A Letter to My Daughters as You Turn Thirteen

Dear Girls,

For thirteen years now, I have written you a letter on your birthday. And for most of that time, if I’m honest with myself, I was writing more for me than you. After all, you were just babies, just children, you were only an idea of who you would become, pools of raw potential. But for me, the act of sitting down and writing to you gave me a chance to reflect on our years together. These annual birthday notes are a map from you to me.

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For the most part, the letters were positive, emotional testimonials of your growth and your feats. They were a jar in which I captured and sealed all of your best milestones. But some of the letters were not as happy. See, I was in there with you -messy and scared. My reluctance, my insecurities, my mistakes, all captured on film if you will. There was the year Samantha rolled off the couch and I blamed myself, the year Penelope needed more than I could possibly deliver, and the year we lost Grandma G.G.

Then, there was 2012. The year twenty first graders were murdered in their classroom at Sandy Hook Elementary School only two days after your sixth birthday. The day my chest cracked open and the swallows moved in. I wrote late and slow that year, dragging the words across the page. Everything felt like dusk. The next year, darker still. The color never quite returning to my prose.

Now, seven years later, I still feel a dull ache at the center of me as I near your birthday. And I wonder how the span of two days could possibly contain my entire emotional range. There will be the high of your birthday, the celebration of the most important day in my life, the day I became your mother. Then, inevitably, the sorrow. The grief. The intense mourning for my fellow Americans who lost their children that day. Only this year, there is something I never expected when I first wrote that horrible, sad note seven years ago: a sliver of light.

As part of my new book, and with the immeasurable help of my co-editor, Loren, I have spent the last year interviewing and working with 83 families who’ve survived or lived through a school shooting. We gathered their stories into a book which details exactly what the aftermath of a school shooting looks like. Through this work, I connected with (and I would like to think befriended) several of the survivors, among them the Sandy Hook families, teachers, and community members. Last month, I visited Newtown, and proudly stood with four survivors as they read their stories and talked publicly about their experience. Standing there in that moment, I could feel the warmth emanating from the center of that small conference room in the local library, and I suddenly remembered what the December sun felt like.

In the stories from Sandy Hook and the other twenty communities in our book, there is heartbreak, loss, and unimaginable pain. But there is also healing, hope, and an unimaginable strength. Asking others to bear witness to these stories has helped me to realize a new sense of purpose not just as a writer and teacher, but as an American. Over the past three months, I have traveled to several cities, met with survivors, and shared these first-hand accounts with anyone and everyone who will listen.

In each audience are advocates, parents, and educators-people who have also never forgotten those twenty children and the families who are minus them. At the end of each event, after they’ve listened to some of the stories, they hug me, and hold me close with tears welling in their eyes and their palms warm with friction. It is in those moments, enveloped in their love, the pain feels lessened somehow, and the slightest sliver of light finds its way in through the cracks.

My dear girls, what I have learned over the past year is simple. There is no weight that love can’t lift. So when it feels like the world is pressing down on your chest, which it will someday, and you feel crushed under the heft, unable to breath, there is an endless well of love within you from which to draw strength. Never be afraid to seek it out. Never be afraid to ask for it. That love is a map from me to you.

Love,
Mommy

Swallow

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Breathe.

The simple act of pulling the world in and swallowing. When I was a kid I used to hold my breath underwater for 74 seconds. I remember that number clearly because it was the neighborhood record. It was a feat to balloon my chest and deprive my body of the very thing it needs most.

Breathe.

When I had my daughters, the doctors had to put me to sleep. It was predetermined that I would have a cesarean, I don’t remember being asked or offered an alternative. The epidural didn’t work. The nurse tapped something against my spine and I jumped. He did it again, I jumped. Twice they tried. Then, they laid me on my back and slid a mask over my face. Breathe deep, a voice said. The lights were stars, the doctors were magicians. I was so passive. I so easily turned my body over to strangers.  I didn’t even know what agency meant. But I knew how to fill my chest with air.

