Hello, it’s me

It’s been six years. An afternoon break stretched out six years, and it wasn’t afternoon anymore. After a while, it felt impossible to begin again. Gardens, friendships, writing - they need tending, and with some things, and some people, I waited too long. I could not climb up out of the well of old and familiar grief.

I lived overseas as a child and teenager, and am marked by the English and French education systems of the mid-1960s. When my family moved back home to the U.S., I couldn’t find a way to fit in. I finished my senior year at a “good” public high school. Every class I had to take was a repetition of something I had already studied in French two or three years earlier , and the only way to fit in was to pretend to know less and be less than I was. Let others (the boys) lead. Let them have all the answers. Don’t make them feel bad.

Now, I loved the boys, so I did just that. I guess it served me well in the music business, but oh my good Lord, I was so lonely. In one way or another, I stayed that way until 2008, when Barack Obama took office, and he and Michelle Obama and their daughters took up residence in the White House. When that happened, I started to feel at home in this puzzling, immense, beautiful country. It was the first time I felt trulyAmerican since 1962. It was OK to be me. There was room for me here.

But.

Eight years later, the brilliant, capable, experienced candidate lost to the obnoxious, ignorant, prep school boy. I cried for days for her loss of the presidency, and for my loss of the newly-won sense of belonging here in the US. The sense of this being my country, and that anything I would ever say or do might matter.  The sense that I would be allowed to exist here. Why? Because I’m smart. I use big words. And I love to read. And I speak French. I’m a woman, and I had just seen that all of these characteristics were unfortunate, and in combination, unacceptable.

I don’t know when I crossed from grief to depression. Somewhere along the way I noticed the water was deeper and colder as everyday something more bewilderingly cruel had happened and been applauded. It didn’t matter that I just stopped writing.

I always intended to come back to it. Maybe at Christmas. Or Tolkien’s birthday. Or spring. Or the next spring. Couldn’t.

Now years later and miles farther along, I am hope to retrieve the difficult skill of dancing with words, of being myself, and of talking to you. My pen’s inked up and my keyboard is clicking.

We begin again.