Mabel

This morning I slipped my great grandmother's ring on my finger.

I can't say why, exactly. It is a symbol of something. She is a symbol of something. I can never place exactly what. Or maybe it is that it is so much that I cannot parse it out. She is a symbol of everything. A weight so heavy, I know she could not (or would not) bear it should I ever have met her, had she still been alive when I was born. I never did; she was not.  Instead, I pour over old photos, the notations on the back of them. I am thirsty for her stories. I make up my own narrative of her life. I understand her, in some ways, as both the glorious embodiment of all the things I have wanted for myself and the failure of those things, the ways they failed her, failed her children. The story of her as told by my mother's generation is always tinged with a selfishness. My mother's mother was loved less than her sisters. Mabel said so flatly, I am told. Mabel was not really a good mother, I am told. It is whispered as if it is a secret, but it is so central to everyone's story of her that I cannot imagine it ever being anything but plain as day. She was an artist. And when I look at photos of her young, I see that. That is what I see in her eyes: a fierceness, a wildness, a desire bigger than the life that was laid out before her. I wonder often how her story would have differed had she not been born at the turn of the twentieth century.

The ring is from the twenties, three sapphires surrounded by a cluster of tiny diamonds. The once faceted sapphires are worn down to smooth round stones like river rock, or the stones I used to collect on beachwalks as a child.

I wear it on my right hand as a signifier, but it is just as much a signal that I am taken. I am taken by art, by history, by the weight of expectation, by story, by all the things she was, all the things she could not be, all the things I can be and somehow must be because she could not. I am obligated to make something of the creative fire that burns in us both, the one that is more my inheritance than blood or jewelry, or cut of cheekbone. I am obligated to make her story more than that of a woman of some means, a wife and mother who painted in her spare time, who did not give her children enough attention, who had a room dedicated to hat-making, whose lore is imbued with dismissal and reverence in equal measure. I am taken by the responsibility of that. I am taken by narrative. I am whisked off my feet by story, by my story, by the body politic, by the politicized body, by the feeling of being a woman in this time, by its tethering to our collective history. I am taken by feminism and expectation, and the crushing weight of wanting everything, the weight of the expectation that I must be unfalteringly capable of that everything. The seamlessness of it still expected of women. She was not seamless; she was biting. She knew what she wanted. It wasn't always what she was supposed to want. It wasn't always kind. She wasn't always likable; she was a woman willing to be unlikable. I like that about her story, about my story of her.

Mabel.

I slipped on her ring on my way out the door this morning—on my way out the door to work, where I stand in tall boots and an oversized turtleneck sweater, wearing my professor uniform—on my way out the door while listening to Roxan Gay's essays Bad Feminist. I slip it on my finger, and think about choice, about freedom, about desire, about all the times I've been told that women need to choose between art and love, art and family, all the times I sat in classrooms while men and women(!) told me it was still not really possible, not truly. You can't have both. Men can have both, but not you. Women care too much about being a good mother. Being a good mother precludes the kind of singular devotion that true artistic genius demands.

I think of my great grandmother, the wildness in her eyes, her unparalleled beauty. I wonder how it could have been different had she not chosen the man who adored her most, the man who offered her the most security. She was acutely aware and conscious of that choice, I am told. How could she not be? She was happy and she loved him, I am told fervently, as a follow-up. It is important to note: She loved him. I wonder how it would have been different had she lived in a time when a pursuit of her own passions was an option. She tried to have both. She broke her daughter's heart. She met with no fame or traditional success as an artist—something I can only assume she never pursued. We have glowing oil paintings of autumn trees, and wild stories, and I have my life. I cannot arrange these facts into a tidy meaning. They are simply the facts.

She is a symbol of something, a symbol of everything. I wonder how things might have been different for her. I wonder how they could be different for me.

Last week I glimpsed through the narrow crack between two large metal doors on the third floor of the Museum—the Museum: capitalized, as was our custom—and saw emptiness. The place that once was the resource center is now an empty room, only the streams of light coming in the angled windows, the quiet.

This was the place that my love for art and my love for education met. I remember my first day there, the way it made my heart swell. It was fall. I was just 25, or maybe not even yet, and I was madly in love with life, with the season, with swirling leaves and color and the way everything seemed to be imbued with magic, even the sound of the high heel click on concrete on my walk from the bus, on the marble stairs inside. It seemed my whole wide magical life was laid out in front of me in glittering jeweltones, like the night pavement after rain.

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It was strange to see the bareness, the white walls, the tacked up paper, presumably an exhibition on its way in some distant future. It reminded me (as as everything seems to) of the passage of time, of the way things slip in and out of a life, of the way sometimes the color just fades despite our best attempts to keep it alive, vibrant, stay in love with it, the way something we have worked for and poured ourselves into can slip away into memory, into emptiness. Time can sap as well as swell, and my persistent metaphor is unrelenting; it is the waxing and waning of the moon, the rise and fall of the tide.

This has been a year of the swell, a year of growing and rising, at times fast and sharp, a tidal wave, bursting at the seams. It has been a time of intense gratitude and learning, and the deep searing growing pains that accompany such times. So much good has come into my life since last year at this time. Still, it's hard sometimes, to catch up with all of life's dizzying spinning, to catch my breath after all of the fear and the work and the work and the work.

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That year—the year I started at the museum as an intern— that was the year I found the mark that made me feel like what I was making was art, that my love and my sight could somehow translate to paper, to 2 dimensions, to something others could see and touch, a way I could put a true and real and unedited piece of myself out in the world. I fell in love with ink and skylines and feeling—for the first time—wholly and unabashedly myself.

As the splits and seams heal into stretch marks, rivulets of scars, and the exhaustion begins to abate, I know that this has to be what comes next; I have to find my mark again. I have to find the place in me that is in love with curiosity and truth and the bones beneath the skin, the part of me that is unafraid of all I have to lose, unafraid of all I have to give.

I am sitting in the school library, by the window on the second floor. Building 3 is across the small green, and the tiny campus is tucked into a pocket of fog in the farmlands west of the city. My eyelids are heavy because they sprung open at 7.30 this morning, and because this is the first long day of the first long week of the term. It is week 4 of the term already (somehow), but this week my classload doubles. It is a lot of talk of scramble and busyness, but really it is unadulterated glory. I love my leather briefcase, my commute along skyline through flickering afternoon sunlight, my office, all the trappings of this real life, this real career that seems to finally be something thick enough to knock on, breathe around. It is all tenuous, and I know that every term has potential for drastic change, but sitting here in this plush chair with the grey out the window, I am happy. I am deep down, full-bellied happy.

And despite the ever-nagging fear of falling, fear of failure, I am wise enough to revel in this moment while it's with me. Here I am. This is the life I get to live today, and I am grateful.