That Big Kid Ellen #19: Write a poem
My incredibly dedicated mother is a scrapbooker. And boy do I mean she. is. a. scrapbooker. Goes to scrapbooking retreats, buys specially designed books and stickers, has a suitcase of scissors and cutters and pure nostalgic magic. She saved just about every scrap of paper from my childhood, printed off copious amounts of photos, and when I graduated college she gifted me three big, beautiful scrapbooks of my life from age 0–18. She is who you should thank for so many of the visuals I will be including in a lot of my posts this year (thanks, mom!).
After writing my intro post for this blog, I combed through the artifacts of my life in a sort of sad treasure hunt to find out exactly when my creativity died.
Thanks to my mom’s hoarder-adjacent tendencies, I found the exact moment where it all started to go downhill.
In 5th grade, I was deemed “accelerated” in math. Sadly, the only creative thing about accelerated math was the fact that I got to decorate my slightly-hallucinogenic Lisa Frank spiral notebook that was *needed* for this course (their emphasis, not mine) with scratch-and-sniff stickers and my crushes’ names written in cursive with gel pens.
There was (and still is) tremendous pressure on schools to get young girls into STEM fields — science, technology, engineering, and math — to close the gender gap in these career paths later on in life. And I was an exceptional young girl who easily made sense of numbers since I was very young. Of course it was exciting for my family and school to place me into this trajectory and watch me succeed. It clearly made my mother proud enough to keep this scrap of paper. (There’s also a whole tangent here on the history of math and statistics in my family, including my grandfather taking a job as a human computer for the Navy in college, but I won’t drag you through right now. Just know that it runs deep, and I deeply wanted to make my family proud.)
However, 5th grade also seemed to be the peak of my creativity as a young child. I was a part of the 5th Grade Creative Writing Club, and poetry was my jam.
Going through the scrapbooks, I found some absolute *gems* of my poetic creations. I tried out different rhyming schemes, haikus, cinquains, and varying verb tenses like a wild woman! I was totally unafraid of creating, and I was somehow equal parts startlingly philosophical and downright goofy.
Throughout the years, my prose and vocabulary matured. My poetry morphed into something a bit more heavy and foreshadow-y. I started to hide (behind a very, very thin veil) my insecurities and inner demons with extended metaphors. I screamed to be loved and seen and understood. And… I figured out how to use Clip Art.
However, creativity slowly took a seat on the bench. It hung on for a bit as an escape from the rigor of academia, but it wasn’t praised or nurtured and it started to fade. I was told that my brain would bring me success, and I started to get lost in what other people wanted from me to the point that I forgot what *I* needed.
As is the tendency of over-achieving kids who crave love, I started looking for my next quick fix of approval with certificates and awards and top grades. My last creative moment was in an art class in 9th grade where I drew an incredible self-portrait of myself with a mini basketball, but after that, my life was run by sports and AP classes and the pursuit of success.
Achievement became more important than expression.
No bueno.
I recently started thinking more and more about writing and how much I want to do it all the time. I uncovered a lot of mental blocks keeping me from producing, the biggest being that I didn’t have any current proof that I’m actually any good. The last poem I wrote for an audience other than myself was in 8th grade, and although many people have told me that they enjoy my writing, I didn’t have the self-confidence to fully believe them.
Then I heard an extremely profound yet simple thing. In March 2021, I virtually attended a panel with Glennon Doyle at the California Conference for Women called “Untaming your Career.” She stated that people who aren’t writers don’t think about writing. The people who have dreams of writing books are already writers! I don’t dream of being a cyclist like my husband does (guess what he is), just like he doesn’t dream of writing (guess what I do). So just by dreaming it and thinking about it and wondering if I could do it, that makes me a writer.
And hey, look! I’m writing! Dream, meet reality.
So let’s get back to it. To check off the first thing from the list I’ve created, I wrote some poetry.
This specific idea came to me like most ideas do — in the shower. I actually couldn’t believe that this is where my brain went, but I ran with it because it made me laugh and filled me with such pure, playful energy.
