The Holes Are Still There (And So Are You)

What I heard in your comments, and what I want to say back

I did not expect what happened in the comments on Tuesday.

I wrote about words. About the boy who called me Waddles the Duck when I was thirteen, and about the nail and the fence, and about how the holes stay even after the nail is pulled. I wrote it because it was sitting in me and it needed to come out. I wrote it for myself as much as for you.

And then you wrote back.

I read every single comment. I read them sitting right here in my chair, and I will be honest with you, I had to stop more than once. I sat with Patches on my lap and I read about the desk in the high school English class, and the white jeans in the store, and the student union at the university, and the father who used a word no father should ever say to his daughter, and the mother whose voice is only now, at seventy-eight, beginning to go faint. I read about a woman who lost her best friend to brain cancer at thirty-seven and is still carrying, all these years later, the beautiful thing a stranger said to her friend. And the ugly thing he said to her.

I want to say something to all of you, and I want to say it before too many days pass, because these things matter and you deserve to hear them quickly.

You Were So Brave

I do not say that lightly. I know what it costs to say these things. Most of you have carried these words for forty, fifty, sixty years. Some of you have never told anyone. And you came here and you typed them out into a comment box on a Tuesday morning, and you hit send, and that matters.

That is not a small thing. That is a very large thing dressed up as a small thing.

What I kept thinking, reading your stories, was: how many people are walking around like this? How many women in the grocery store and the doctor’s waiting room and the church pew are carrying something a thirteen-year-old boy said, or a mother said without thinking, or a stranger in a store said because she was miserable and decided to spread it around? All of us, it seems. Nearly all of us.

And we have been carrying these things quietly, because that is what we were told to do. Don’t be dramatic. You are too sensitive. He didn’t mean it. She didn’t know what she was saying. Let it go.

As if letting it go were as simple as opening your hand.

What Letting Go Actually Looks Like

I want to be honest with you here, because I do not think you need platitudes. You have had enough of those.

The holes do not close. I think we have to start there, with that truth, before anything useful can follow. The hole from Waddles the Duck is still in me. I am fifty-nine years old and it is still in me. I do not walk into rooms the same way I might have walked into them if that boy had never said a word. That is simply true.

But here is what I have also learned, and what I heard underneath some of your comments, even the hardest ones: the hole is not the whole story.

Letting go does not mean the hole disappears. It means you stop using the hole as your address. It means you stop forwarding your mail there.

Sandy, and I keep coming back to Sandy’s comment, told us that her sturdy legs (not a compliment, as she made perfectly clear) skied and hiked and kept up with three boys. She took the nail her mother hammered in and she planted something in that hole, and what grew there was strong and capable and entirely her own. She didn’t erase the hole. She grew right around it.

Joan, at seventy-eight, said something I have been thinking about ever since: There is such peace in acceptance at my age of what is and what can’t be changed. Now I’m just moving on. Not healed. Not pretending. Just moving. I find that more comforting than any promise of closure I have ever read.

And Ellen reminded us that the people who hammer in the hardest nails are almost always the ones who have the most holes of their own. That does not make what they did acceptable. But it does make it something other than about you. It was never about you.

The Fence Is Still Standing

Here is what I want to leave you with, and I mean it in the plainest, most unsentimental way I know how.

You are not the holes in your fence. You are the fence. And after everything, the cruel boys and the careless mothers and the strangers in stores who had no business saying a word, you are still standing. You are here. You came to a blog on a Tuesday morning and you read about a girl called Waddles the Duck and you thought, I have a story like that too. And you told it.

That is not a small life. That is an enormous one.

I do not know what you have planted in the holes over the years. Maybe not much yet. Maybe a great deal. Maybe you are just now, in your sixties and seventies, beginning to decide that what someone said to you at twenty does not get to determine what you wear to the pool this summer. Maybe, like Joan, you are just now letting the voice grow faint.

That is enough. That is more than enough.

There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind. C.S. Lewis said that, and I have clung to it in my own life more times than I can count. I am clinging to it for you right now.

Thank you for trusting me with your stories and for listening to mine. I do not take that lightly. Not for a single moment.

Tell me, friends, did any of the comments from Tuesday stay with you the way they stayed with me? I would love to hear what you are thinking.

I hope that you have a safe and wonderful 4th of July. I will be here tomorrow for Friday Favorites, and on Saturday for Weekend Meanderings.

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