“The Way I See It” is the “Prologue” from Writing Personal Essays: Sharing and Shaping Your Life Experience, Published in print and digitally by Sheila Bender’s Writing It Real, March, 2017

[Note: I wrote a slightly different version of this essay for the 1995 edition of my book. Everything I realized then remains important to me.]

The way I see it, I am already past the halfway mark in my life. Writing this sentence, I suddenly remember my pre-teen self as I cut through the aquamarine water on swimming race days summers at the Greenwood Swim Club in East Hanover, New Jersey. Somewhere past midway down the lane and desperate to take a breath, I’d struggle to keep myself from looking around as I opened my mouth for a quick gulp of air. My head back in the water, I’d look to my left and to my right. How far had I come? Were any swimmers behind me in their lanes? How many?

Waiting to hear the names of the winners, I’d stand with the other girls, panting and dripping, self-conscious about the way my ribs and navel showed between the two

pieces of my bathing suit. I wasn’t exactly a fish in the water, as my parents and their friends would describe other children, but I wanted to be a part of things. I wore the right bathing suit, swam the crawl stroke races, learned to dive from the high dive, and danced with the teenyboppers, as we were called, to rock and roll from the clubhouse jukebox.

I worked so hard to look like the kind of fish everyone else seemed to be that I didn’t know what it felt like to be the kind of fish I actually was. All of my growing up, I felt like a hypocrite, a working-hard-to-be-a-part-of-things person on the outside covering up for a sidelines kind of a girl on the inside. Though I wanted to be sponsored to live on an Indian reservation one summer, I stayed home and enrolled in the shorthand course my mother wanted me to take. Though I longed to go out with our high school’s gawky first chair violinist who enjoyed long walks more than school dances, I dated the president of our youth group. Though the only science facts I could remember vividly were ones like “when you smell manure, you are actually taking particles of the substance into your nose,” I declared I would be a science major on my college applications because all the smart kids were going into science. Though I longed to travel and live abroad, I finished college and became a teacher so I had a career I could fall back on, something my mother told me time and again was necessary. She wanted me to have a career that would wait for me for when my future children were grown. To have children, I married a guy who was swimming in the same water I was trying so hard to stay in.

While he was in medical school, I directed a day care center. When he became an intern and we had kids, I asked for a leave from my job. I sat in the bleachers during my kids’ swimming lesson days discussing Volvos and home furnishings with the parents beside me. I chauffeured and shepherded my kids from class to class, playmate’s house to playmate’s house, pre-school potluck to preschool potluck. I was a good wife to my tired and overworked husband. One evening a week I took a watercolor class at the neighborhood community center and one day a week I volunteered at the juvenile court.

It seemed all right from the outside, but raising my children was rapidly becoming the first job I couldn’t succeed at with sheer activity. I loved them too deeply. I knew at my core my hypocrite days were over. Raising them to be happy would mean raising them to be the true people they were inside. How could I do that if I denied them who I was? I would have to shed that person working so hard at swimming to the end of the lane and find the person who was lurking on the sidelines. What was her element?

Folding the unending piles of laundry in my life, I began to hear poetic lines inside my head. I had only written poems in junior high and then once or twice when I was in high school. But since college, poetry books by people I’d never heard of had jumped of their own accord into my hands whenever I visited bookstores. I read the poems, and though I never spoke of this to anyone, I had taken to buying them; the books insisted on it. Now that I was hearing these lines, I started to write stanzas during my children’s naptime. I felt like a song was there in the sounds I was making, but the words didn’t convey much. I had found the tune my inner self sang, but I didn’t know the words to it. I continued reading poems voraciously and trying to write them.

Another summer, when I was looking for activities to do with my children, I found a catalog from the University of Washington, and I read about poet David Wagoner’s Poetry Writing Workshop. I would need to submit poems to be considered for the workshop, so I struggled to rework the few “almost poems” I had managed to pull from myself all those nap times.

The day I was to drop them off at the Creative Writing Office, a good friend and I headed to the campus with our strollers and diaper bags and my envelope of poems.

“Why aren’t I applying to social work school?” I lamented. “Then people would believe I was going to help others when I got my graduate degree, not sit around finding out my thoughts and feelings.”

