Monthly Book Report: You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith

 Maggie Smith is a poet and writer whom I found via the Internet, I think via Instagram but maybe Twitter, back in the before Elon days.  That I found her first via her poetry is interesting because I am sometimes an impatient reader of poetry.  Over time, I read more and more of Smith’s work and when this book came out earlier this Spring, I was eager to read it. 

It’s labelled a memoir and in certain ways, it is that.  It’s Smith’s story of the end of her marriage and what comes next; what she learns to make of the life that remains for her and especially for her two children.

So much of the book resonated with me.  Smith writes with clarity and intention about the end of her marriage and the pain of the loss.  She sorts out the matter of being a mother and a wife and the story is about how she finds her way forward as a mother who is no longer the wife.  She writes of feeling that a family of herself, two children, and a dog, feels impossibly smaller; smaller than just the subtraction of one, the husband and father who left.   

I’ve made this journey myself, not as a wife but as a partner.  At the time, my child was around the same age as Smith’s youngest.  Like single mamas everywhere, Smith finds that the days blur into one another, a frenzy of the activity involved in caring for others with very little time left for oneself.  But it is in the finding of one’s self, and the nurturing of her, that Smith finds her way forward.  This path is paved with both grief and a deep and abiding sense of happiness.  That the two can occur simultaneously is a lesson that I learned all those years ago when JT’s other mother left. 

I’ve thought about that time and those years a great deal lately.  Part of that has surely been the reality of my life as a parent right now.   A great deal of it is associated with the ending of my relationship with T.  First nine years and now eleven years of time with another human being whom I thought of as a partner for life is a lot to think about; two losses that I sometimes feel as failures on my part.  I am again at work to find myself on the other side.  I did it before, as a mother of a young child, and now I am doing that without needing to care for a little.  It’s different this time around, in some ways harder and in other ways easier.  I am not thinking about my obligations as the mama of a young child but I am certainly thinking about my son as I look toward the path ahead.  This time, I am aware that I will likely grow old alone, that plans for my future that once seemed like my bedrock turned out to be gravel.  

I’ve re-paved the road before and I can do it again.  Though I don’t know Maggie Smith, her book seemed like a friend who can help and that was a great comfort; a reminder that I there is a strength at my core that can see me through.