Category: Polly Hansen

A slightly longer version of this essay was published in Vol. XI, Spring 2023 print edition of Metonym Literary Journal.

My ninety-one-year-old mother is shivering on the patio on a cool spring day. I remove my shawl from my shoulders and drape it around hers. She opens her eyes. “Ew! What are you doing with that thing? I don’t want that!” She tosses it to the ground. I pick it up and walk away feeling hurt and ashamed. I remind myself I haven’t done anything wrong. It’s my first time in my mother’s new house on the other side of the country. I try not to disturb the precarious balance she and my sister, Tiggy, her permanent caretaker, have established.

Dinnertime isn’t for a couple of hours, but my body is on a different timetable. I find a pot of water on the stove, sniff it, and boil a potato in it. Ten minutes before it’s done I add a stalk of broccoli. As I’m eating, I think, broccoli certainly is sweet in this part of the country. What an odd variety.

Tiggy enters the kitchen and goes to the stove. “Where’s the water that was in this pot?”

“Oh! I used it.”

“That was hummingbird syrup! Why didn’t you ask first?”

I laugh at my mistake. “No wonder the broccoli was so sweet!”

Bruised and angry, I grab an umbrella and go for a long walk in the rain. I reach a friend on my cell phone and tell him my woes. By coincidence, he’s also visiting family and tells me his. We laugh and take courage from each other.

Late at night, in the privacy of my sister’s art studio which seconds as a guest bedroom, I lie naked on my yoga mat in front of the space heater. It’s how I relax and unwind. Is it my imagination, or do I smell paper burning? Someone taps on the door. The doorknob twists back and forth. My sister knocks loudly. I quickly pull on my bathrobe and yank open the door. She stands there looking rejected and hurt. “Why did you lock it?”

“I like privacy.”

“Why are you yelling at me?”

“Because you woke me up,” I lied.

“If you hadn’t locked it I would have snuck in quietly. I wouldn’t have woken you.”

She gets what she needs, then softly closes the door behind her. I hesitate, my hand poised over the knob, but leave it unlocked.

The next morning Mom looks up from her crossword puzzle. “Did you hear me yelp last night? Tiggy made a batch of hummingbird syrup, forgot it was on the stove and set off the smoke detector. I was terrified!”

I open the back door and find the scorched pot on the stoop; billows of charred lava fill it to the brim. I pick it up, thinking I’ll scrub it clean, hesitate and put it back down.

“It’s lovely out here,” Mom says. “Peaceful. Tiggy would love it.”

I agree. I want to carry her here in my arms and make her sit and breathe.

Returning home, I notice the weedy flowerbed encircling the massive ponderosa pine out front. I enjoy weeding. The physical exertion of digging into the Earth and releasing Her fragrant richness soothes me. After depositing Mom into her favorite chair, I go to the garage and find a trowel and spade but no gardening gloves. I’d ask Tiggy if she has some but decide against it, thinking she’ll tell me not to bother.

I bite into the impacted, grass-bound bed with the spade, then kneel on the cool ground, disentangling various bulbs from roots and put them aside in a pile to replant. A few mounds of grass clumps are scattered around me when Tiggy rushes outside. “There are all kinds of bulbs in there! You’ve got to be careful!”

The roots of our sisterly frustration pull at me. I resist, but not successfully. I smile wanly, pick up the trowel and spade, and without a word, take them back to the garage. Then I retreat to her studio and sit on the bed, arms folded, and stare out the window at nothing, my mind a wall of frustration. I look about at her art projects everywhere—huge, bold oil paintings, delicate watercolors, wire sculptures of playful characters—a woman eating peas, a cowboy singing, and wonder at the woman who creates so marvelously and uninhibitedly. This is the sister I want to be with, not this brittle, tense person I now see.

I hear Tiggy coughing and clearing her throat in the next room. I want to make up with her but don’t know how. How can I walk through the adjoining bedroom without an ugly encounter? I yearn to return to the flower bed, to dig in the soil, to pull and weed, to tidy things. Then I remember, I’m not nine years old anymore. I can do what is best for me without hurting anyone. Perhaps I have been careless and disruptive. But right now, I need to be outside, digging and pulling and breaking apart. I close my eyes and pray. Help me, Lord. Let me be kind and patient and good to us both.