My friend assured me that writing poetry was a humanitarian act.

“Right,” I said, “but I really can’t shake the idea that I am supposed to do something to serve my country. To be a good citizen.”

“It’s that Sputnik thing again, isn’t it?”

I nodded. When the Russians successfully launched Sputnik, I saw my grade school teachers cry, telling us students that our country was now at risk. All classes reported to the auditorium where we were told how important physical fitness, science, and math were to be from then on and how art and music were not as important in our battle to regain leadership of the world.

“I had a lot of trouble climbing the thick hairy ropes they suddenly hung from the gym ceiling, but I thought I could help another way. I feel guilty about poetry. People think it’s superfluous and dilettantish,” I said.

“Learning your own heart is a big contribution,” my wise friend said. “Do you know how much better the world would be if more people had true insight?”

Amazingly, David Wagoner accepted me into his class. In September, I began going to that class three times a week. No matter how hard it was to make child care arrangements or how much trouble I had parking or how many times my poems were heavily criticized or how many times not one student in the class seemed to care what I said since I was new and unpublished, I was happy. David Wagoner’s class was the first place I had ever congregated where I was completely at peace. I understood the thinking and the ideas. I liked what we talked about and I liked what we did. I knew I would learn how to do it better. It didn’t matter if anyone else recognized this about me. It was enough that I recognized it. My classmates could tear into my poems and I never flinched. In class, I never felt time go by. I was never out of breath. I didn’t think about who might be ahead of me. It didn’t matter how far I had come to get there or how far I would need to go.

As my children grew, I wrote and learned and published. To get a poem to both sound right and mean right, I had to listen closely to it, check it with my ear and with my heart, until all my conscious mind’s attempts to short circuit the revelation of truths or supply unearned truths were stopped. Each time I wrote, I had to get beyond what my “good girl-good citizen” self propounded and find the sources of pain and joy in my life, no matter how small or how large, how alike they were to those of others or how different they seemed. My conversations with my children became passage-ways into my poems. When my daughter told me that when she grew up, I would grow down, I wrote about that, and I shared what I wrote with her. Though she may not have understood the meaning of my words, she learned the sound of her mother’s heart and mind. When she told me she dreamed I came out of the sky with the raindrops and opened my umbrella and floated back down to earth watering the flowers, I felt more real than I ever had winning a race or getting a job.

Poetry had taken me to my inner self. Much of what I had accumulated with my old outer self fell away, including my marriage. The hardest thing about saying goodbye to my marriage was being unable to explain to my parents and relatives why I was doing it. They had never seen the inside me. They didn’t really trust insides or foster recognizing them. They said my divorce was making them sick. The fact that I couldn’t be heard no matter what I said allowed me to give up trying. I wasn’t going to swim in the wrong element for myself anymore. My children understood me without much explanation. My son would fall asleep nights to the sound of my Olivetti truck of an electric typewriter and report to people that the only problem with having a poet for a mom was hearing the typewriter at night. I became a teacher of writing at community centers and community colleges, a state artist-in-residence, and a member of literary project boards. When I was overwhelmed with other people’s writing and the administrative details of the projects, my son told me he wanted to build me a house on wheels so he could drive me around and I could be free to write and write.

I am remarried now to a man who found me through my poems. He was a friend of one of my best friends when my first book of poems, a locally published 20-page chapbook, came out. He saw it on her coffee table, and he read it while she was on the telephone. Then he asked her how she had found this poet. When she said I was her friend, he insisted on organizing a picnic to meet my children and me. That was now over 30 years ago.

There have been many eddies and stagnant pools in the waters of my life, but always the flow of fresh water, which writing poetry brings, has cleared me of those spots.

I know how far I have come. I enjoy recognizing myself as someone who has let her true self emerge, who doesn’t need to push herself down the wrong lane anymore, desperate for breath. I think often of my grandfather in summer, the way he floated on his back in the Atlantic Ocean off Coney Island, hands behind his head for a pillow. He was the only person I knew who could float on his back as long as he wanted to without sculling his hands or kicking his legs. There he is, smiling and buoyant, the water glistening with sun.