Tomorrow’s Lunches

When I was admitted to Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA program in Creative Writing, I had to pick a concentration:  Fiction, Creative Nonfiction, Poetry, or Speculative Fiction (the science fiction of years gone by).  It was easy to exclude the latter two but I grappled with the remaining choices.  All my writing up to that point had been creative nonfiction:  memoir and personal narrative essays about my life and the experiences that shaped me.  And yet I felt the beginnings of a novel inside me; a story inspired by my grandmother’s early childhood experiences and the enduring impact of those events on the generations that followed.  So I chose fiction and began writing short stories (while keeping my novel alive in my spare time).

It turns out that writing fiction is not so different from writing nonfiction.  In creating characters and scenarios to explore in fiction, I draw from people I know and experiences I’ve had.  The power that I felt in writing my truth in creative nonfiction is still present when I bring the emotional honesty of my own experience to the characters and circumstances I explore in fiction.

Tomorrow’s Lunches, recently published by the Green Hills Literary Lantern of Truman State University, is such a piece.  A work of fiction, it explores a moment in the life of a working mother juggling the needs of her family while trying to hold on to some semblance of self.  I was once such a mother and while the events portrayed in Tomorrow’s Lunches are created from my imagination, they thrum with very real emotions that I and many of my contemporaries have navigated.

As a writer, whether I am utilizing fiction, nonfiction, poetry, or even speculative fiction, I strive always to write honestly.  To convey the sometimes raw emotions that are part of our collective human experience.  Bringing words to those feelings and sharing them with strangers, whether in fiction or nonfiction, is the way I choose to build community.  To reach out and find common ground.  Won’t you join me?

Tomorrow’s Lunches, by Beth Holly

The Power of Stories

Oh, the power of stories. 

The ones whispered by our mothers, of their dreams for us. 

The ones read to us by our fathers in precious minutes before sleep. 

The made up stories acted out in playrooms and living rooms and classrooms. 

The stories that make you cry. 

The stories we tell ourselves about who we are. 

The ones we think are keeping us safe.

The ones that shelter us from the truth.  Or the pain.

The ones that hold our shame.

I told my therapist a story about a little girl, so afraid to float in her swimming class that she kept her tippy toes on the pebbly bottom of the pool.

What is the story you’re telling yourself about that story?

For fifty years I held that story as proof positive that I was a cheater.  That I was less.  That I was not enough.

She helped me rewrite my story.

My ex has a story about our marriage.

I have a different story.

Some stories serve us.  Some are best left behind.  Some demand to be rewritten.

And some must be told.

Last night I got on stage and told such a story.  I gave a piece of myself to a roomful of strangers and was richly rewarded. 

For there is power in stories. 

The Road Ahead

Three months ago today, I was experiencing an unexpected low.  Since leaving my marriage in the spring of 2019, despite the intervention of an isolating pandemic and a heartbreaking flood and costly renovation, I had been on an unmitigated high, filling my new life with the people, places and adventure that nourished my soul.  But mid-summer 2023 found me feeling lonely, vacant, quiet.  I was spending most of my time alone and Bodhi and Tucker, while loving and loyal companions, are poor conversationalists.  I had closed out a satisfying career and had yet to begin my new life as a graduate student. I was living in an unsettling state of suspended animation.

As I have learned to do, I chose to process those feelings in writing, penning this poem on July 20, 2023:

The wave must recede

before it can crest

The field must lie fallow

to nurture once more

The sun must set

to permit the dawn

I will walk through the valley

to reach the peak

Three months later, I am writing a very different story.  My life is once again rich and filled with newness and wonder.  I’m a student again, refueled with new inspiration, new challenges, new people.  I just returned from a two-week trip to Nepal with my daughter, fulfilling a pandemic-interrupted adventure.  And most wondrously, I’m in love.  September brought a startling and unexpected romance with a man who has shown me a glimpse of what love can be.  What love never was before.  I am living a life of abundance.

How prescient, my summer words.  In embracing my quietude, I readied myself for the unknown to come.  For there is always more road ahead, leading us wherever we are meant to be.

