Another Piece of My Heart

You may be old and worn

and tattered and torn,

but I don’t care.

You’re still my bear.

It was an ode to my teddy bear.

I don’t remember

how old I was

when I wrote it. 

Old enough, certainly,

to form the letters,

spell the words. 

Young enough to be very, very proud.

I took my poem downstairs to the kitchen

where my mother could usually be found

and read it out to her. 

Without looking up from the task at hand,

she said, “Mmmm.”

Just that.

“Mmmmm.”

I stood for a while,

waiting for more,

whatever more might be,

then went back upstairs,

shoved the scrap of paper

into the far recesses of a desk drawer

and said to the drawer,

“Well . . . I thought it was good.”

I never forgot it, though.

 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

My junior year of college had just ended.

Me, brimming with discovery:

My first philosophy classes.

That others before me had asked such questions!

Thought such thoughts!

Literature.

Not too-many words gathered into a too-heavy book,

but stories that awakened the soul!

A short-story writing class.

The professor scorned

what he called “women’s writing”—

and naturally, I accepted scorn

as my due—

but three of the stories I wrote for his class,

submitted without my woman’s name,

won honorable mentions in a university-wide contest.

So, the year still electric in my veins,

I waited in the motel room with my parents

for the next day’s drive home.

Nothing to do.

Nothing to say to one another.

Until, filled with the triumph of my year,

the caution I had learned in childhood swept away,

I read one of my newly minted stories

aloud to my captive audience.

The word hell occurred several times in my story,

an ironic reminder that my main character,

a jaded young priest,

was, indeed,

in hell.

The reading finished,

the pages folded away,

silence smothered the room.

A long, long silence.

“Too much swearing,”

my father said.

Nothing more.

(Hell was a word

that visited

his mouth

often.)

My mother,

sitting on the bed,

gazing at anything in the room

that was not her daughter,

said nothing

at all.

Not even “Mmmm.”

Part of becoming a successful writer,

is to learning to take criticism,

to ignore it sometimes,

too.

I’ve mastered that part.

What has been harder

is living inside the familiar silence

that descends whenever I send

another piece of my heart

marching

alone

into

the

world.