I Thought I Was Writing. I Was Grieving.

I didn’t decide to write a memoir.

For a long time, I don’t think I even understood that I was grieving.

When my mother died, I was still teaching English, something I had done for more than twenty years. The following year, I went part-time, thinking maybe that would make life manageable again. It didn’t. Eventually, I took a one-year leave of absence.

I never went back.

I loved teaching. But after my mother died, something in me had shifted. My heart wasn’t in the classroom anymore. The strange thing was, I didn’t know where my heart was.

There had never really been time to find out.

In the months after my mother’s death, grief didn’t arrive the way I imagined grief would. There was no quiet stretch of time when I could fall apart, miss her, cry, and slowly begin figuring out how to live in a world without her.

My father kept throwing things at us.

There was always another crisis, another conflict, another thing to manage. Instead of grieving my mother, I was managing my father.

Eventually, I tried figuring out what came next. I went to real estate school and completed the coursework. I never took the state exam. I was searching for something to do with myself, but nothing fit because I wasn’t really looking for a new career.

I was lost.

Then one day, I opened my laptop.

And I started writing.

For roughly three months, I poured about 60,000 words onto that computer. It wasn’t a memoir. It wasn’t even particularly good writing. It was angry and repetitive and analytical. Adult me had an explanation for everything. I psychoanalyzed my father, my mother, our family, myself. I explained every memory before the reader had a chance to experience it.

I wasn’t writing for a reader anyway.

I was writing because apparently there were 60,000 words inside me that needed somewhere to go.

Looking back, I understand what I couldn’t see then.

That was how I finally grieved my mother.

The book came later.

I’ve spent almost three years turning those first frantic pages into something entirely different. I learned to stop explaining and start telling. I learned to trust scenes and details. I learned that my mother’s hands could reveal more about her than three paragraphs of analysis. That humor belonged beside fear because that was how we survived it. That sometimes the adult narrator needed to step aside and let the little girl remember.

Very little of what I wrote during those first months resembles what is on the page today.

But those words did exactly what I needed them to do.

They gave my grief somewhere to go.

I thought I had sat down at my laptop because I needed to write.

I think I sat down because, finally, I needed to cry.