On Turning Sixty

Today I am sixty.  I guess by any standard, it’s a significant milestone.  If life is a game, this marks the start of the third period.  Maybe I’ll get some overtime.  Maybe the game will get called early for rain.  It’s hard not to be aware that the finish line is drawing nearer and I know I’m mixing my sports metaphors but I’m sixty. I can do whatever the hell I want.  A week ago, at a surprise pre-birthday dinner, a friend handed me a pink, feathered tiara that read “Oh Shit, I’m 60.”  I humored the group and put it on but took it off just as quickly.  The sentiment just didn’t fit. 

 My fifties were transformative.  I began the decade deep in the blinding storm that was my marriage, unable to see my hand before my face.  My forties had left me lost to myself, to my friends, to my family.  I had no idea how to find my way out.  Didn’t even know there was an “out.”  But the skies began to clear in my fifties.  I found a wonderful therapist who gently led my gaze to the things I’d been too afraid to see.  I started working out regularly, voraciously, with a trainer who would become a friend, building the strength I needed to push myself out of the altered reality in which I’d been living.  I began speaking aloud the dissatisfaction I had swallowed in search of an elusive peace.  I accepted the truth that I would not find happiness inside my marriage.  By my decade’s mid-point, I had freed myself. 

At fifty-five, I began building a new life of my own design.  I reinvested in friendships long dormant and found a tribe patiently waiting for my arrival.  I challenged myself with adventure and travel, eagerly flying into the unfamiliar.  I inked my first tattoo, a leaf of the Bodhi Tree to symbolize my path to enlightenment, and quickly followed it with three more, each one chronicling a milestone on my journey.  I gifted myself a new name, leaving behind both my maiden and married names to craft something all my own.  To plant my own flag in the earth I was cultivating. 

I focused on family, repairing relationships wounded by marital shrapnel.  My mother and I fell in love again, leaving behind the hurts and accusations that weighed us down.  My sister and I get to be sisters again, free of the complicated overhang of my marriage. There’s a lightness to family gatherings that used to tie me in knots for days.  And my children.  Oh, how my relationships with my children have flourished, grounded, as they are, in the now-spoken truth of our shared experience.

And I wrote.  I took a mid-pandemic Zoom writing class and just kept writing.  I wrote the heartache of my marriage.  I wrote the struggles of my childhood.  I wrote the joy of my new life.  Where I used to keep my thoughts and feelings to myself, and often from myself, I now shouted them from the rooftops, publishing deeply personal stories in literary journals.  Reading them aloud from the stage.  I refuse to be alone with my truth anymore.

The blueprint for my new life rests on three key questions:  Is it teaching me something?  Is it helping me grow?  Is it bringing me joy?  Looking through that lens, I made the decision to close an outstanding and rewarding legal career.  I loved being a lawyer and a leader and was at the top of my game, but my learning curve had ebbed.  My joy had muted.  After thirty-five years as an attorney I was ready to flex different muscles. I found an amazing community of creatives in The Spark File and began to reimagine my identity as an artist, a writer, a storyteller, a poet.

And so fifty-five years after entering kindergarten I am going back to school.  In less than a month I will be a full-time student at Sarah Lawrence College on my way to earning a Master of Fine Arts in Writing.  I’ve begun work on a novel that tells the story of my remarkable grandmother and the inter-generational impact of her early childhood trauma.  I’m ready to write my next chapter.

In less than five years, I have radically transformed not just the circumstances of my life but who I am.  And now I get to begin my sixties, my first full decade as Beth Holly, living a life of my own creation.  A life filled with the people, places and things that are helping me to grow and bringing me joy.  I couldn’t have gotten to my sixties without going through my forties and I am grateful for every hard moment I endured because it has made me into the amazing woman I have become.  I am my own inspiration and I can’t wait to see what I will achieve in the decade to come. 

This is no “oh shit” moment.   Bring it on. 

Fifty-Six Ways to Say I Love Me

Sunday, May 7th was a special day. Not just because I had the opportunity to read my story, Fifty-Six Ways to Say I Love Me, in front of a fabulous live audience at City Winery Chicago. Not just because my children were there, and my parents were there, and my daughter’s future in-laws were there. Not just because old friends (as far back as high school) and new friends (as recent as my bike trip in Mallorca the week prior) showed up to support me. On Sunday, May 7th I got to stand on a stage and read my truth out loud. To share the power of the journey I have been on for the last four years. To hear the audience laugh together and grow quiet together and feel something together. I got to savor the applause and hear people tell me I reached them, touched them, inspired them. This is why I write. In sharing my honest truth, my struggles, my triumphs I open myself up to connection and I thrive on that energy. Thank you for being part of my audience.

