SOL: On Becoming an Adult

After completing the SOL Daily writing challenge in April, I've decided to link up occasionally to their Tuesday posts.  Two Writing Teachers host this fantastic community.

There's a lot going on right now.

A lot.

Both reading and blogging are falling by the wayside this week.  But I was just looking through some old documents on my computer and found this sort-of-poem I wrote several years ago, before we adopted our kids.  I thought I'd post it here for the SOL challenge.  It's a slice of my past.

It's also the only free verse poem I've attempted in about 25 years.  I've never worked out how to write poetry that isn't just prose with weird line breaks.

When I first realized I was an adult,

I was so pleased.

Walking down a city street in a strange land,

carrying a sack of groceries

purchased with money I’d earned myself.

A few years later, another sign.

The twelve-year old looks up trustingly from her desk

and asks me to feel her forehead

to see if she has a fever. 

Becoming an adult

is what you spend childhood preparing for

(especially those of us

who spend our adolescence rolling our eyes at our classmates’ antics).

But now it seems that time

insists on carrying me along

in her relentless march.

My mother gone

too soon for her, with projects started in her studio

seeds ordered for the garden

talk of a camping trip next summer

and too soon for me.

I still need her guidance.

“How do I do this?”

I want to ask

as I lay on the table while the technician

rolls a wand over my belly.

She peers at the screen, not looking for a telltale tail

but just to determine if this unending ellipses of a period

is merely my body giving up on fertility in yet another way

or the sign of something more malignant.

This ultrasound won’t become my profile picture

won’t be posted on my fridge

at best, it signals hormone therapy and hot flashes.

“How do I do this?”

I want to ask Mom,

veteran of heart disease, stroke, breast cancer.

But when I get home, feeling forlorn,

there’s no Mom to call.

So I find comfort in some chocolate

and the nook of my husband’s neck.

Younger than me, but feeling his age as well.

Twelve years without his father,

and the young bucks during harvest season reaching over to help with the heavy loads.

How do we do this?  It keeps getting harder.

And our foundations have disappeared.

So we do what they did.

We lean on each other.  We keep going.