A friend said to me recently, “I’m just dealing with the fact that I’m not a rock star. I’m a high school teacher.”
I laughed. I also felt a tsunami of compassion swell in my veins. I knew exactly what my friend meant.
Let me begin by saying I have the highest respect for teachers, especially high school teachers. My grandmother taught high school history, my mother taught high school science, and my partner teaches high school English. These beloved people, and all other great teachers, do difficult, honorable, often thankless work. God’s work. It is no easy feat to steer a soul out of darkness and into light.
Still, I understood my friend perfectly. The older I get, the more my youthful aspirations elude me. Even five years ago, I was wide-eyed with artistic expectation. Ten years before that I wouldn’t have believed that I wouldn’t always be one of the prettiest, one of the brightest, one of the most talented or most successful. I didn’t think I deserved those things, necessarily, but I thought I could earn them. Vanity may be the bane of my generation and tribe, and the crippling misdirection from purpose that society uses to seduce all pretty girls. Vanity is certainly my Achilles’ heel. For some people like me to say “I’m a teacher,” to a stranger at a dinner party requires a humility and strength that “I’m a novelist” does not. In her own way my friend is facing the same realization I’m facing: I may or may not become a writer with a capital W. I may not become famous or semi-famous or even singled out. I might not save the world. My metabolism will slow down. My muscles will atrophy. My hair will turn gray. Many of my students will graduate and forget my name. I might be ordinary.
As with any trial, I turn to literature. Or rather, literature finds me like a fairy godmother or talisman. The word talisman comes from the Greek, teleo–to consecrate. In my case, this August I received a talisman charged with sacred power from Lucille Clifton in the form of this poem:
the thirty-eighth year
of my life,
plain as bread
round as a cake
an ordinary woman
an ordinary woman
i had expected to be
smaller than this,
more beautiful,
wiser in Afrikan ways,
more confident,
i had expected
more than this
i will be forty soon.
my mother was once forty.
my mother died at forty-four,
a woman of sad countenance
leaving behind a girl
awkward as a stork.
my mother was thick,
her hair was a jungle and
she was very wise
and beautiful
and sad.
i have dreamed dreams
for you mama
more than once.
i have wrapped me in your skin
and made you live again
more than once.
i have taken the bones you hardened
and built daughters
and they blossom and promise fruit
like afrikan trees.
i am a woman now
an ordinary woman.
in the thirty-eighth
year of my life,
surrounded by life,
a perfect picture of
blackness blessed,
i had not expected this
loneliness.
if it is western
if it is the final europe
in my mind,
if in the middle of my life
i am turning the final turn
into the shining dark
let me come to it whole
and holy
not afraid
not lonely
out of my mother’s life
into my own.
into my own.
i had expected more than this.
i had not expected to be
an ordinary woman.
When I first read the poem, I was in the bathtub at a hotel in Farmington, Connecticut. I ran naked out into the room and said to my fiancee, “Here. Read this. This is what’s wrong with me and what I haven’t been able to articulate to you.” That same warm night at an outdoor poetry reading, I sat next to him, a rich glass of full red wine balanced delicately on the grass between us. The emcee chose from an entire anthology of poems to read Clifton’s “An Ordinary Woman” to the crowd. For a split second, I believed in signs.
I also recalled a song I love by Tracy Chapman, First Try, a song she croons in an older, more wistful voice than any song about fast cars. She sings, “Can’t run fast enough, can’t hide, I can’t fly. Struggling with the limits of this ordinary life.”
That word again. Ordinary.
In the Catholic Church, we have what’s called “ordinary” time. As a child I didn’t understand what the priest meant when he welcomed us into mass on the “Third Sunday in Ordinary Time,” for example. What was the difference, I wondered, between ordinary time and other time? In the Roman Catholic Church there are two periods of ordinary time on the liturgical calendar. The exact timing becomes complicated, but suffice to say that Ordinary Time exists between Christmas and the Lenten (Easter) season, and then between Easter and the next Advent Season. The time between birth and death.
More people attend mass on Christmas and Easter; these are holy days of obligation and Catholics love them some obligation. As I get older, I do the opposite: some years I attend Christmas mass, and rarely attend Easter mass. I show up tempus per annum, the latin phrase for “times of the year”, translated in English as “ordinary time.” I need lifting when I feel most lowly and alone, most human.
Perhaps that makes sense. The Catholic writer Henri Nouwen said, “I realized that healing begins with our taking our pain out of its diabolic isolation and seeing that whatever we suffer, we suffer it in communion with all of humanity, and yes all of creation.” We can display vanity in our suffering too. We must learn ordinariness. We have to be common to find communion.
In ordinary time we will arrive at the most holy of our life’s work. In ordinary time we will be asked to recognize the everyday-miraculous: sunrise, schoolroom, sentence, spoon, soap, sleep. It is not the high drama of midnight mass with its trumpets and Halleluia’s, nor is it the dusky hours of an Easter vigil. But it may be the time between birth and death–ordinary time–when life demands from us the most humbling and extraordinary task of coming out of our mother’s lives and into our own.
Amen.
(non)seculargirl 