I stand in the doorway. “I’m going back out to weed, if that’s alright.”

Tiggy turns from her computer. I detect a fraction of relief, an easing of tension about the eyes and mouth. She holds out three left-handed gardening gloves. “It’s all I have. It really would be lovely if you want to weed. I just wanted you to know what’s in there. I’m sure you’d feel the same about your garden.”

 “You’re right. I’m sure I would.”

I am three-quarters of the way around the tree, shaking out dirt from a root ball when Tiggy approaches. At first, I think she is going to tell me I’m doing it wrong, but then I notice she’s smiling and holding out a glass of wine.

“What? Now?” I survey my work. A few primroses past bloom breathe freely, two lily stalks yet to flower stoop slightly, clumps of volunteer blackberry seedlings lay in a pile ready to be transplanted. “Maybe in a bit,” I say, “but thanks.”

“It looks good. Are you going to be here all night?” she teases.

“Just a while longer. I’m almost done.”

She retreats and a moment later I hear tapping at the window above me. Tiggy and Mom wave. They put their hands to their brows and turn left and right as if scanning the horizon searching for me. I mime binoculars with my hands and stare back at them, grinning.

After all the tiny crocus bulbs and large tulip bulbs are replanted, and I’ve swept away the dirt from the brick border and dumped grassy clumps by the compost I enter the house to wash up. Vegetable soup heats in the crock pot on the counter. I help myself and when Tiggy enters the kitchen she looks alarmed.

“You said to help myself to whatever was in the kitchen,” I say, mid-mouthful.

She stammers, “Yes, but….” Then pauses and relaxes her shoulders. “Okay…it’s not quite ready.”

She’s right, but I’m famished and scoop another spoonful into my mouth. “It’s delicious just the way it is.”

She accepts my choice with a faint smile. A truce, then, as if she’s acknowledging, to each her own.

The rest of our visit goes relatively smoothly. Eventually we talk about Mom’s estate. I tell Tiggy how much I appreciate the care with which she has managed all of Mom’s financial affairs. She’s made a huge sacrifice to take care of our mother. I endeavor to accept her choices and not interfere. It’s difficult; I feel guilty not doing more. But I hold myself back. All I can do is take care of myself, watch from a distance, and hope my love is enough.

There’s a family of catbird’s right outside my bedroom window. The bush leans up against the pane, so I have an eyelevel view of the nest. I saw the moment one of the parents returned to it this spring, inspecting its intactness, how it had weathered over the winter. I watched as Mama bolstered its security and sturdiness with new twigs. And then it got in, ready to lay eggs. (I had seen the moment the nestlings fledged last year.)

Mama and Papa catbird are diligent parents. I see them foraging throughout the day while I’m in the yard, flying back and forth with small worms. When I’m in my room, I keep a discreet distance from the window, wanting to give the family its privacy, not wanting to scare them away, but I doubt if I even could, at least not permanently. The parents are so dedicated.

Mama flies to the bush just now while I’m watching. She lands in the low branches, then hops her way up to the nest. I think she saw me through the glass for she perched on the nest looking at me before feeding the tiny beaks that barely crested into view. And then she stuffed worm bits into several beaks and sat on her brood. It’s a cool morning.

Ah, what maternal bliss, watching what nature does instinctually. Alas, it is not so for us humans.

My husband and I just had an argument about plastic trash cans. He wants to buy several for yard waste. I like using the large brown paper bags made of recycled materials. This morning, just as he was leaving to do errands, he said he was stopping by the hardware store to buy some plastic bins.

We’d had this discussion before. I didn’t say anything the first time he brought it up. Many of our neighbors use plastic bins labeled “Brush” in big, white letters painted on the side. His argument is that we could save money and avoid the hassle of running out of bags and having to run to the store to buy more. My question was how many times would we use the plastic bins until we broke even after the initial investment? In any event, it sounded like a reasonable, practical solution to yard waste collection.

Except, I hate plastic.

I don’t like to purchase plastic, nor to encourage the production of more plastic. I said none of this the first time my husband brought it up, choosing instead to go along to get along. So today when he said he was going out to buy some plastic trash bins for yard waste, I said, “okay,” and closed my writing room door. Three seconds later, I opened it again, went out to the kitchen and said, as he stood with his hand on the back doorknob, “Have you considered where we’re going to store all those trash cans? I mean, won’t they look unsightly standing around?”

