Books like The Dream of a Common Language

It's cold and gray, where I am this morning, and it also happens to be the anniversary of my father's death.My dad passed away on this day, four years ago, and, in the moment that I received the news in a phone call, I felt a piece of my heart shatter off from the whole, and I am wise enough now to know that it will never heal. We don't know, until it actually happens to us, that we don't ever truly heal from that level of heartbreak. We also don't ever stop missing someone who was that beloved to us. We eventually get on with the daily business of living, even thrive again, but we never stop wanting the conversation, the cleverness, or the counsel of the person missing from the room.So are we broken? Yes, of course we are. We all are.My father was as broken as the next guy, but he was also the man who taught me to read and taught me to sit out on the porch with a hot cup of tea, waiting for the UFOs to arrive. Through him, I learned to love Doctor Who, Rod Serling and Ray Bradbury, and while he dreamed of alien abduction, I studied him, and read and wrote fantasy instead.Dad was a pensive man, with a lovely baritone voice, and he was playful, often crooning in his affection toward me, but he made one mistake with me, over and over again. He didn't take me seriously. . . because I was a girl.I would come to him, beginning at age 7, with my writing journal, filled with my short stories and poems, and the neighborhood newspaper I'd started and he wouldn't read any of my work. He'd just chuckle, give a gentle shake to my shoulder and laugh and say how cute I was.When I told him I wanted to write, more than anything else, he'd say, “But all you need to be is pretty.”When I got older and I informed him I was going to college, he answered, “Honey, a girl as pretty as you are doesn't need to go to college.” He not only didn't acknowledge my academic pursuits, he didn't pay for them, either.Even knee-deep into my marriage, when I spoke to my father of my professional ambitions, the conversations always turned into, “But you're so pretty, and you're all taken care of, just like I always knew you would be.”In my 40th year, my father finally read a blog post of mine and called me that day, crying, and said, “Honey, you're a writer. I'm sorry I didn't know.” From that day on, he started every morning with his signature cup of tea and some material that I'd written. He read through my essays, my short stories, he even read my poetry (which was shocking and uncomfortable for both of us, at first).He validated my artistic pursuits in the final years before he died, and it was cathartic for us both. Unfortunately, like Adrienne Rich, I still spent the first half of my life feeling invalidated and overly private about what I truly wanted. To this day, I still “look at my face in the glass, and see a halfborn woman.”It's so hard to be a woman, especially when the old messages still resonate with us. . . we need to be a good girl, a pretty girl, then a wife (and a desirable wife, no less) and a mother, and a good mother, a devoted mother. . . and what else? That part seems to get left off the sentence.What about our artistry? Our dreams? Our desired professions? What if we don't want to become a wife or a mother?We're still stumbling over both big pieces of identity: wife/mother, and/or artist/professional? Very few of us will have both, and rarely at the same time. And what's okay, and what's not okay to do?Ms. Rich wrote once in an essay, “We need to understand the power and the powerlessness embodied in motherhood in patriarchal culture.”The power and the powerlessness. There's an ebb and flow to womanhood that can help us surge up toward greatness or drown us, in an undertow. And, as Ms. Rich writes in this collection, “a lifetime is too narrow to understand it.”I can not sum up my experience in one simple reading response to this poetry (and I will be reading a lot more of Adrienne Rich, especially her essays), but, please, whether you're a man or a woman, do my father and me one favor: don't invalidate your daughters. Whether they're physically pretty or not, could you focus instead on their courage, their passion, their intelligence, their creativity?They're going to need all of the support they can get.No one ever told us we had to study our lives,make of our lives a study, as if learning natural historyor music, that we should begin with the simple exercises first and slowly go on tryingthe hard ones, practicing till strengthand accuracy became one with the daringto leap into transcendence, take the chanceof breaking down in the wild arpeggioor faulting the full sentence of the fugue.