Breathe.

There are nights when I wake up breathless. I have somehow pushed the air from my lungs, extricated the oxygen from my body. In my dreams there are kids- six, seven, eight years old. The same age as my twin girls. There is a gunman. They don’t know that he’s coming, but they know that something is sour. There are people screaming. Then, a door opens.

 

There is a space here-a pause.

 

Between the moment of knowing and the moment of dying. I sometimes imagine this space as a breath. A long, 74-second breath like the one I treasured as a child of their same age. I wake gasping for something.  I want to suspend these children in that breath, and I cannot. The air runs low. My daughter falling down the stairs when she was three years old. That scream. The one that woke me from a daydream. The one that cut through the air like a siren. I imagine a classroom full of those screams. How the walls must’ve ached with their echo. The air runs lower. The swallows in my chest fade, collapse, die.

Breathe.

The shooting happened on a Friday. My daughters were six. One was home sick. The walls could not contain my grief. I pressed my spine against the molding of our kitchen door and sobbed. The building could not hold me. The world could not hold me. Not tight enough. I wished for a jar to pour my heartache into and seal away. There was no shelf wide enough. My breath tasted like vinegar-it foreign in my mouth. I mourned the obvious-lives cut short, parents devastated, and the collective heartbreak of a community. But I obsessed over the terror in that pause. That 74-second exhale of air. The swell of life leaving their lungs.  That’s when the swallows moved into my chest. They’ve never left.

 

*A poem for the children of Sandy Hook.

To donate to the wonderful people who work tirelessly to prevent another Sandy Hook shooting in our country, click here.

A Letter to My Daughters as You Turn Ten

Dear Girls,

Last year I wrote you a letter about how we failed you as a country. How we should have done more to protect you from the overabundance of gun violence in this world. How you should not have to live through “lock-down drills” in which your principal bangs on your classroom door and tries to lure you into the line of his imaginary gunfire. You were nine. These things were impossible for me to imagine.

This year, so much and so little has changed all at once. You are ten, and in every way you have grown more than I have expected. You have boyfriends now, little boys who tell you that you are pretty and buy you bracelets and necklaces to prove it. You don’t want toys for Christmas anymore, preferring instead clothes, earrings, and pretty-smelling body spray. Also, our shared history has started to reveal itself to you. You say things like “I used to think you were a bad mother…” followed by a very specific example of when I was. I no longer have to protect you from gun violence only, the web under which I need to hold you now has grown larger and less secure: boys, peer pressure, bad memories and sadness have all tried to sneak their way in.

Every year, as much as you grow and change, I’d like to think I do as well. I learn something new about how to be a mother, how to parent you, or how to love you in a new light. But this year, the lessons were hard. This year, I had to parent you through grief: yours and mine. This year has been a year of loss. For all of us.

We lost Grandma Gigi, the woman who lived just to love you.  At almost 80 years old, she watched you three or four days a week for most of your life. She taught you to do puzzles, to play Solitaire, and to hold a special place in your soft hearts for “old ladies.” On her death bed she said to me “Oh, Amye, you don’t know how much I wanted to see those girls grow up.” It was and remains to be the single most painful thing anyone has ever said to me. Those words have strung themselves together in a little bow around my heart and squeeze hard enough to break it most days. This first year without her has been like finding my way through the darkness with only a match.

