Things My Mother Kept

On the floor of the entryway
To my parents’ apartment,
A Bath & Body Works bag.
My father gestured to it, saying
“There’s your mother”
As we walked by.
The brown plastic box of ashes
Fit as if it were made for the
Blue and white checked paper bag
With convenient carrying handles.

On her dresser,
A melamine plate I made for her.
Remember the Make-a-Plate kits?
We spent one first grade class
Preparing for Mother’s Day
Drawing and coloring earnestly
Green-roofed house, purple door
Bright yellow sun, black cat
The year, for some reason. 1974.

On her bathroom counter,
My earliest ceramic art.
Sushi plates before their time
A rectangle with mama and baby fish
A square with baby fish alone
Each and every scale rendered.
Anatomically improbable
And hydrodynamically challenged
But drawn with painstaking care.

In her closet,
A sweater I bought in high school
From the Tweeds catalog.
Cropped cotton cardigan, aubergine
Sleeves too long, as always, for me.
I used to raid her closet
Secretly, I thought
Not knowing, or forgetting,
That she raided mine right back.

In her locking desk drawer,
Plexiglass pendants
Made by an artist I had known
With his wife as family friends.
I once asked my mother
Why we never saw them any more
And she said, ever oracular,
“Life is short. Things happen.”

In the bottom of a wine cabinet
In the dining room
In a compartment I never knew existed,
The plexiglass chess set he made for her
Which I’m sure she told my father
She had thrown away.

I am a romantic. I believe that love at first sight and soulmates are real things. I like sappy love songs, country music, chick flicks, and stories with happy endings.

I’m also a realist, and I think relationships are just hard. I also think that staying with anyone, no matter how much you love them, takes a lot of damn work. Some days it seems like every single thing you can think of to say or do is the exact wrong thing. In fact, it’s hard to believe there are so many wrong things.

Recently Rose and I decided to try a partner yoga class. I hate the idea of partner yoga. Even more than regular yoga, it seems like a setup for complete disaster. It also seems like a great metaphor for why relationships are so hard. Most yoga poses are hard enough for me by myself, and adding the pressure of not throwing someone else off balance, or dropping them, just seems like too much. Not to mention getting dropped or knocked over by the other person.

Sometimes when I am extremely resistant to an idea, it is because I should avoid that thing for a lot of good reasons. Sometimes, however, I fight it because it’s exactly what I need and I just don’t feel like working that hard, or working on that part of myself.

About half way through the class, our instructor had us all get back to back with our partners and prepare to go into half moon. Of the many yoga poses I dislike, half moon is high on my list. My standing leg gets tired , my hip on my lifted leg hurts, I don’t ever feel balanced, my bottom hand can’t reach the ground, my top shoulder hurts… It’s a pretty long list of gripes. So sure, let’s add the layer of doing that back to back with another person with their own list of physical complaints. I see no way that could go wrong. Such a good test of a nearly 25 year relationship.

Getting into a yoga pose with another person turns out to take less think and more feel. That’s probably true of yoga in general, but left to my own devices my brain starts thinking what Anne Lamott calls its thinky thoughts. It also takes a fair amount of laughter, which fixes anything that feel doesn’t.

What I expected was awkwardness, pain, falling down, and irritation. What I felt was Rose’s back pressing against mine, and when I reached with my raised leg I had hers to search for to help extend the pose, and when I stretched my arm up and back I felt only gentle contact with her hand. What I got – and gave – was support.

Grace. You just never know where it’s going to turn up.