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.