Transcript

I’m Maggie Smith and this is The Slowdown.

Sometimes I get overwhelmed. I often have multiple deadlines looming, and emails piling up, and planning to do, and bills to pay. I also have housework I’ve been ignoring, and laundry I need to keep up with, and on any given summer day, I might also have a teenager or two complaining that they’re bored and they want to go “do something.”

Normally I can stay calm, and stay focused, and continue to be pleasant to people in my life…but sometimes I find myself pushed to the limit. I know I’m not alone in that. When I get truly overwhelmed, usually it’s because one or two—or three, or four—unexpected things crop up. Those things add to the already long list of things to manage. I picture a giant tottering pile, ready to tip over, and then a couple of big, heavy things are added to the top. What happens? The whole thing topples, or at least threatens to.

Recently for me, the heavy thing added to the top of my pile was a water line break at my house. My hundred-year-old house. It’s charming, and I love living here, but it’s also a constant project. My house is not quite to the level of The Money Pit, that hilarious movie starring Tom Hanks and Shelley Long, but sometimes it feels that way. Old houses are full of sucker-punch-level surprises—like when your front yard and sidewalk flood, and suddenly your main water line needs to be replaced.

I try to tell myself that a disruptive and expensive home repair is enough to put anyone over the edge. ANYONE—not just single moms, not just self-employed writers. I try to remind myself of what I have to be grateful for: the roof over our heads, and our health, and the work I love to do, and the means to pay for the repair! That gratitude doesn’t always make sense. But neither do the problems themselves.

Today’s poem captures that feeling when you’ve just HAD it—you’ve absolutely hit your limit. But at the same time, you realize that you’re the only person who can pick yourself back up. You have to keep YOURSELF going.

New York Address
by Linda Gregg

The sun had just gone out
and I was walking three miles to get home.
I wanted to die.
I couldn’t think of words and I had no future
and I was coming down hard on everything.
My walk was terrible. 
I didn’t seem to have a heart at all
and my whole past seemed filled up.
So I started answering all the questions
regardless of consequence:
Yes I hate dark. No I love light. Yes I won’t speak.
No I will write. Yes I will breed. No I won’t love.
Yes I will bless. No I won’t close. Yes I won’t give.
Love is on the other side of the lake. 
It is painful because the dark makes you hear
the water more. I accept all that. 
And that we are not allowed romance but only its distance.
Having finished with it all, now I am not listening.
I wait for the silence to resume.

"New York Address” from TOO BRIGHT TO SEE / ALMA © 1985 Linda Gregg. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Graywolf Press.