June #MeToo: A Poem for My Children
One of the hardest things I’ve faced in healing from my own childhood/teenage/young adult trauma was knowing that I passed effects of that trauma on to my own children. To be honest, they don’t want to hear any more apologies! What I can do, and what I strive for, is to live out my healing in my relationships with each of them. Even though they’re now adults, I’m so grateful that it’s not too late to heal some bungled parenting!
FOR MY CHILDREN
Only when I let you leave
will I discover you are not gone.
Small crimes lie beneath my eyelids
like tiny silver forks
even as the sun tells me I am here, now,
not there, then.
Then I did not know. Then I was eating
with tarnished silver, in secret, during the night.
(Let’s eat with our hands! It’s Anything-Goes-Night
for the rest of our lives!)
When you were in France,
Iceland,
Utah,
Istanbul
I heard your infant wail
all the way inside my sanctuary.
I named you Freedom.
I named you Love.
But I wanted my own freedom
and I wanted to be the beloved child.
And I had to learn
long and hard
that you’ll have to learn
long and hard
That you, too, are in the sun
here, now, and always—
and in that light,
that age-long minute
is the stone wall, the glade, the mossy place
where you’ll inherit your names.