We lost Hope. You were too young to remember the Obama elections, still I bought you shirts that read “My mama’s for Obama” and posted pictures of you wearing them on Facebook without your consent. But this year, this cycle, you were able to participate. I bought you Hillary shirts in which she was made to look like Rosie the Riveter, and you wore them proudly. It was fun for you, to root for a girl. You had no idea of the struggle behind those words. Your elementary school became a hotbed of political conflict. Everyday you came home with a new story about a new friend with whom you were upset because he/she told you they were supporting Trump. You couldn’t wrap your nine-year-old brain around it. “BUT, he wants to kick all of the Mexicans out,” you would decree in shock and anger. I lacked the ability to explain it. I didn’t understand it myself. But we held fast to the idea that Hillary would win. I baked Stromboli and vowed to let you stay up to watch the results. You were in bed by ten. I cried myself to sleep wondering how I would explain to you that someone filled with such hate could be chosen by so many. Trump’s America will be the very opposite of Obama’s America, and I realize now how lucky I’ve been to have raised you in the latter.

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My mother was 20 years old when her father died, and I often wonder-now that I’m a parent-how she managed to keep the ship floating in the wake of all that grief. How her sadness didn’t just overwhelm her, pull her under the surface and hold her there for a long while. But she didn’t sink. She kept swimming, kept moving, and she and we survived. Each day I have to learn to swim all over again. What once came so naturally to me-moving forward, moving on, moving… has become difficult. I smile for you, shove the pain of losing my grandmother and the shame and disappointment I feel for my country into a black box inside of me and I struggle to inch forward against the current.

There has also been some good. Everyone is healthy and my heart is full when the entire family is together. You have grown into amazing individuals with different outlooks on life and the world. I’m so proud to hear from your teachers that you’re excelling. I’m so proud to see you question the world around you. I published my book! The thing that pulled me from you in every way for the previous five years was finally a reality! We also saw the Pacific Ocean for the first time. It took me thirty-eight years to get there, it took you nine. I stood on that coastline, closed my eyes, and breathed the salty air deep into my lungs. I had waited and wanted to see California my whole life. And there we were. In that moment, there was hope.

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Here is what I know to be true: I love you more with each day. I love you differently than I once did. I love you in spite of yourselves, sometimes. I love you enough to give my life to protect yours. I love you in ways I never thought I could. I love you enough to keep swimming for you-every day. But, most importantly, I love you enough to teach you to swim for yourselves. There will be hope again. There will be paths forward. You and I will find them together. In the darkness, I will be your match.

Love,

Mommy

This is 39: Day 26.Survival.

 

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You’ve spent your whole life convincing yourself of things.

He’s not a bad boy. He loves you. He puts his poison in your mouth and you drink it because he doesn’t hit you. He knows you. He loves you more than all the rest.

I can live without you.

They won’t notice your body-big and blooming. They will notice the hard-fought poem that kept you up last night-the slant rhyme, the image, the effortless onomatopoeia.

I can live without you.

He will do what he says. She means what she says. They will do the right thing.

I can live without you.

He can’t live without me. I am a tether to this earth, and he must hold on.

I can live without you.

Your value is not defined by the weight of your mattress. It can hold one. It can hold only you.

I can live without you.

He is a good man. He will do the right thing. He will mean what he says. He will do what he is supposed to do. He will shelter me. He will protect me.

You’ve spent your whole life convincing yourself of things.

And then one day you stop.

They will notice only your body. He is not a good boy, man, woman. He will not mean what he says. She will not be honest with you. You will need to protect you. Your value is defined by the throb of your heart-broken or whole.

You can live without him. You can live without her.

You know how to survive now.

This is 39.

*

Amye Archer is 39. She is the author of Fat Girl, Skinny, a memoir about skinny jeans, Weight Watchers meetings, and horrible life choices. Follow her at @amyearcher

This is 39: Day One

Today I turned 39.

If you slide your hand up the outside of my right leg, you will feel her-a deep, pulsating river zig-zagging against your palm. She breathes like a thunderstorm. She fades against the autumn air.

This is 39.

I have begun shoving things in my bra. Tissues, my cell phone, my writing notebook. Things are safe there, resting against the thump of my heart. I have no pockets.

This is 39.

My hair dying is now a necessity. Blood red dye against the white porcelain of my claw-foot tub reminds me of watching Psycho with my grandmother. Janet Leigh seemed so old to me then. She was an adult.