He gave me a look of exasperation. “I knew you were going to do this. I knew you were going to object to the idea eventually.”

He knows me so well.

“But, seriously, have you considered it? I mean, where will they go? They’ll be an eyesore, won’t they?”

He stared at me, virtual smoke clouding his face. “Really? Is that all you care about?”

 “Well, no. They’re plastic.”

“There you go. That’s the real reason. I knew it all along.”

“Yes, but I’m more environmentally conscious than you are.”

“They won’t go in the landfill. We’ll keep using them.”

“But yes they will. They’ll last for thousands of years after we’re gone.”

He looked at me, that same look he’s given me for years on various occasions. “Fine. I won’t get them.”

I didn’t say anything. Though I was glad he decided to please me, I didn’t like our arguing about it. I just wish he was more conscientiously minded about the environment. He resents that I am. He hates my obsession with plastic, the fact that I want to buy glassware with plastic lids for food leftovers instead of using something like Tupperware. But he goes along and washes and reuses the plastic Ziplock bags I buy without complaining. Today, he’ll go to the hardware store and buy my tomato stakes, but not the plastic trash bins.

We’ve been married nearly 40 years. He loves me. I love him. Sometimes we go along to get along. I was trying to do that by not saying anything when he first brought up the idea of plastic trash bins. In the end, I just had to voice my concern. After he left, I thought of one solution. He could get a plastic bin for himself, and I could continue to use paper bags. But I didn’t call him with this idea. I knew he’d think it was ridiculous.

Oh, God–being ourselves while married. It’s trying sometimes. One of us always bends. I get the feeling it’s him more than me most times. Perhaps I owe him an apology, but what would I say? I’m sorry I’m so stubborn? But I’m not planning on changing that aspect of myself, so why apologize? Or should I say that I’m so grateful that he is a caring, loving, accepting husband? Yes, that I can say, and have said, and will continue to say for as long as we both shall live.

Here’s a prayer: Help me to stop blaming people for their illnesses. Those illnesses may include selfishness, narcissism, addiction to alcohol, drugs, pornography, or gambling. Their behaviors may affect my life profoundly, may make me sad and angry. I have a right to those feelings, but I might not lose my cool so readily if I distance myself from the disease and have compassion for the person.

Who knows what kinds of trauma our loved ones may have experienced that they have never grown past? And even when we do know some of it, we’ll never know the full extent of the deep pain that caused them to create unhealthy coping mechanisms, or to self-medicate with whatever.

My coping mechanism as a teen and young adult was narcissism. I isolated and did whatever the hell I wanted while trying to get everyone to like me. Bad combo. I’d often be mystified as to why people became extremely annoyed with me or even enraged. I was just taking care of myself, doing what I thought I had to do to survive without thinking of the consequences. My actions often affected people negatively. They were inconvenienced, betrayed, lied to, manipulated, and hurt by my selfishness. I gradually learned to be accountable and take responsibility for my actions, especially when I saw their negative effects on others. Painful lessons. It takes a dose of humility to say “I’m sorry.”

Narcissists find apologies extremely difficult to make. Making amends may not even be on their radar. We who live with narcissists must accept them as they are and not try to change their behavior. To do so is to lose our sanity, our own mental health. All we can do is take care of ourselves.

I take care of myself by honoring my boundaries, even when I can’t get someone else to. If someone is behaving badly, I leave the room, take a break from their presence, do something for myself. I limit my exposure to sick behavior. If it’s a family member or loved one, I do what I can to be of service, but I have my limits. When someone crosses my boundaries, I’m out of there.

Knowing that I can’t change or control someone helps me stay sane, keeps me grounded. I am only in control of myself, and even then sometimes I might be powerless over how I feel. That’s why I pray—to feel guided, protected, and loved. When I pray, when I focus on that guidance and love, it gives me the grace to be patient, loving, and kind in return.

“Hate the behavior, not the soul.”