Here’s the backstory for this crazy idea. My husband is an incredibly talented person, but writing has never been a forte. For our wedding vows, I was prepared to blow him out of the water with my heart-felt, well-edited words, and I had accepted that his might not be all that deep or grammatically correct. I thought our families would fawn over my carefully selected words of love and commitment, and that we would eventually frame our vows as a keepsake. These were the expectations I created for myself, expectations based on achievement and not expression (red flag).
My matron of honor, Brittney Thompson, read over both of our vows the night before our wedding and made the very cryptic and absolutely terrifying comment that I should probably read mine first. She wouldn’t tell me exactly why, but that she thought it would be for the best. In a sweaty panic, I rewrote my vows, OVER-editing them, taking all of the heart and soul from them, and was left scrambling to make sense of my deeper intentions just hours before reading them aloud.
The plan of me going first with the vows didn’t reach our officiant, and during our small wedding ceremony, he asked Derek to go first. A storm of swear words rained down in my head, but I kept my cool, still not sure what to expect.
What came out of my husband’s mouth were the most intensely beautiful and thoughtful vows that I have ever heard. He had ever single person sobbing with his authenticity and endless love for and understanding of me. I have had him recite his vows to me multiple times so that I can burn them into my memory and remember just how much this man loves me.
Well, shit.
Y’all, mine sucked. They really, epically sucked. And it’s something that I’ve never gotten over. It’s embarrassing on so many levels, but the most impactful one being that I feel like I wasn’t able to fully explain to Derek how much I love every single thing about him and will always love everything about him.
So, below, you will find a trio of poems that I wrote for Derek. They are a part of a larger poetry anthology that I call “A Body of Work,” and it is with every intention that I show my husband that I love literally everything about him, even the things that he might not like about himself. They are minimally-edited, pure expressions of very intimate moments of our life, and I don’t care if you understand them or appreciate them — I’m writing for me now.
1.
It always starts with a smile
A smirk, really
Your golden tiger eyes glimmer
With that smirk
It becomes
A bit of a preemptive apology
That cheshire smile of yours
Because you know
You truly know
How much I hate what comes next
Even though
I laugh every single time
I can tolerate a lot of things
But this one does worry me
Delights me
But really, really worries me
That smell
Is identical to what you ate hours ago
Hours ago
Not just the essence of it
But as if it were right in front of me
A literal blast from the past
To say that it erupts from you is cliche
It is a part of you
It is you
It is wild and untamed
And you are completely unabashed
As you express it proudly to the world
Before smugly blowing away the evidence
Away from my face
With one dramatic exhale
Through pursed lips
That come back to form that same smirk
The burp smirk
2.
While giving me a massage
Practicing what you have learned
Or rather
Showing what you already intuitively knew
Somehow
While watching the latest superhero movie
Action scene after action scene
Anticipation building
Mind racing to predict
The next scene
While playing video games
Doesn’t seem to matter which one
Feeling like you’re a part
Of something bigger
Creating your own reality
There they are
Quite a pair
Oh how they blossom
They are passion
Possibility
Exertion
Slightly annoying
But there they are
Pit stains
3.
I know it’s not fair
The ultimate inconvenience
Devilish in fact
A trade that was made in a previous life
A sacrifice for all of your many talents
But not giving willingly
A prisoner in your own body
Always weighing the options
Between comfort and pain
Between richness and blandness
Between fleeting joy and lasting destruction
The ultimate balancing act
Sometimes you choose
To be the bigger person
And not let it win
Not let it dictate your life
And suffer minimally
Other times you give in
To temptation
To sweet, sweet temptation
And suffer deeply
To deny yourself for too long
Would be wrong
Just a little couldn’t hurt
But it always hurts
It hurts my Italian soul
It hurts you in every way
It always ends in a sprint
To deal with the consequences of your actions
Maybe not right away
But eventually
You race away
Trying to hide your original sin
Until you can’t conceal it any longer
Until you release
Into the world
Garlic diarrhea
(I love you, Derek!)
