Can I Take This?

Baltimore friends, the next session for my (FREE) writing circle at The Womb Room is coming up on Monday, April 28th at 7 p.m. I would love for you to join me. You can register for it here.

Thanks as always for reading and for all of your support!

Earlier this month, one my favorite poems I’ve ever written was published by HAD. I loved writing “A Poem in Which Chuck Knoblauch Maybe Makes Snow” because it gave it me such a fun and unexpected puzzle to solve.

Here’s the background: I spent the month of January giving myself odd writing prompts. I find January to be a difficult month in which to write, because I am simultaneously invigorated by the New Year, but depressed by the slow, gray crawl of winter. I want to write, but everything I write is miserably heavy and dull, and too thematically homogeneous. So to mix things up and lift my spirits, I came up with a bunch of small writing challenges related to incorporating weird descriptions, random asides, conversational tone, odd grammatical elements, etc. One of these challenges was “insert a random baseball player into a poem that isn’t about baseball.”

I had the lines

and decided to try to figure out how to weave a random player into the poem from there. I asked my husband, who frankly knows a little too much about baseball, to give me the name of a player who played for the Minnesota Twins but was not most famous for that. This is not a poem in which Joe Mauer maybe makes snow. He gave me a list of four or five names, which included Knoblauch who was one of two names I actually recognized. I knew Knoblauch had had the yips, but that was all I knew about him. So it was just good fortune, or perhaps fate, that I ended up with a player who had actually been great until he suddenly wasn’t. Who you had to feel kind of bad for, except not because it turns out his off-field actions were abhorrent. It just happened that I ended up with a guy who started as one thing and became something else, which is not what I thought this poem was about when I wrote those initial lines. The puzzle of putting all those pieces together into a poem that felt cohesive and complete was great fun. And witnessing the way a piece of writing unexpectedly transforms into what it feels like it was always meant to be is one of my favorite things about writing. I remain delighted by the result.

If you’d like, you can read the full poem here.

Can I Take This?

and other unintentionally existential questions

If my toddler wants me to hold something for him, he’ll extend the object in my direction and ask, “Can I take this?”

“Yes, I can take this,” I’ll reply and though what I mean is, “Sure, I can hold this for you,” I always feel a bit like he’s prompting me into more philosophical thinking. What is this, really? Simply the object in question? The object, plus the request, plus the unspoken assumption that I’m duty-bound by parenthood to fulfill the request? Does this mean motherhood, with all its joys and burdens? Daily life, with its tedious routines and small irritations? The world, with its crushing heartbreaks, painful disappointments and rare, but breathtaking moments of bliss and beauty? Can I take this? Can I bear this? Can I hold all this life in my hands without letting it slip away from me? Without letting it crush me beneath its weight?

My older son’s version of this “I” and “You” confusion when he was a toddler was to hold his arms out and say, “Carry you.”

“Carry me,” I would reply and like now, it felt as if we were saying more than the words we were speaking.

We recently drove back to Michigan to celebrate Passover. It is a long car ride but one my husband and I have done dozens of times in the last eighteen years. Each trip carries the ghosts of the trips before—the one where we collided with the back of a semi-truck and though we were thankfully mostly unharmed, I ended up covered in scratches because our cat had been sitting on my lap at the time; the one where we ran out of gas on the Pennsylvania turnpike in the middle of a blizzard; the one where we were new parents trapped in stop-and-go traffic with a hungry, screaming infant in the backseat; the one where it was dawn and we were only five minutes onto the highway when we came around a bend in the road to discover a crashed car blocking multiple lanes, its lost tire right in front of us, too close for us to avoid hitting it; the one where we drove through the night, desperate to be home after three days without sleep.

Thankfully, this trip went pretty smoothly. I always have trouble when we go back to Michigan, though, because I grew up there but none of my family lives there anymore, so it feels like home and not home. We are always in my husband’s childhood house, celebrating with his family, and though I have known them for decades now and think of them as my family too, I am still inherently an outsider in this space—this is their home, their traditions, their history, their family’s stories and shared identities. It doesn’t make me sad—this is a warm and welcoming home where I feel at ease and surrounded by love—but rather, contemplative. Introspective. This particular trip happened during the week leading up to my fortieth birthday, so I was especially in my head about my past and our current world, the life I have built and the future I’d like to see.