Sometimes I have to say to someone who has crossed the line, “I do not like your behavior right now. I do not want to be with you.” The recipient of this message may well honor it. If they have followed me into my sanctuary, she may leave it after hearing this. No one likes to hear that their presence is not wanted. Then I’ll breathe deeply, and if I’m a caretaker and can’t leave the house, maybe read poetry, or prayers, or listen to music, or watch my favorite show on Netflix until I calm down.

If I need extra help, I might turn to a mantra like this one:

“Kindle in me, oh Lord, the blazing fire of faith

To be the pole star of my life.”

That’s one of my favorites. It inspires me to believe that help is present, and that I am okay and well loved and cared for.

I hope the next time you deal with an unpleasant person in your life that you care for deeply but whom you also sometimes hate because of their sick, selfish behavior, try to distance yourself from their disease. Try to hate the behavior, not the soul. This practice helps me to accept the person as they are. Simply accept. Sure, it may be sad, because it’s such a tragic waste of life. But it’s that person’s life, not yours. Now, is that selfish? No. It is realistic. It is life on life’s terms.

My grandmother and my mother were visiting an art museum in Boston. This was years ago when my mother was a little girl. They were by themselves in a quiet gallery looking at a painting when my grandmother farted loudly. She hadn’t noticed the gentleman standing nearby. She turned to my mother and said, “Penelope!” and stalked away.

Although this is a funny story, it is also rather sad. My poor mother! My grandmother was heartless and cruel in that moment. The fact that my mother remembered this story and told it to me decades later meant that it still held power for her. It was a kind of emblem of her relationship with her mother who could be cruel at times. My mother could be cruel to me at times, too, and in turn, I could also be thoughtlessly cruel to others.

I doubt that my grandmother ever apologized to my mother for treating her so poorly in that instance. My mother has never apologized to me for the way she has treated me cruelly at times. That doesn’t mean that I need do the same.

We all inherit certain characteristics from our parents, certain traits of which we are not proud. Every time we enact that bad behavior is an opportunity to make amends and to act with mindfulness the next time.

As a writer I am often asked to critique others’ work. It is a valuable tool to get honest feedback from another writer. But when a writer asks, “Are you enjoying this story?” What if my answer is, “No.”

That’s my mother talking in her blunt way. I have had to teach myself to be mindful of my words and realize that I can respond kindly and gently without resorting to rudeness. “No,” may be honest, but isn’t it a bit cruel? Mightn’t I couch my words and say something like, “At the beginning I had a little trouble following the plot and understanding the relationships between the characters. I’m enjoying it much more towards the middle where I can see what’s going on and am intrigued. I want to find out what the outcome will be.”

In this case, I’m glad I paid attention to my initial reaction and paused so that I could respond thoughtfully. All of us can choose different behaviors from the poor ones we have been taught.

I imagine myself in an art gallery with my daughter and farting into the silence, then laughing and saying something like, “Oops! Excuse me. Sorry about that,” then wafting the air and slinking away, taking hold of my daughter’s hand. Maybe the person standing behind us grimaced, and shrugged, and said, “It happens.” Or said nothing at all and pretended nothing happened. What I mean to say is that when we put down our defenses, we make the world a kinder place to live in with all our imperfections, even the smelly ones.

No one is perfect. Neither am I, but I can strive to be mindful, thoughtful, intelligent, and kind.

Punching through pain may seem antithetical to the spiritual path. I have found it essential. As a teen I was in so much pain I yearned to be devoid of all feeling. I wanted to be like the atoms in an ice cube–perfectly still. I believed that if I could freeze my feelings, l would no longer feel miserable. I could forget myself.

However, I have learned that the spiritual path to self-forgetting is not pain free. Ironically, for me at least, it has meant accepting pain, embracing it. I have had to go through pain and feel it completely rather than ask God to subsume it. In doing so, I have discovered that pain did not obliterate me, nor define me. By accepting and surrendering to it, I discovered a greater capacity to love myself and Her more deeply than when I held pain at bay. By letting go of the massive effort it took to be numb, I freed up my energies to love myself and Life more.

I had a deep love of the Divine to begin with, but as a teen I had no teacher in the spiritual journey to guide me. But my yearning for the Divine and for my Self eventually drove me to punch through pain to be with Her. That’s what my journey has been about.