This is 39.

On Tuesday I moved a couch, a chaise lounge, a coffee table, a 10×10 rug, and then I moved them all back again. On Wednesday I saw my chiropractor and iced my shoulder.

This is 39.

I tell rude boys and mean girls to fuck off with ease.

This is 39.

On Friday nights I go to bed with Bill Maher and always fall asleep before New Rules.

This is 39.

I still make promises to myself, still feel there is ground to cover, choices to be made, journeys on which to embark. I still look to the stars with awe.

This is 39.

 

The Drunk Boys

Here’s how a poem happens.

You’re watching a reality show where people meet one another at the altar and get married. Your house is quiet. Your twins are asleep in matching but separate beds, your husband is asleep on the couch, and the dog you didn’t want but love anyway has wedged her weight against your hip, drool slipping from the corners of her loose sigh. One woman is having difficulty kissing her new husband. His body angles toward her like a coworker asking what she did last Friday. There’s a hint of sexuality, but she’s not entirely sure it’s for her. You begin thinking about the wine. Give him some wine, you think, he’ll open up.

Here’s how a poem happens.

You’re watching trashy reality shows on a Friday night while your family sleeps around you. The dog you didn’t want but love anyway, the dog who knew exactly the right amount of pressure to place against your body in the hours after your grandmother died, shifts and twitches as you whisper-yell at the TV. Get him drunk, it will fix everything.

Here’s how a poem happens.

You’re watching a reality show where no one is getting laid, and your response is to add alcohol. Then you realize: you’ve always trusted the booze more than the boys. The booze will make them honest, unzip their hearts and pull you in. You have been told some of the most flattering things by drunk boys with diamonds in their mouths: you are beautiful, you are sexy, you could be my girlfriend, you are beautiful, you are sexy, you are worth my time. The dog you didn’t want but love anyway stares at you with the world behind her chocolate eyes.

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Here’s how a poem happens.

You remember the booze and the man who wore it on his breath. You remember the rage, the pain, the invention of love. You remember the tip of the knife against the flesh of your neck, the fear in your veins. Your body forgets sometimes, but the memory of him lives at the tip of your pen. You wonder when “drunk” has ever made anything right in your life.

Here’s how a poem happens.

In your safe, comfortable home with a man whose heart has no clasp, a dog whose breath is measured against your own, and twin girls who hum sleep like two notes of the same stringed instrument. Far away from the booze and the boys and the bars.

Here’s how a poem happens.

You think to yourself, I should write a poem about this.

 

Amye Archer is the author of Fat Girl, Skinny, a memoir about waiting, weight-ing, skinny jeans, fat girls, bad choices, and happy endings. You can buy it here.

The Book Inside of You

I was on a debut author’s panel over the weekend at the fabulous Hippocamp to discuss my memoir, Fat Girl, Skinny.  If you haven’t heard of Hippocampus Magazine, I suggest you check them out, it is a brilliant pub and the conference they hold each year is wonderfully inspiring. Anyway, the panel I was on was one in which myself and four other authors each described our road to publication.

The audience was eagerly awaiting our answers. They asked great questions and I hope we satisfied them with our responses. However, now that I have a few days distance and more than ten seconds to respond, I’d like to answer two of the questions I was asked a bit more thoroughly.

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Here I am (left) with two amazing authors: Jamie Brickhouse (Dangerous When Wet) and Laurie Jean Cannady (Crave: Sojourn of a Soul) 

First, I was asked how I knew I had a book in me. The answer I gave was truthful. I had always written poetry, and when asked to write a short creative nonfiction piece for one of my graduate classes, I fell in love. My poetry has always been so confessional that expanding that same voice out to a longer narrative felt good actually. It was like allowing my memory to stretch its legs. I also liked writing with a dash of humor. I tend to be the person always looking to make a joke in real life, so again, putting that on the page felt natural.

