Do you have a first thought or a first feeling when someone mentions word problems? For me, it’s the latter: a twinge of cringe— my heart rolls its eyes.
It’s not that I was bad at math in high school— I took AP Calc, and did ok on the exams. It’s the experience of a word problem that gets us: all of high school, we ask our teachers “WhEn WiLl wE uSe tHiS iN tHe rEaL wOrLd?” and the word problems never convince us it will. Word problems reiterate in our memes: in Throckmorton, in the greeting card memes of the 2010s, etc.
I have no segue so a header will do
Today, my friend (and fellow poet who has a chapbook coming out soon!) Isabelle and I came to an agreement. When our parents tried to help us process some sort of perceived tragedy during our childhood, they’d already experienced some sort of other perceived tragedy before (probably more than one), and so when they comforted us the way they comfort themselves— they gave us a sort of x = y explanation. But as kids, we didn’t know how they got to that conclusion. Our parents didn’t “show their work,” to quote the math textbook word problems.
Whereas a parent might know by experience and study, metaphorically, that x equals y because a + b = x, and y = b + a, and the Commutative Law of Addition means that a + b and b + a are the same, but their kid doesn’t know that yet. So just saying (to bring it out of the metaphorical) “it doesn’t matter as much as it seems” doesn’t help a child process any sort of grief.
Great parents “show their work” [emotional, logical, etc.] when they try to help kids process emotions. It might be a socratic process:
“you remember that time that you lost your lunchbox? [yeah]
was I angry with you then? [no]
what did I say? [you forgived me]
so now that you lost your water bottle, you know you don’t have to be afraid i won’t forgive you, right? [yeah]
it’s still okay that you felt that way, though.
i know what it feels like to let yourself down [you do?]
yeah! i’ve let myself down, too. [really?]
of course! everyone lets themselves down sometimes. and if we remember that, it can help us forgive other people when they let us down.”
But a parent “showing their work” could also look like emoting along with their child. When one of our pets passed away a few years ago, I remember how seen and comforted I felt that my parents cried with me and my sister. I felt that we were all on the same page, and that I was safe to feel sad and to show it.
…how is this. about poetry?
The conversation Isabelle and I had began this way.
A couple of nights ago, I was writing about Molly, the first dog we ever had as a family. For once, I was writing things that had actual effects on my emotions as I wrote — I felt like crying as I wrote the first 13 lines, and this made me excited, kind of, too.
For me, this is a new experience: if I’m to observe my usual process, I think I follow a kind of recipe [pick 1 topic, make 3 formal choices, write 2 drafts, spend at least 1 hour revising, for example] that produces a poem, but with this one, I just started by fully embodying the feeling/image/memory I was trying to express, and it made me SO sad.
As I revised and expanded on the Molly poem, I thought more about the grief I didn’t know that I still had towards what happened to Molly, the sort of stuff that started rising as I wrote the first lines of the poem. Why had Molly come back to me as I was walking Leonard the other day? What spirit possessed me to write about her all of a sudden? Obviously, there’s something that I brought with me here that I haven’t yet processed all the way.
It hit Isabelle and me, talking— what this poem was doing was figuring out why x = y with Molly. This poem is figuring out the ‘commutative properties’ of the death of a first dog (and, probably, one of my first-experienced deaths). Some of it is emotional, through the memorializing of her burial, but it’s also speaking some child logic, playing with the idea of catching the bus, bargaining with “she never demanded” — nailing down that she didn’t deserve what happened to her.
I think it might help to prove empirically what I’m talking about. My dad (at least then, if not now) was a very “x = y” communicator. Proof: read this facebook post.
As a person now, I might reach the same conclusion as my parents back then: it’s all right; Molly lived a good life; she didn’t suffer too much in death.
But the poem is showing the work.
(vibe check) What I’m listening to:
Snail Mail’s new album Valentine. It’s too soon to choose a fighter in terms of songs, but I’ve been on the Snail Mail train since 2018, when i listened to her first album, Lush, while I was in Spain walking from the language school to the mall (oblivious that there was a train that would take me the mile and a half distance lol). I can hear Heat Wave blasting in my ears as I press into shoes that would wear out by the end of the summer climbing around the base of a castle-topped mountain, and I can’t wait to find the song on Valentine that I’ll press through to my classes, on a trail somewhere hiking, on long drives back home.