It is glorious on the other side. This isn’t to say that I never feel pain. I do. But I no longer hold it at bay. As a result, I heal and recover from emotional and spiritual pain all the more quickly. Pain never destroys; not in my experience. My thoughts might try to destroy me, like an autoimmune disease, but never the pain itself. I always have Her love guiding me, and that has made all the difference in my well-being.

How I’m treating my plantar fasciitis.

I have a stubborn case of plantar fasciitis and I’m not responding well to acupuncture treatments. Instead of getting better, my heel pain is getting worse. Because of this, my acupuncturist is not happy. When he reads my body, he says the reason I am not responding well is because I am under too much mental stress. “Do you feel stressed?” he asks.

I’m writing my memoir and feel great anxiety about it, like I have to get it all just right, right now. I worry that the other writers in my critique group won’t like it. So, sure, I’m feeling a lot of mental stress right now. My practitioner says I should put all my energy into healing and reduce all mental stress as much as possible. For this reason, he suggested I take a break from writing. “Just while you are healing,” he said.

Wanting this heel pain to go away, I took his words to heart. So, what have I done this weekend instead? Read other writers’ personal essays. All that did was make me want to write. Last night, I couldn’t sleep. At four in the morning, I thought, stress be damned. I’m more stressed out not doing what I itch to do. What I love to do. Express myself. Consequently, a little over twenty-four hours after my commitment to take a break from writing, I opened my laptop and worked on my memoir.

“The reward of patience is patience,” says Saint Augustine. What that says to me is I need to write my memoir for me first, not anyone else. I think I’m stressed because I’m trying to be a perfectionist and am too focused on the outcome.

I must let go of the outcome and let the words flow in their own time and at their own pace without judging them. Maybe the pain in my heel will go away if I stop stressing myself out.

Impatience is my Achilles heel. I think I’ll follow my heart instead, do what I must and go easy on myself.

There is a tiny yellow crocus in this picture left of the big tree, taken January 21.

I suffered needlessly recently all because I was afraid of what others might think of me. I thought I was long past that kind of suffering and well able to speak up for myself and ask for help.

Apparently, I’m not.

I was donating platelets for the first time. It’s a process that takes about two hours sitting in a chair with a needle in each elbow. Blood is taken out of your body, platelets removed, and then recirculated back into your body. The blood going back in has cooled quite a bit, thus causing shivers. I was too timid to ask for an extra blanket. All the nurses and technicians were so busy, rushing here and there. I suffered through more besides being cold—pain, numbness, dizziness. I didn’t want to come off like a nagging prima donna, so I didn’t speak up right away.

While it may have been true that they ought to have been more attentive, it is equally true that I didn’t take care of myself either. I allowed myself to suffer to the point of unbearableness and accumulated a well of resentment while doing so, hoping someone would notice my suffering and come to my rescue without my having to ask for help.

I have spent my life waiting for others to pay attention to me, to take care of me, to notice when I am vulnerable and need care. I expected my mother to take care of me when I was little and as a teenager. When I asked for help, she gave it resentfully, or gave such little assistance as to be scandalous. Like when I was homeless in California at age sixteen. I finally called her for help, fearful she wouldn’t care and tell me it was my own fault. I got into this mess myself, I could get out of it. She didn’t say those things. No, she had been worried. She sent me a plane ticket via general delivery at a post office, but not enough money for a motel, food, or transportation to the airport.

In hindsight, I believe she should have given me those things and more–called the cops, called in social services, come out to get me herself. But back then I thought the help she gave me was sufficient and that I needed to suffer. I ended up in a dangerous and painful situation in the days it took me to get to the airport in time for my flight. I didn’t know how to take care of myself. I knew what I wanted but didn’t think I had the right to ask for it.

The platelet donation was the same dynamic on a different level. I knew what I wanted but was afraid to ask for it.

I am thankful for these painful lessons because they bring these old beliefs to the surface so that I can become aware of them and humbly ask God to remove them. But that also means that I must stand up for myself. I must take care of myself and stop waiting for Mom or anyone else I’ve substituted in her place to take care of me.

These lessons are uncomfortable and painful, but I’m worth the trouble of asking for help when I need it.

