Homecoming

A poem I wrote many years ago came back to me recently. I wrote it while sitting on a stoop outside my psychoanalyst’s office on the Upper West Side. I felt the grief of the triumphs of independence and success and the ways they widened the chasm between my life and my parents’ lives.

This feeling returned in a conversation with my partner, David Whyte, about a new Substack essay he was writing on resentment. We talked about how universal it is and the hold it has on our lives. He wrote that resentment is a defense against a deeper truth, a way of refusing the freedom of forgiveness. I quipped that it was also a way of having a false sense of purpose. And then he shared a line he wrote that unsettled me: "Nurtured resentment becomes my ongoing excuse for not being brave.”

My resentment was full of false hope and purpose. It occurred to me for the first time in my adult life that I was not as brave as I imagined myself: becoming somebody was my way of not being the daughter of nobodies.

That is not brave. But if I let the resentment go, what was it all for?

— — —

When I wrote the poem, I was fully inhabiting my adult life in New York City and becoming a “somebody.” I was paid to speak to hundreds of therapists and received standing ovations. I published books. And yet, I found myself sitting in front of my analyst’s office, full of a sadness I could not explain to anyone who applauded my success.

My parents could not believe people paid me to talk. They could not read what I wrote.

“What is it about? People sitting around talking about their feelings? Only in America.”

They were happy I had a job. A job meant I could take care of myself and help support them.

The resentful part of me hid the frightened child belonging to “nobodies”: the invisible immigrants who hand you your groceries and answer with silence, shaking their heads, when asked if they speak English. I resented how little hope they offered and how much they needed me in their powerlessness and loss.

The poem I wrote:

Birds of a Feather:

Sitting on the stoop
Can’t relax enough
To lose myself
In my thoughts

To soar high
Above the world
To taste the joys & sights
Of flying

You see, I came to being
From two feathered
Birds,

A rooster and a hen,
Too hungry and broken
To look up
To long for the sky

Years passed wondering in silence why
Until I heard a voice say
“instead of why, imagine, what if?”

So I
Imagined
Soaring in the sky
Dreaming all the things
I would see, learn and be

Only to find
Myself
Tethered
To winged
Birds
Who could not fly

Undeterred, I practiced each day
Imagining
Myself
In the sky,

Until
One day
I looked down
And realized
I was flying

And spotted below
The rooster & the hen,
Spending their days
Pecking for
Worms.

Never imagining
What could be,
Never knowing
What had become,

Of me.

— — —

Resentment was useful fuel. It gave me a direction and a story that became my identity:

“This is who I am, and how I found my own way.” It’s true: I grew up writing my own sick notes for school. My parents worked until midnight most nights and could not come to parent-teacher conferences. No one taught me how to move through a life, because the people who would have taught me could barely stay afloat.

Beneath my resentment, this facade of strength, and a well-established sense of “I was given nothing; therefore, I am,” was a deep well of grief. Theirs, and my own.

I was eight, in a new country, and none of us spoke the language. The world frightened me. I needed parents who were stronger than that world, and their own grief and helplessness overwhelmed them. I was too young. I still needed protection, and I had no choice but to grow up and take care of myself and them. From then on, I hid behind the “somebody” I built so I would not have to feel the loss of the home and family I can no longer return to.

I wrote that they were winged birds who could not fly. But they had enough hope to cross an ocean. For most of my life I mistook their silence for the absence of wings.

They need more from me each year. My father struggles to climb the stairs since a recent hospitalization. They live on very little, as they always have. They still do not understand what I do. Their hope for me was never about that. Some days the resentment comes back. It is smaller now, and I know what lies beneath it.

This is what I would say now to the frightened child and struggling parents:

I learned to love the English language. One of my favorite lines is one Emily Dickinson wrote: “Hope is the thing with feathers.” 

I want you to know:

Your hope is the thing
I tried to leave behind
what I learned to forget
I carry with me, still
far beyond your sight
into the distance
even into your final
silence.

You can rest now.
Your simple will
to find a way
has long since
made a home

In me.