Exodus

I have always loved Passover. I’m not a religious person but I am a storyteller and am moved by the countless generations that have retold the story of strength and resilience, of hope and of faith.  This year, I hosted a Seder in my home for the first time since Hurricane Ida destroyed it, gathering friends and family together to rejoice in the freedoms we enjoy and to honor the struggles that got us there.  With the aroma of brisket permeating my house, I felt a poem arise within me.  One that I would share at the Seder and that I now share with you. May we all be free.

Exodus

The Passover story is a story of hope.

Of believing that there is more for us

if we are willing to journey,

 to relinquish the familiar

and reach for the unknown.

It is a story of faith.

 Not in a vaporous wish

but in the self.

In one’s own ability to do the unimaginable

in service of a life worth living.

Like Flies to a Haggis

I have always been writing poems. As a child I wrote long, rhyming ballads; wretched tales of loss and hardship. Birthdays, Thanksgivings, Chanukahs have long been commemorated in verse, read aloud to my captive audiences. For twenty years in my corporate career, I have regaled my teams with annual poems to capture and celebrate the year’s achievements. I like to rhyme. So when my brother-in-law asked me to prepare a Toast to the Laddies at this year’s Burns Supper, a celebration of the great Scottish bard, I took to the task like flies to a haggis. Enjoy.

56 Ways To Say I Love Me

Today is a big day. Today my words have been published in a print anthology, Storytellers’ True Stories About Love, Volume 2. It’s been exciting to see my stories and poems published in online literary journals and blogs but there is something special about a book that you can put your hands on, pages you can turn, ink you can smell. I’m thrilled that my story, which is about self-love and the wonderful new life I have built for myself, was chosen for Chapter One. And there are dozens of other wonderful stories about love included in the volume so buy one for yourself and everyone you love. And thank you all, my beloved readers, for joining me on this journey.

I’m Not Retiring

Three years, seven months and twenty-six days ago, I began a cascade of life-altering decisions.  It took many years of advances and retreats, of minor victories and major failures, of fears and tears and therapy before I developed the courage and commitment to walk out of the home I shared with my longtime husband.  From that moment on, I have chosen to build my life anew, filling it with things that bring me joy, that help me grow, that make me a better person for the people I cherish.

And now it’s time for another leap.  I’ve been fortunate to have a fulfilling and rewarding career as an attorney.  But after working in similar roles for nearly thirty years, my learning curve has flattened, as has my joy.  I hunger for new challenges, new sights, sounds and tastes.  I’m ready to grow again.  And so I have said goodbye to my employer of fourteen years and have closed the book on my legal career.  I am now a retiree.

Some call me impulsive, and I can’t argue with them.  Patience is not my virtue and once an idea strikes me, I move quickly.  But as the sole owner of this life, I’m the only one that will bear the consequences of my decisions.  While I could, theoretically, find myself bored or lonely, I’m willing to take that risk.  Somehow, as I’m sitting in a Parisian café writing my debut novel, I doubt that I will pine for my days as a Chief Compliance Officer. 

I’m not retiring.  I am aspiring. 

Wildflowers

For my mother

“You’re not a rose,” her mother said,

the words a thorn that pricked the skin,

leaving a tattoo that would not fade

not pretty

not beautiful

not worthy of being cherished

She wore that tattoo all her life,

Rebutting it with love and bubbles,

excitement and adventure,

strength and resilience

And yet, her mother was right

She is not a rose

with its predictable uniformity

its stoic, linear stem

its thorny dangers

She is not something to be placed in a vase

and admired for a few short days

only to be discarded

No, she is a field of wild flowers

Her roots deep and wide

to endure long winters

Her stems meander

going where the sun leads

face turned always to meet it

She blooms in many colors and shapes

Pushing through soil season after season

Rewarding all who pass

with her brightness and joy

filling bouquets of love

that children pick for their mothers

Feed me!

So, what do you think? If my writing made you think or feel something, I’d love to hear about it. What sang to you? What made you cringe? What do you want to hear more of? Less of? My writing is fueled by feedback, so give it to me!

Note: Click on “Feed me!” above to reveal comment box.