Inheritance by Siri Live Myhrom ("Life is hard.")

Inheritance:A Poem

by Siri Live Myhrom

My mother had a mantra

that connected dots through every year,
every difficult event:
            Life is hard.

It was always said gently and meant tenderly, often preceded by Uff-da
or whispered as a quiet descant
with the bruised and urgent love of a mother
as she held me:
            Oh, honey. Life is hard. Oh, honey.
For 37 years, it was the sympathetic balm applied
            to scraped knees and mean words
            failed attempts and broken hearts
            bad colds and depressive breakdowns.
Any pain was wrapped up in her arms
and the immutable fact
of the enduring un-easy-ness
of our days.
And she knew something of how hard it could be,
my Midwestern mother, born on a prairie farm,
broken by polio at eight,
paralyzed for a year, taught herself to walk again
by holding on to the bed mattress or her mother’s coaxing hands.
But her body was never whole again,
always faltering and bent, always tired, always aflame
with relentless twisting pain.
Yes, she knew it: Life is hard.
            hard like a kick from a milking cow,
            hard like hauled wood and cast iron stoves
            and cold pine floors and stillborn baby siblings you never knew,
            hard like the unwanted hands of your oldest brother on you,
            hard like January ground that the dark wind pounds down.
Life is hard.

I felt the inheritance of that fierce story
passed down to me like a burning coal —
the kind that can soothe the ache of winter nights
if placed in the right container
but that will take the flesh right off you if you hold it.
I saw this:
that while we cannot rip away the verses
that burn in the palms of others,
once they are handed to us and become our inheritance,
we are given some holy choices:
        embrace and recite
        revise and restore
        toss into the flame
        take up a blank page and create new.
When I hold my daughters and sing this new song,
            Does life feel hard right now? Sweet girl,
            I’m so sorry it feels hard right now —

and we talk later of what beauty can rise
from that rough and nourished ground —
I sense a harmony with my mother’s refrain that hangs
like sweet strung music in the background:
            the hard places make a good foundation
            for rest
            for rebuilding
            for steadying yourself again,
            for dancing
            for practicing over and over
            the patient strides and daring loops of staying upright
            while in uncertain motion.
            All winter long, no matter how ferocious the cold,
            the roots are cradled: frozen darkness, too,
            can be a still, quiet kind of love.
And I know this intensely —
when I hold my girls and the moment of their earnest pain,
their small hot hands clinging to me,
remembering and blessing my mother,
I can do what she did so well:
I can make myself a soft place for them
in this hard, beautiful world.