Jagged Edges

Friends surround me as I write in the lobby of a brown brick building on the campus of Calvin College. Twitter avatars made flesh, we’ve celebrated with hugs all the conversations and online banter and words on-pages. Our beer glasses clinked to “cheers” our friendship and shared identity as writers at a festival just for us. 

I wonder how it can be that I feel so full and bonded even as my individual identity fractures within me. I can feel the jagged edges that I try to dull, sharpening themselves once again. 

Wife. 

Mother. 

Writer. 

I tell my husband, my children, and my friends that writing makes me a better wife and mom. I tell myself too. I think my words are true, but I don’t think they convey what I actually mean. I actually mean that I’d cease to exist without my words-on-a-page. That without the pen clenched between my fingers turning white, there would be no Mom Abby, no Wife Abby. 

The pen and the paper and the click of the keyboard tether me to the physical world. Without them, despite the love of my husband and the needs of my children and intellectual assent to the idea that bodies were made by God and I should probably, therefore, dwell within one, I think I would evaporate. I would float away into the ether. 

The song “Rearrange Us” by Mates of State reverberates through my earbuds as I write these words. The organ and drum somehow clash and blend at once, and I recall introducing myself to an editor on Wednesday—a moment of my own rearranging, blending, clashing: 

“I’m, uh, a wife and, um, a mom,” I stammered, my gaze falling on two Fathom editors one table over from my painful introduction. The sight of them—of two people whose presence evoked the click of the keyboard in my head—retethered me to the world. I managed to eek out, “I write a column for Fathom Mag.” Then I took a long sip of water and hoped the conversation topic would change. 

Three days later, I now no longer feel embarrassed by my stammering or awkwardness. I feel compassion for myself, for my tired mind’s scrambled attempt to rearrange the disparate Abbys. Ever since I got that first awkward introduction out of my system, I’ve enjoyed a brief reprieve from the whiplash caused by jolting between unnecessarily fragmented identities.

Writer Abby got to claim the spotlight this week. Just that girl with the column, the person who is laughing in her Twitter picture, the one who stands taller than those who have read my words about being small expected her to be. 

I expected to drink deeply of being Writer Abby for a bit. What I didn’t expect was the bitterness that lingers on my tongue. The aftertaste reminds me how infrequently I am seen for my craft before I’m seen for my roles as a wife and mother. 

I don’t want to be primarily Writer Abby every single day. But I have compulsively scrawled words onto paper since I could hold a pencil. Writer Abby dwells at the very essence of me. She did not go away when I became a wife or a mother. 

I see no evidence in scripture or in the character of God that indicates inherent conflict between writer, wife, and mother. But conversations I regularly have indicate that the conflict exists in the minds of others. In fact, these conversations often indicate that the conflict has been resolved—Writer Abby has been reduced to a hobbyist at most. Wife Abby and Mom Abby, Christian subculture often seems to say, leave no room for Writer Abby in her fullness.

As I scratch these words into a Moleskine, friends who have thoughtfully edited my work for months and who know well the struggles I have as a writer sit at my right and my left. I want to ask them to stay here with me, to keep seeing me, to keep telling me that Writer Abby isn’t a figment of my imagination or a costume I put on to pretend—she’s real. She’s me. 

My friends can’t stay, of course, and neither can I. Soon, we will all go home, back to school and work and families and daily grind. We want to—we miss spouses, children, friends. Rhythms. 

Yet we simultaneously long to stay, to mesh further into our collective identity and not face the possibility of isolation. I wonder if this deepened sense of belonging to one another could alleviate some of the fragmentation I feel. Perhaps we all feel that fragmentation as individuals, souls sliced into our many identities and roles. 

If it sounds like I want to move us all to a commune, well, sometimes I do. After all I kind of grew up on one. But mostly I just want to believe that we can continue creatively loving one another in such a way that the thought of easy yokes and light burdens blossoms into physical reality.

So, I’ll cheer on my friends old and new from afar and smile when I pull my car over to jot down a thought before the muse floats away. Because of them, I know I’m not the only one whose heart and mind receives ideas and sends out words like ground that waits for rain then springs forth with new life. The jagged edges of my individual identity may never become smooth. But if it’s here in the tender and aching place that I find this belonging that compels me to write, to share, to let my inner-creator be cherished, I think I’ll stay.