When I was around forty-five, I blew up my own life in a spectacular fashion in order to save it. Then, I spent years rescuing myself from the fallout. I survived, lived to tell the tale battered and beat the hell up, but ironically, I also turned out to be the main casualty of the whole affair.
When I was a young child, I remember standing at the blackboard and crying because I couldn’t understand carrying a number. Then, later, I couldn’t understand remainders in division. What do you do with that number? It’s just hanging around, random. What’s the point of math if it doesn’t wrap all the loose ends up in a neat and pretty bow, if it doesn’t make order out of chaos? What are you supposed to do with a world that includes remainders dangling at the end of equations?
For much of my life, I think I’ve been a remainder. Or at least, I’ve felt like it. Abandoned by my mother, then shuffled around between divorced parents, then part of a new and chaotic family that didn’t really have a place for me, then married and mothering and wife-ing, but only with my exoskeleton and not my whole heart, often in love with people who couldn’t or wouldn’t love me back or unable to love the people who did and would.
In both of my old houses before I divorced, I had little rooms of my own for writing. And I did write. One thing I love about creating stories and novels is that you can wrap things up in a neat bow. You can see the whole arc of a character’s life and solve things for them. There don’t have to be any remainders and if there are, well, they make sense. They mean something. It’s a little like borrowing the voice of god. You get to bestow grace. And create space. You get to make the world match your innards.
It’s harder for a woman to do that in her own life. It’s hard for me to do that. I walk with my girlfriends a few times a week and we talk about the vagaries of existence. More specifically, we talk about ourselves going through it, how we’re stumbling along, how we got to where we are and where we hope to go. “You know you’re allowed to take up space, right?” my best friend recently said to me. “You’re allowed to matter.”
That about stopped me in my tracks. I mean, I’ve heard it before, but I never really heard it. I haven’t had the space to, which is ironic because when I divorced, I left my small writing room and got an entire house for myself. I got space, yes, I got to be on my own, yes, but I didn’t give myself space of my own.
Instead, I remained a remainder. First, I tried to disappear, which only resulted in everything I was hiding spilling into the light like guts dumped on a battlefield. Then, once I cleaned up that mess, burying the remains and resanctifying the ground, I became indispensible to everyone in my care. I was at the center of the equation, but still divided within. I still had no idea what to do with the remainder. Part of me was still stuck at the blackboard in childhood, weeping because I couldn’t make sense of any of it. What was the trick of borrowing and carrying? Why did everyone else understand that magic and I couldn’t?
These days, I’m not trying to give myself space—I’m trying to take it up. In every way. I lift weights, and eat ice cream sandwiches, and buy bigger pants if I need to, even as the echo of my mother’s voice calling me a “big girl” rattles my bones. I’m working on stating blindingly simple desires to my loved ones like, yes, I would, in fact, enjoy a birthday celebration. And most importantly, I’m trying to find the space to write—not just in a corner of a whole house I’m responsible for, or in a room set aside from the rest of my life, but in my own mind. I need to give myself permission to take up that space, to let my voice crack through all the chatter around me and be the loudest one at the party. I need to be brave enough. I need to actually claim a little space again.
This maybe sounds like it’s freeing and fun in the manner of releasing the brakes on a bike and letting it soar down a hill, but actually it’s excruciating. That kind of abandon goes against everything I ever learned and cuts across the grain of everything I ever did to survive, which was to be convenient and good. Remainders don’t make noise. Remainders don’t demand anything. They just occupy what’s left.
Virginia Woolf so famously said a woman needs a room of her own. I know what she meant. It is an audacious undertaking to rewrite the math of your own life, to resolve the equation in front of you so that you are the whole sum. It’s breathtaking to imagine closing the door to all the things society, your family, tradition tells you need to allow in and be. And not just admit in, but cheerfully serve in the manner of a welcome guest—getting out the good silver and the fine teacups, getting on your knees so you can wash another’s feet with your hair.
The fundamental work of any artist is the struggle to stitch together the imagined and the real, the ideal with the material, the personal with the universal. And oh my god is it hard. It leaves you with wounds, broken weaponry, the scars of compromise. Men like Hemingway and Picasso drank and fucked their way through the process, creating long wakes of ruined lovers, family, and friends, taking up all the space in the world to remake it in their vision, but trashing everyone along for the ride. Even Woolf herself couldn’t take it in the end. She waded into the river with stones in her pockets.
There has to be a better way. One that allows for the grace of finding a pocket of solitude in the fabric of life, and then a way back out of it again. One that allows you both to matter and serve. When god closes a door, the saying goes, he opens a window. When a woman closes a door, she creates a new geometry that rearranges patriarchy, family, friendships, her own self. That single act alone is the first and most necessary act of art. In fact, maybe it simply is the art.
I have a whole house. I have a wonderful second husband and children who are flying the nest. I have dogs, and time, and friends always at the other end of the line. I have my health. I have some books I once wrote and some more I would like to. It’s time for me to finally find a new room. Because I matter.
I remain.