Broken for You

It's 10:30pm and I should be in bed...I should be making progress towards sleep. The Boy is sleeping soundly, the Husband is out walking a lovely dog, but I? I am blogging, and I will tell you why.

I just finished this book. Stephanie Kallos' Broken for You. For the first time in years, YEARS I say, I have read a book so good that I had two reactions:

1) I am GREEN with envy because I didn't write it myself. It is so simple, so lovely, so bittersweet and utterly charming and I cannot claim to be the brilliant mind behind it. WOE. Woe to ME.

2) I have found a book that I actually want to TEACH. I haven't felt this way about a text since Anil's Ghost (which I did teach) and it was years ago. I got halfway through and started structuring lectures and discussions in my head--different directions it could go in, the ongoing metaphors throughout the text, the symbolic nature of Margaret's dreams...oh, there's so much there I could cry with the joy of it.

It is brilliant beyond description. So multi-layered, so rich, so dynamic, so quirky and funny and yet so gorgeously SAD. I read it in 3 days. And it took me that long because I would read certain sections and I would have to stop. Get up. Go and find the Boy. And hold him in my arms for a while. All the time he's squirming because, dude, he was playing and I interrupted, but cut me some slack, Mama's heart is breaking all over again and she needs to hold her little Boy while she can.

(I know. I have been talking about posting something about David Copperfield, I got distracted, people, please. I couldn't help myself, it's not my fault.)

And just to illustrate the extent of my WOE at not having written this amazing book, I'll leave you with a quote:

"The broken are not always gathered together, of course, and not all mysteries of the flesh are solved. We speak of "senseless tragedies," but really: Is there any other kind? Mothers and wives disappear without a trace. Children are killed. Madmen ravage the world, leaving wounds immeasurably deep, and endlessly mourned. Loved ones whose presence once filled us move into the distance; our eyes follow them as long as possible as they recede from view. Maybe we chase them--clumsily, across railroad tracks and trafficked streets; over roads new-printed with their footsteps, the dust still whirling in the wake of them; through impossibly big cities peopled with strangers whose faces and bodies carry fragments of their faces and bodies, whose laughter, steadiness, pluck, stubbornness remind us of the beloved we seek. Maybe we stay put, left behind, and look for them in our dreams. But we never stop looking, not even after those we love become part of the unreachable horizon. We can never stop carrying the heavy weight of love on this pilgrimage; we can only transfigure what we carry. We can only shatter it and send it whirling into the world so that it can take shape in some new way."

Maybe it's so good to me because it's a theme that I've been thinking about a lot lately. Realizing how broken we all are in our own ways. Of course, we're all excellent actors so all we see of one another is the facade, the mask, the costume and make-up and stage lighting. All we hear are the previously rehearsed lines. What we don't recognize in one another, and yet what binds us together, what ties us by our common humanity, are the fissures, the cracks, the breakings and reassemblings. It's what ultimately makes us human--and nothing and no one exposed to other human beings remains unbroken. It's against nature. We were never meant to be shut away behind glass or bars, protected but isolated and alone. We were always made to be interacted with, to share, to LIVE and by living to LOVE...and those things are high risk behaviors. We can't participate in them and remain unbroken, it's just not possible. Maybe what we need is some sort of acknowledgment that it's ok to be broken.

Ultimately, that's what this book does. It brings the fragments out into the light and says it's ok to be broken. We all are. It doesn't make us failures, freaks, or fools. It makes us human, and successful humans at that.