I’ve been getting these messages to let go of my memoir, to stop beating a dead horse, to let go of old ways. My daughter gave me two things for Christmas—a silk eye mask that allows me to sleep in comfort and darkness, and “The Book of Runes” by Ralph H. Blum, who was a cultural anthropologist.

Consulting the Oracle is none other than finding Wisdom deep within yourself. Playing with Runes helps you to do that. There’s a game you can play called “Rule of Right Action.” It’s where you draw a Rune from your bag of twenty-five Rune stones and receive its guidance for the day.

I played the game for the first time today and drew Kano Reversed. “It calls for giving up gladly the old and being prepared to live for a time empty. It calls for inner stability and carries the warning not to be seduced by the momentum of old ways [minor success with my memoir?] while waiting for the new to become illuminated.”

This Rune points to “a death of a way of being that is no longer valid and puts you on notice that failure to face up consciously to that death would constitute a loss of opportunity…Some aspect of yourself is no longer appropriate to the person you are now becoming.”

And as if that weren’t strong enough of a message, I then opened my Overeaters Anonymous daily meditation book which I haven’t opened in years to today’s date of January 15. It reads: [W]e have discovered that humility is simply an awareness of who we really are today and a willingness to become all that we can be.” It goes further to say, “I realized what character traits and behaviors have outlived their usefulness to my life. I saw that the old ways of reaching out to the world [rewriting and trying to get my memoir published, perhaps?] have kept me from reaching my full potential….I pray…to be willing to surrender and allow the natural progression of change to unfold in God’s time. I can even enjoy myself in the process.”

That is a motherlode of guidance for one day. I shall endeavor to pay attention to it. So for now, instead of working on an old story about my childhood, I think I’ll go read the Modern Love and Tiny Love Stories in The New York Times and try not to feel envious of the writers who got published.

"Through our hopes and fears, our pleasures and pains, we are deeply interconnected."
--Pema Chödrön, "Comfortable with Uncertainty"

When I was a teenager, I was uncomfortable with uncertainty. It felt like acid eating me from the inside. In some respects, that’s what I craved, to be eaten away so that nothing was left of me or the pain I felt.

Today, I accept uncertainty as a way of life. However, there are some things of which I am certain, which makes all the difference in how I feel about living in this world. I know that I am loved unconditionally by my children, my husband, my dogs, and tremendously by my God. Perhaps, this last awareness is what allows me to embrace uncertainty and all that I am, and all that life is.

When I was a teen, being me was fraught, as it is with many teens, with heartache and self-doubt. Being happy, whole and self-confident was an unattainable dream. I’m glad to have lived through those days and to have come out the other side of adulthood with all those desirable aspects in my possession.

“My mom let me leave home at age fifteen. She even typed a letter and had it notarized at the bank giving me her permission to travel alone.”

My mom let me leave home at age fifteen. She even typed a letter and had it notarized at the bank giving me her permission to travel alone. I started from the Midwest, traveled to the West coast, to the far Southwest, to the East, bumming rides, hitch hiking, staying with friends, staying with strangers, doing what I had to do to survive. When I arrived home half a year later, my parents were divorced, and my mother was living in a new apartment. She said, “You stink.” I did. I hadn’t bathed in days or washed my clothes in weeks. But she said, “I’m glad you’re home,” and that was that. She didn’t ask me how I was doing. Wasn’t curious about my experiences. Perhaps she was afraid to know.

Fear and anguish cause us to hide from so many of our realities. In recovering from such experiences, I’ve had to face the reality that I wasn’t protected by my parents, and how harsh and gut wrenchingly painful that fact was. I’ve had to face the rashness of my choices, the reality of my isolation and grief. The reality of self-loathing. Facing all of it was a kind of death. What I have gained is myself.

I found the courage to forgive myself, and my mom. (My dad died years ago. I forgave him, too.)  She has never apologized for her mistakes as a mother. Never asked me how I felt. Never wants to listen when I broach difficult topics. I pray for her and for all people who run in fear and blindness from the pain that would show them the way to their better selves, if only they faced their emotions. It takes guidance in therapy and/or prayer, but most of all it takes bravery and courage. That’s what it takes to find oneself.

Bravery and courage.

I never take for granted the desire within me to be whole and to be a wholesome home for my family, my friends, and everyone I meet. May we all endeavor to make good homes for ourselves and one another.