A Little Love Gram

for the ones that love us just the way we are

Welcome to Pocketful of Prose a community for sharing stories. As always links are in bold, and there’s an audio of this pocket if that works better for your life. Over the past few weeks, I have been participating in Jeannine Ouellette’s Writing in the Dark For the Joy and the Sorrow Workshop. Each week, Jeannine offers a prompt in connection to one of Ross Gay’s essays from The Book of Delights. The whole experience has been rather delightful. One week, Jeannine asked us to, among a few other things, write about “the unexpected gaze of grace,” and that got me thinking about how and where that gaze shows up in my life.

Without further ado, today’s pocket…

Photo by Mayur Gala on Unsplash

My husband Dan and I are in the living room going through some of the most recent edits he has made to my manuscript. I have asked him to go through my book one more time as I move towards seeking an agent. He has circled a passage, and I ask him to explain why he circled it. It’s a description of how I found myself guarded around some of the social workers who were trying to help us, and I wrote, “I didn’t fall for the bait.”

“You can’t fall for the bait,” he says to me. “That’s not a thing. You can take the bait, and you can fall for something, but you can’t do both,” He laughs gently, as we work through my manuscript edits together. Most of his comments are about places where I have taken a widely used phrase and mixed it up. Deplug, I learn, is not a thing that people ever do. I laugh again, louder this time. It’s my own game of telephone. My ears say something to my brain, and my brain says something to my fingertips, and the words that appear on the page are not always what I intended.

For someone who writes as often as I do, I get a lot of words mixed up. For example, in our student staff multi-cultural book club, we planned to make momos, or Nepalese dumplings, but every time I mentioned this to the students, I said, “and then we get to make mimosas.”

At my school, I work with two Susan S’s, and on more than one occasion I have emailed the wrong Susan S with information that the right Susan S cares about. The wrong Susan S has a Type A personality. She’s the kind of person who would never confuse unplug with deplug or momos with mimosas, and she always writes back to let me know I have contacted her out of error. I think she is genuinely trying to help me and the right Susan S out, but I sometimes feel silly.

With Dan, I feel silly too, but it’s not the same. He picks up on each of my made-up phrases, but they seem to turn the corners of his mouth up. My made-up words make him smile, and while I now understand that it’s not possible to fall for the bait, I see that he still falls for me, every time.

I’m trying to be more aware of these gazes of grace. I’m also realizing that I could gaze upon myself with a lot more grace. I wonder if you feel the same.

I would love to continue this conversation in the comments. What resonates with you today? What are you reading these days? What are you thinking about? What are you loving?