On one morning of the trip, I went on my own with my toddler to the park right down the street. This is the same park where my son broke his arm a few years ago, so an intense rush of anxiety always floods my body when the red and turquoise playground comes into view. I was alone that morning too, when my son fell from the monkey bars and yelled out repeatedly that he had broken his arm. He could feel it. He was sure of it. I had to carry him back up the hill, his body too long and heavy for me, our dog straining against the leash I had in my other hand. What I have told people is that the moment was scary and I had to do that thing that parents in crisis do where you find a way to be exceedingly calm so that your child will feel less afraid. What I have not told people is that if I hadn’t left my phone back at the house that morning, I would have stopped halfway up the hill and called my husband or my mother-in-law to run down to the park to carry my son back for me. The pain from carrying him was excruciating. This was before my surgery and each step up that hill and back to the house was unbearable. My feet were so numb that I couldn’t feel where they made contact with the ground. Both of my legs were pulsing with sciatic nerve pain shooting through them like lighting strikes. I wanted to cry not because I was afraid for my child and the pain he was in, but because I was afraid for myself. I thought about making him walk—it was just a broken arm, his legs were fine—but he was so young and so frightened, shaking with pain. And I thought about leaving him, setting him down softly in the grass and telling him to stay put, I’d be right back, and then racing to the house and sending someone else back to get him because I couldn’t carry him any farther. I did carry him, though. I carried him all the way home because there was nothing else I could do.

On this most recent visit to the park, my toddler climbed the play structure and slid down the biggest slide. Then he spent the rest of his time swinging. I pushed him in the swing and he said “get closer,” which actually meant “go higher,” and then he asked me to sit in the swing next to his so we could swing together. This went on for a long time. Once he was finally done, I lifted him out of the swing, set him on the ground and he reached his arms up and asked, “Can I carry me?”

Can I carry me is perhaps the defining question of my thirties. If I look back on the past decade it is repeatedly marked by the effort to drag myself through physical adversity. Two pregnancies and two long labors. Two postpartum periods which people claim lasts a few months, but in reality extends for years; the body never really bounces back, it just finds a new way of being. And in between, a chronic pain condition that so frequently knocked me down and brought me to tears that I’m not sure I’ll ever fully recover emotionally. I am hoping I’ll be able to mostly recover physically, but it is not an easy process.

I realized recently that I harbor a lot of resentment about this period of my life—the painful period, I’ll call it. I kept working as a massage therapist when I probably should have stopped since it exacerbated and intensified my pain. I resent society for making me feel like my worth was tied to my work even when it was detrimental to my well-being. I resent the niceties of small talk and conversational exchange, the number of times I answered “Okay” to the question, how are you doing, when the real answer was, “I’m terrible. I’m in such terrible pain.” I resent the times I was accused of not giving enough help to others when everything I gave of myself was all that I had to give, when everything I showed up for I was showing up for while in pain, everything I did I was doing through the pain. I resent that other people didn’t fully see my pain for what it was and offer more assistance, even though I often worked hard to hide it. I resent myself for not being able to more openly and honestly answer, “No. I cannot carry me.”

I am trying to let my anger fall away, to let it go and move forward, let it not be a thing I feel destined to carry forever. I am trying to find a way to be open about still not feeling strong enough for certain activities, about having to put a lot of effort and energy into rebuilding both my physical and emotional fortitude such that I don’t have a lot of extra energy to extend to other people’s needs or requests, and I still feel a little too worn down for more active engagements.

Maybe the defining question of my forties will still be can I carry me. Not as, can I possibly bear anything more, but as, can I give myself permission to put myself first more often. Can I carry me, as in just me sometimes. Can I carry me, as in my needs, my desires, even if it inconveniences other people. When I have the capacity to carry more, can I allow myself on occasion to say no, I’m already carrying enough?

There is so much in the world right now that needs attention and care. So much vying for our time and effort. So much demanding our energy. It feels incredibly foolish to look the other way, selfish to step back and take a break. And yet it so easy to become overwhelmed into inaction. To simply throw up your hands and say, I cannot possibly keep up with all this horror, so why even try?

When I go out walking now with one of my children, either just around the neighborhood or to one of the playgrounds within walking distance from our house, I carry my phone with me. I know a great many parents who are actively trying to do the opposite in an effort to be more present with their children. But I need to know that I have help available only a phone call away. That I am not standing at the bottom of a hill trying to carry more than I can manage on my own.

I need to apply this same thinking to the rest of my life. Perhaps we all do. There is too much to carry and none of us has an endless supply of strength.

Ask yourself what “Can I carry me?” means to you in this moment and be honest about your own needs and limitations.

I am so thankful to be starting a new decade in a place of better health and personal well-being. With a feeling of optimism despite everything going on in the world right now. That I am better suited now to carry myself in all the different ways I need to be carried. I am so thankful that when my toddler reached his arms up and asked, “Can I carry me?” I could confidently respond, “Yes, I can.”

You can find more of my writing & contact information at clairemtaylor.com. If you’d like to further support my work, please consider purchasing one of my books, or a copy of Little Thoughts Press. I also have a ko-fi page.