90’s. It was time. 
I wrote this poem seventeen years ago, after watching one of my daughters standing on a stool at the kitchen sink. A few things have changed in those years: that daughter and her brother and sister have grown up, I’m happy with blonde hair and I’d settle for an eight-minute mile. But everything else still holds. My bargain with the planets remains the same.
Alison McGhee 