personal essay — Blog — Tanya Shaffer

On the Occasion Of My Fifty-Seventh Birthday

After Annelyse Gelman, “How to Pray”

It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us – else what use is love at all?

- Oscar Wilde, “An Ideal Husband”

Bless the missteps, the stumbles, the chances lost

Bless the heaviness

The memory of those things brings

Bless friendship abandoned

Love unrequited or forsaken

Opportunity squandered

The gentle Spaniard

With eyes of softest brown

Whose hands you held and lips you kissed

On the Peace March

in Nicaragua, 1990

Then lost at a rally

And never found again

The Dutch friend met in Ghana

Who said if you didn’t write her back this time

She wouldn’t write you again

And why, oh why, did you not?

The number a friend gave you

In your solo performance days

For a major presenter

He was sure would be intrigued by your work

And the prestigious director

who handed you his card

Bless those times you sat by the phone

Those numbers in your hand

Dialed and hung up

And dialed

And hung up again

The Woman Beneath My Skin

The woman beneath my skin is alternately ravenous, elated, grief-stricken, bored.

The woman beneath my skin is sometimes at peace and sometimes dissatisfied with everything, thinking, what else, what else, what else??

She wants company, she wants solitude. She wants to write, she wants to simply be. She is bursting with stories, she has nothing to say.

She is profoundly selfish, she would do anything for her kids. She tries to be kind to everyone, always. Sometimes she fails.

She wants a new relationship. She wants to get back together with her wasband*. She starts conversations with strangers on dating apps, gets excited, loses interest, all within a couple of days, or hours, or minutes.

She determines to invest more in her friendships, then fails to return calls.

Sometimes I get so sick of her.

Never the Less

A few years ago, after reading an article about the impact of climate change on the arctic circle, I had a vision.

A friend had given me a temporary tattoo that read Nevertheless, She Persisted. As I applied it to the smooth skin of my inner arm, I marveled that Mitch McConnell, of all people, in describing his attempt to silence Elizabeth Warren on the Senate floor, had inadvertently handed the feminist movement such a powerful and enduring rallying cry.

I was meditating on my living room couch the next day, my eyes closed and the ink on my arm already beginning to fade, when I saw that same sentence written across the sky in puffy cloud letters, with the first word separated into three parts: NEVER THE LESS. Seeing it broken up like that made me understand it in a new way—not only does she persist, she is in no way lessened by all she’s been forced to endure.

What came to me next was an image of the earth as viewed from outer space, that glistening blue-green-brown ball with white swirls of cloud hovering above it. With it came a deep knowing that the words NEVER THE LESS, SHE PERSISTED referred, not to me or women in general or even humankind, but to Her—the earth Herself. She is the one who persists, who will continue to persist, no matter what we do to Her, or to ourselves, or to Her other, non-human inhabitants. Even if we managed to destroy Her ecosystem for a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand years, that would be barely a breath compared to the five billion years She has left before Her precious sun burns itself out. She’d have plenty of time to get us out of Her (eco)system. She’s uniquely positioned to sustain life, and sustain it She will, with or without our cooperation. Should we go belly up, no doubt other species will make their way in, or evolve their way up, to fill the void.

Off-Leash Writing / Off-Leash Arts