But on a more serious note, I didn’t know I had a book in me for a long time. You see, I was married young and it didn’t go well. I married into comfort because I was fat and ashamed and my self-confidence was in the toilet. I married the boy who accepted me, instead of a boy who loved me. When the marriage finally disintegrated, as we knew it would, I knew I had to do something about my weight or I would fall back into the same bad habits. So, I joined Weight Watchers, lost some weight, and started to feel good about myself and the life I began to shape. That’s it. I never thought that story was anything extraordinary, I mean, this happens to a lot of us right? My friends and I call it the divorce diet. I just started writing about it, and decided to be grossly honest. And that, is where my story sprung from: truth.

Writing a memoir doesn’t always take an extraordinary story. It takes extraordinary honesty. People don’t always read memoir to discover the great feats you’ve accomplished, they read memoir because they’re looking for some part of themselves in your story. They look for that recognition, the universal truth that connects the memoirist and their reader. I didn’t know I had a story in me until I started to read my pieces in front of people, until I met men and women who approached me after readings to say “That happened to me,” or “I’ve struggled with weight my whole life, I can relate.” It wasn’t until I started realizing the universality of my seemingly ordinary story, that I realized its power lay in accessibility. Which brings me to the second question.

I was also asked about feedback I’ve received. I talked a little bit about the feedback I find most rewarding, and that is from young men and women who have shared with me their weight-related stories. But I wanted to share an example with you. This came in late last night, and it brought me to tears when I read it.

From an Amazon reader:

I would recommend this book to anyone who’s struggled with their weight, or an addiction. I think this is a story that so many people can relate to on multiple levels.

I went from anorexia, to bulimia in my life. I would read stories of eating disorders, and instead of marveling at how they recovered, I’d wonder if I could make what they used to get so emaciated, would work for me. This is the first book, having to do with eating disorders, that made me want to work for the weight loss, instead of doing something extreme and dangerous while hoping for immediate results.

I can’t praise this book enough, nor Amye, for laying it all out there for us, allowing the rest of us to have hope.

This review means the world to me. To think that my story, my vulnerabilities, may have helped someone is overwhelming. This is the feedback that keeps me writing, that makes every rejection (and there were A LOT of them), every edit, every revision, and every tear shed, worth it. It’s comments like this that remind me of one simple truth: everyone has a story to be told, because everyone has a life they’ve lived. It doesn’t have to be exciting, it has to be true.

Thank you to those reviewers who let authors know that a book has moved you. And thank you to everyone at Hippocamp, especially Donna Talarico-Beerman, Hippocampus Magazine’s creator. You’ve created a culture of acceptance and inspiration that I’m confident will grow and nurture writers for many years to come.

 

 

I Fucking Hate My Body, and I’m Tired of Pretending I Don’t.

A few weeks ago I read an article called I F*cking Love My Body.   I tried to get into it, to understand the message, to feel the same pride in my inherited features, but I cannot pretend to be something I’m not. No matter how hard I try. So, this was born:

I fucking hate my body, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t.

I buy dresses, hike them up above the knee, feel the swoosh of them on the back of my thighs, but cannot forget the purple inky veins slinking across my skin. Blue, black, deep red, these lines remind me to pull it down, tug it over my ass, stay grounded, stay knee-length in all things.

I buy new bras, smaller across the back, skinnier straps for a slimmer body, yet the cups remain overflowing. My breasts hang heavy with past mistakes. The valleys in my shoulders remind me of their heft.

I buy panties with the most elastic, walk past the lace, past the high hip cuts, straight to the strongest, sturdiest pair. I buy black, hoping there is some sex appeal left in color.

I buy tools to quantify my being. My digital scale holds bad news. My FitBit says I haven’t done enough. My Fitness Pal says I’ve overeaten again.

I fucking hate my body, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t.

I can’t wear short shorts because of my veins.

