And sometimes there'll be sorrow

Recently, I was at a party where someone asked me what my “mom deal” was as an icebreaker. I admired the moxie of posing such a weighty question to a stranger, so I decided to be honest. I told them that, due to my mother’s mental illness and intermittent psychosis, we had been somewhat estranged over the course of my childhood. The temperature check on the room was that other people’s mothers were sending them self-help books and weren’t totally down with their bisexual tattoos.

Today I accidentally listened to Little Green by Joni Mitchell before 10am, in the company of others. Little Green is a song Joni wrote at 21, after giving birth to a baby she named Kelly. Kelly as in Kelly Green. Joni, being young and poor and wanting also to be a singer, decided to give Kelly up for adoption.

Some people find this song sad because they think that adoption due to poverty or youth is worth mourning on its own, in the abstract. I cry when I hear this song because I know that Joni had foresight in choosing not to mother her daughter, and by extension communicated to her daughter from the beginning, I will not be your mother. The song reminisces into the future about childhood specifics — icicles, birthday clothes, crocuses — and ends many of its phrases with the refrain “and sometimes there’ll be sorrow.” It’s a reminder to Joni herself, but also to Kelly. It is almost a comfort. I am not going to be here for these things, and you will feel sad about this. It is a kindness to remind you that this will happen.

The totality of my loss was not realized as a child, when the pain was most acute. It’s only when I look back at the gaps, the wide canyons of missed memory, that I realize there was something worth warning about. And sometimes there’ll be sorrow is true not just in the moment when the loss occurs, but for the retrospective in which all small losses congeal. Most of the things I do to hurt myself involve recreating the sharp pain of my childhood to avoid the dull pain of my adulthood.

Last night, after our show, on a rocky beach off the coast of Maine, I dared Jacob to stand with me in the ice-cold water and see which of us could stand it longer. I fixed my eyes on a set point in the horizon and started to breathe.

I am pretty good at this now. A while ago, I decided to learn the difference between discomfort and pain. The difference between pain in safety and pain in danger. The difference between pain that is bearable and pain that is unbearable.

The point has never been to avoid pain. If anything, I trend towards the opposite impulse — wanting to hold onto pain as proof of being. It is interesting to notice how little pain needs to be grasped, how freely it will come and find you. The water arrives in a cold shock against my legs and someone small inside my head tells me that I am in danger.

I’ve been getting this signal a lot lately because my body knows that things are about to change. When you spend your childhood walking under the tipping ladder of psychosis, you’re always looking up. Change as danger is programming that once kept me safe. Change as pain is mostly still true. Pain as danger is less true than I think.

I let my legs go numb in the sea and I’m still standing, still looking at the horizon line, still breathing. Things are going to change again. Pain is here with me as its witness.

Joni on skates