Healing in words

Imaginative Writing 2853 connected my mind and my heart.  Perhaps that sounds melodramatic but it is true.  For the majority of my thirty-seven years I had yearned to write.  To put pen to paper and write beauty.  I was in grade school when I read To Kill a Mockingbird for the first time and I remember my favorite line.  It was not discussing Scout's bravery or even the social issues that came to rest in my malleable young mind.  It was simply this, "Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum."

I read it again and again.  Harper Lee wrote a sentence about how hot summers were and about women sweating and her crafting of words made it beautiful.  I did not just fall in love with a book, I fell in love with words.  I read it aloud and heard the alliteration in noon, naps, nightfall as well as soft, sweat, and sweet.  I did not know it had a name, this lingual song that I could hear in words.  In Words.

What I found this spring was that I could use this writing down of words to settle my mind and clean out my heart.  There were things I could not yet speak of that I could write.  Things I could not work out in my head poured out of my pen.  I found and have continued to find that when I write I heal.  It is the way my mind works, it is the way I reconcile what I know to be with what I live now, with what I have lived through.  That is why it was so painful for me when I found myself afraid to write yet again.

The following poem was a big breakthrough for me, in healing and in understanding my need to be pleasing.  Always.  No matter the cost.  No matter the damage.  So just as words planted these things in my heart, words helped to pluck them out.  I knew that healing was waiting for me to let go because God does not heal what we cling to, what we obsess over, what we keep closer to our hearts than Him.  These words were the beginning of release.   They are not pretty.  They are not even especially emotional even though I hear the edge of anger.  They are just painfully authentic. 

My Grandmother’s Words

People will like you
if you make them happy.

I heard her words
Long after she said them.

Smile and stand up straight.

I never called them forth,
But they came all the same.

When I was your age I was thin.

Whispering spirits with steely
 Tongues cut deep.

No one loves you like I do.
Not even your parents.

I searched for the secret
Mark that flawed me.

Marry someone handsome-
you wouldn’t want ugly babies.

I stripped away bits of self,
Trading them for approval

You know nothing.

Until I was a secret
Whore working for love.

I could raise your children better.

I used to wonder why some tribes
Sewed shut the mouths of their dead.

I deserve more than you.

Now I know it was to bury
Their curses with them.

No one loves you like I do.

I won’t listen anymore.
I’ve sewn her mouth shut.