My Daughter Found My Old Poems
She met the person I was before her, and she liked her.
My daughter reads like a thief. Quietly, quickly, and always in rooms she has no business being in.
So I should not have been surprised when I came home from the pharmacy on a Tuesday in March and found her cross-legged on my bedroom floor, the closet door open, the winter blankets pulled down from the top shelf, a shoebox in her lap. The box once held a pair of tan sandals I wore to a cousin's wedding in 2007. For nineteen years since, it has held three spiral notebooks, a rubber-banded stack of loose pages, and every poem I wrote between the ages of nineteen and twenty-six.
She is eleven. She looked up at me the way you look at someone whose passport you have just found, with a photograph of a stranger inside.
“Mom,” she said. “Who is this?”
I want to be honest about what happened in my chest at that moment, because it was not one feeling, it was a stampede.
Those notebooks contain a boy who is not her father. They contain the semester I almost dropped out of college, a poem about a hospital waiting room I have never told anyone about, two mentions of cigarettes, one genuinely bad poem comparing my heart to a dishwasher, and an ugly, unfair poem about my own mother that I wrote at twenty and never apologized for. There are words in those notebooks I fine her a rupee for saying.
My first instinct was to take the box.
My hands actually moved.
Nobody prepares you for sharing your past with your children. We curate ourselves into mothers. We edit out the drafts. By the time a child can read, the woman she meets is a final version, proofread, sensible, someone who says things like we don't slam doors in this house. The drafts stay in a shoebox behind the blankets, and we tell ourselves that is not hiding, that is storage.
I sat down on the floor next to her instead. To this day I do not fully know why... Maybe because she had sticky notes.
She had sticky notes. Pink ones, torn in half to make them last, marking maybe a dozen pages. The school bus had dropped her early and she had been in the box for two hours. She had a ranking system. Her third favorite was a poem about rain on a bus window. Her second favorite was the one about my grandmother's hands smelling of onions and Pond's cold cream.
Her favorite was the angriest one.
It is called “Twenty-Two,” because I was, and it is about wanting to walk out of my own life, get a job in a lighthouse, and speak to no one but the weather. It has a line about burning my address book. It is not a poem a mother would ever show a child, which is exactly why I braced myself for the question about the boy, or the cigarettes, or the swearing.
She asked none of it. She held up “Twenty-Two” and asked the only question that had occurred to her.
“Why did you stop?”
I said something about life getting loud. About jobs and rent and then her brother... and then her.
“That's not a real reason,” she said, and went back to reading.
She was not shocked that I had been someone else before her. She was delighted that I had been anyone at all.
That is the part I keep turning over. I had spent nineteen years guarding that box as if it were evidence. My daughter opened it and treated it as an inheritance. She met the twenty-two-year-old with the lighthouse plans and the terrible dishwasher metaphor, and she did not think less of me. She thought more of me. There was suddenly more of me to think about.
She made me read “Twenty-Two” out loud that evening, sitting on my bed with the box between us, the pages soft as cloth from age. My voice shook on my own nineteen-year-old lines, which is a strange thing, to be moved by a girl you used to be, to grieve her a little and envy her a little in the same breath. My daughter stopped me at the second stanza.
“What was the yellow kitchen?”
The yellow kitchen was my first apartment, a one-room flat above a tailor's shop, with mustard walls the landlord refused to repaint and a fridge I covered in poems held up by vegetable-shaped magnets. I had not thought about that kitchen in years. I found, describing it to her, that I could still smell it: chalk from the tailor's downstairs, and burnt toast, because I burned everything then. That is the trick of old poems. They are not really about memory. They are the memory, still wet, kept out of the air.
Over the next few weeks the box migrated. It moved from my closet to the living room, then to her room, where it now lives on her shelf between the horse books and a jar of beads. I signed a treaty of sorts: she can read anything, and she can ask anything, and I will answer, and if the answer needs to wait until she is fifteen I will say so honestly instead of lying.
She has cashed that in twice. Once about the boy. Once about the hospital poem. I kept the treaty both times, and both times the truth turned out to be smaller and more bearable spoken aloud to her than it had ever been sealed in the box.
Then she escalated, because she is eleven and escalation is her native language. She decided the poems should not live in a box at all. She picked the one about my grandmother's hands, stood over me while I typed it up, and made me enter it in a monthly poetry contest, my first submission of any kind in fifteen years. I hovered over the button for a long time... She pressed my finger down like she was launching a ship.
The poem did not win... It did not even place.
My daughter was furious in a way I have never managed to be on my own behalf, a stomping, editorial fury, demanding to know what had won and why. And I sat there watching her defend the woman in the shoebox, and I understood that I was seeing love in one of its rarer forms: not love despite who you were, but love because of it, retroactive, reaching backward twenty years to stand up for a girl it never met.
I bought a new notebook the next day. Plain, spiral, exactly like the old ones, out of superstition. The first poem in it is about her, obviously. The second one is about the yellow kitchen. I write at night now, propped up in bed with the pen going soft in my hand, and some nights the door creaks and I know I am being read over the shoulder by my favorite thief, and I do not stop writing.
Last week I went to her room to borrow the box back. I wanted to check a date. Tucked between the second and third notebooks I found a page that was not mine, folded in quarters, in handwriting that is still learning its loops.
She had hidden a poem for me to steal.
It was about a lighthouse. I read it standing up... twice. Then I folded it along its own creases, put it back exactly where I found it, and said nothing.
That is how thieves are kind to each other.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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