At first, I was confused about pleasure,

how fleeting it is, how brief.

One must run to it, and then let it go.

It will never stay for long,

because we will be in search for it again.

And, searching is the whole point of it.

Then, I was confused about love.

What love is worth holding

if loving means surrendering to the possibility of pain?

Can I imagine selling my soul so easily,

ready to be crushed at any moment,

and yet doing it deliberately?

Sending gratitude even to the one who hurts me,

simply because he chose to be present.

And when I did give my soul to a man;

a man within my reach,

who reached out for me,

a man who wore my father’s face,

and spoke with my father’s voice.

I became confused about the idea of staying together.

To play the parts he needed,

and he played the parts I needed,

and together we performed,

the longest, most dramatic, beautiful, mischievous play,

as long as we could stand side by side.

I represented him, as he represented me.

Then came motherhood,

and I was utterly lost.

This one sent me back to school,

to lessons I never knew I needed.

The theory and the practice never matched;

every chapter felt different in reality.

It was as if I’d been thrown into a kindergarten for mothers,

learning how to hold, how to let go.

But oh, how I love being a mother!

even as I wonder, endlessly,

how to do it better.

I believe in every season of life,

we stumble,

as though strangers to the world we live in,

never quite grasping the full shape

of what was, or what is.

We are born with a longing,

an ache for something unnamed.

And we live our days searching.

All writers, in the end,

write questions.

the same questions we all carry.

Not in hopes of finding raised hands

with answers,

but only to meet

yet another question.

And so, I remain confused about life in general.

Maybe, just maybe;

the answers are hiddenin my own poetry.