I can’t wear tank tops because of my floppy biceps.

I can’t wear a bathing suit in public.

I can’t sit down without worrying about muffin top.

I can’t be naked in the daylight in front of my husband, ever.

I can’t fake it. I never could.

I fucking hate my body, and I’m tired of pretending I don’t.

But, I love the inside. The red, gushy throb of my love, the seemingly endless canals of hope, the equal parts sweet and snark.

I just wish I could turn myself inside out and meet you heart first.

 

Amye Archer is the author of Fat Girl, Skinny, a memoir about waiting, weight-ing, skinny jeans, fat girls, bad choices, and happy endings. You can buy it here.

Review of Amye Archer’s Fat Girl, Skinny

Thanks to Brevity for reviewing Fat Girl, Skinny! So exciting!

The Brevity Blog

41YCR2btxyL._SX331_BO1,204,203,200_By Debbie Hagan

I’m working on a memoir about mental illness, and, at times, the process feels like a long, combative, and slightly schizophrenic therapy session. One part of me lies on the couch, reluctant to divulge details. The other part of me sits in the chair, pen poised, grilling my prone self: What did you mean by that? Are you telling the truth? Why are you so defensive? What’s wrong with you?

The analyst part of me can be rather brutal. That’s why me, quivering on the couch, eventually pops up, storms to the door, and cries, You’re just trying to embarrass me. While me in the chair shouts, Wait! We were just getting to the good stuff.

After a few hours of this, I sit back and wonder, have I at last fallen into the black abyss?

Reading Amy Archer’s sassy memoir Fat Girl, Skinny (Big Table…

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To Some of the Boys I’ve Loved Before

I’m working on a new book. It’s coming along, but sometimes writing a whole book can be so solitary. You live in this world, you and the voice-the narrator-and you live there alone. For a long time. Sometimes, I just need to break that solitude and write something, and get it up here on the blog and out into the world. So, in that vein-here’s a little poem I worked on this morning. It’s rough, but I’m spent. I hope you enjoy it.

To Some of the Boys I’ve Loved Before

I dream in previous lives-the one where you’re young and carve our initials into a tree planted in the middle of a parking lot at the nearby high school.  You propose to me there-I accept, act surprised, even though I orchestrated the entire moment-right down to paying for the ring.

You mother is a soft woman. Her birthing you and your siblings was her greatest achievement. Her raising of you is the light burning in her belly for the past forty years. Later, when I think of the word mother, I will think of her-always. Her kindness was just what a chubby, insecure teenage girl needed. I keep the good parts of her with me, mother my girls with her heart.

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On a hot, fall night you teach me to play Radiohead’s Creep, my favorite song.  You press my plump fingers down into a bar chord and slide our fused hands up and down the thick neck of my cheap guitar.  We make music together.  I mistake your tenderness for love. Sing the touch of your skin into every Radiohead song.

There are chapters of books living in the back of my throat. They hold the stories of our break ups, our failures, your hands on my body. They hold the story of my babies, of how I willed them into existence with sheer want. How they could have been yours, or his, but found the exact right man.

I braid my daughter’s black-brown hair. Three strands thick and sturdy fold effortlessly into two, then fall together into one. She loses patience with me when I have to pull it all apart and start again.

I dream in past versions of myself-call my husband your name in my head sometimes, fix his coffee like yours, wonder if you remember the way we sometimes fit together like the ocean and the sand-one resting atop another.

I write in meaningless parts-our life together carousel-ing into my daughter’s childhood, us as teenagers against a black sky in the backyard of the home my husband built for me. Car parts and extra brothers resting elbows on a table I no longer own.

I don’t know how to separate you completely out.

But, I’m learning.

One poem at a time.

~

Amye Archer is the author of Fat Girl, Skinny, a memoir about waiting, weight-ing, skinny jeans, fat girls, bad choices, and happy endings. You can buy it here.