I wasn’t handled gently: I formed from uneven ground, Learned to tremble before I could talk, Understood young why birds yearned to be heard. So, I hold you with clumsy hands: They fumble—inept and unsure, Intolerant to caresses, Incapable of stillness.
You’re ignorant of cruelty. You massage my hands with a frown, opening anxious fist, Insistent and sure, Pulling each finger until they pop, Sighing as you work out their knots.
You deserve unblemished palms,
Yielding to love and affection
Like well tilled earth: soft and bountiful.
Thoughts on “Handled gently.”
When Mike and I began dating in 2019, it was clear from the beginning that we’d marry. We enamored and devoted to each other, to the point that the notion of committing ourselves to another person didn’t seem like a tough decision to make in our mid-20s. We didn’t consult anyone, or rather, I don’t recall consulting the elders in my life about marrying him in 2023, mostly because I knew negative comments would come our way. I I made decisions the way I normally did: I notified Mommy and my older brother, Ray, about what I planned to do. Their opinions be damned.
For better or worse, I spent my adolescent and young adult years making decisions that way. Mommy, who became a widow in her 40s, isn’t an emotional woman, let alone a delicate parent. She’s practical, a straight shooter with little patience for my whimsical ideas about love, commitment, and journeying through life with a kindred soul. To me, marriage is an amorphous idea that was whatever he and I decided to make of it. To her, marriage had been a trap where her youth, dreams, love, friendships, and all-things good about herself came, went, and died. She didn’t want this for her daughter. She didn’t want me to marry him—or anyone at all. In 2020, she told Mike as much when he asked for her blessing. She told him I wasn’t ready to be anyone’s wife and that I probably would never be. To this day, she never gave the blessing; in hindsight, I think she knew I’d do what the fuck I wanted anyway. “I know my daughter,” she often complained, usually sucking her teeth or laughing bitterly. “That one has a mind of her own.”
Her rejection—and by extension, my increasing distance from my family—was an early blow to Mike. He wasn’t used to anyone disliking him or being outright cruel. She’s never hugged him willingly, didn’t bother to sit with him or get to know him, none of the normal things a parent does when their sole daughter intends to marry someone. I spent the better part of a year begging her to be kinder to him, but, like all my other requests for basic humanity, it fell on deaf ears. At first, when Mike expressed how much this hurt him, I made excuses for her, but my insistence that it wasn’t about him, that her words were designed to hurt me, and it was my burden to bare, did nothing to diminish the loneliness that entered our young home.
That was tough lesson to learn in 2023 but I did what I’ve learned to do as a rejected, lonely and embarrassed daughter: put my head down and make the best of it. As the years crept by, I’ve adamantly shielded Mike from the dysfunctional nature of my family. She isn’t invited anymore to birthday parties or holidays (not that she ever comes). She doesn’t call his phone and doesn’t ask about him. She jokes that I check on her in person every three months out obligation. She’s right. It is an obligation, nothing more, because he is (and will continue to be) precious to me and, quite frankly, I’ve been terrified of the version of myself he’d discover if he were to ever see the full scope of the environment that birthed me.
Still, it’s a foolish idea that I could construct a wall around us. I imagined myself digging a moat around our home, pulling up the draw bridge, and everyone who’d ever hurt me would disappear while everything I care about would live inside. What’s actually happened is I’ve built a tower to hide within: a sad-ill constructed version of happiness that teeters in the wind. The mortar is ill constructed, cracked seams and fractured bricks. And, instead of a warm place for the both of us, he’s left on the other side in the breeze. Inevitably, I snap out of it and guilt falls over me and I wonder when apologizes will stop being enough.
SABLE will be writing more about agape.
Marriage has reveled a lot about myself. More than I anticipated. I considered posting my older poems first, but this one felt more appropriate. I imagine my reflections on how I loved, had been loved, and continue to love myself and others.
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