What gets to me the most is the In Memorial displays propped on three easels by the front door as I enter the ballroom. Matted individual photographs from my high school yearbook show that 42 of us have died and too many have died young.

I’m at a high school reunion tonight, decades after having parted company with every single person in this room. No one in my life now was in my life then, although this room is full of people with whom I entered first grade. The first boy to kiss me is supposedly here tonight. We were 14. I required coaching from my best friend to get him to make his move. I scan the room and see a tall, lanky figure holding a beer.

Who put the moves on whom, Billy O’Brien?

And my senior year boyfriend is here as well. Traveled all the way from Brooklyn for this event. He is funny, kind and has grown even more handsome. His presence is a gift, and he brings a gift: flowers.

Our committee chairman opens the reunion with a prayer as we are milling around, and this feels a bit uncomfortable. I comply instinctively as the good-girl, rule-abider I was, then remember that’s not so much me anymore and look up over a sea of bowed heads to catch the eye of others who feel self-conscious opening this secular event with a religious ritual.

Over the decades since we have seen each other we have all changed in more than just looks. In this case, our reunion organizer has adopted the happy confidence of a late-night comedienne and the instructional skills of a kindergarten teacher. She makes us practice raising one hand while simultaneously covering our mouths with the other upon a signal that she is going to speak. It’s like we’re learning a trick and there’s going to be a prize until we figure out it’s crowd control and the rebellious teens we are at heart, start talking over her microphone. “You’ve got detention,” I say to the classmate next to me. “You’re suspended,” she says in return.

This reunion is a chance for a new perspective on the past. We were hormonal, insecure, and so angsty, it was hard to be present in high school. I want the opportunity to pay attention. To meet people I used to know for the first time. To see how everyone’s lives have turned out.

But I do exactly what I did in high school!!! I hang out selectively with those I know best!  Is it possible we haven’t changed at all?

On the memorial easels there is a photo of my best friend. She was academically brilliant and a gifted musician. After college, she married an eccentric guy who made his living selling Kirby vacuum cleaners but who annually piloted a small plane to their family reunions in the Midwest. On the way back from a gathering in which she had not flown with him, the plane went down over the Great Lakes. His body was never found, leaving Diane in a no man’s land of unprovable widowhood with two small kids.

I was giving a craft talk one evening perhaps 20 years ago to a bunch of writers—it had been publicized in the newspaper–when I looked up and saw Diane sitting unobtrusively in the back row. Afterwards, I went out into the hall to find her, and she told me she was dying. Cancer. I think she would have slipped out without speaking had I not stopped her, and I understand why. My immediate impulse was to hold open a door she had come to quietly close.

Margie Milligan’s photo smiles from the easel as well, sweet, with kind eyes, forever 17. She contracted mononucleosis our senior year. I’d had it, several of us had. But Margie suffered the rare complication of a ruptured spleen and died. I was the recipient of a scholarship created in her name though Margie had been a quiet girl I barely knew. I hadn’t even realized until this moment how utterly beautiful she had been. There are so many other classmates pictured on these displays tonight. They are all beautiful.

It’s autumn in Maryland. The wild crab apple trees are wearing ruby-orange bittersweet in their boughs. The ballroom doors are open and a waxing moon, two days from full, is on the rise over the water. After several hours of visiting the past, dinner on a paper plate, and a dance, I’m ready to leave.

I tell Diane’s photo that I love her, and that I hope she is here somehow. And I tell Margie Milligan I’m sorry she was deprived of a future, and I thank her for abetting mine. I tell her how lovely she is and that I wish I had known her.

Would you live forever if you could? Genetic engineers are researching the possibility that aging might be treatable, like an illness. Through tweaks to the immune system and DNA repair mechanisms, we might someday enjoy perpetual youth.

I’m studying the photos on these easels and suddenly the idea of living forever feels as wrong as being gone too soon.  Why is that? If I were sick, I’d want to be well and if I were dying, I’d want many, many more years. But would I want forever? Would you?    

I think I’d be disappointed if death could be exchanged for an eternity here. More of same, while in many ways appealing, would be to relinquish knowing what else there is, what’s on the other side of now. Walking to my car under the mercy of the moon, I know I don’t want to be held back. I’d rather graduate into the mystery of what’s to come.

And to believe this will not be our last reunion

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

One of my older sisters and I look a great deal alike. When we were little, our mother sometimes dressed us in matching outfits– plaid dresses and coordinated playsuits– as if we’d be more appealing as twins. But the similarities are superficial. My mantras tend to be, “close enough,” “good enough,” and “who will know?” My sister is a perfectionist, saves everything, and is flawlessly organized. 

I was visiting this sister on her Charlottesville farm when I opened a storage closet and discovered the entire set of plastic horses she received for Christmas when we were 4 and 9. The shiny black stallion reared on his molded back legs, his little chain reins still attached. The creamy palomino still wore his tiny saddle, perfectly intact. And I thought,

This is just wrong. So wrong.

I always return from these visits equally inspired to organize my closets and demoralized because I just don’t care enough to keep them that way past Wednesday. And my childhood toys—Scottie Dog, my Ginny doll—disappeared years ago. I swear they were stolen. I suspect it was an organized crime.  I had a bride doll for a long, long time, (yes, a bride doll), and I was proud of that fact, but then I found a box turtle, put him in her case and ruined that real estate. 

I asked my sister about her need to hang onto things so long that their value is primarily their longevity. She said, “I think I’m afraid that what we have today is all we’ll ever have—that we have to make what we have last forever.” Which is interesting because it actually means her perfectionism and thriftiness, which I both judge and greatly admire, are sourced in fear. 

As she aged, our mother also thought odd things were nonrenewable resources: like vision. She thought she was going to “use up” her eyes if she watched television. She thought she would run out of sight, the way you might run out of gas. As her sight dimmed, she viewed what remained like a Honda with 200,000 miles on it. Just keep that thing in the garage. Emergency use only!

I told her repeatedly that vision is like your heart—the more you use it the stronger it gets. I claimed to be quoting her doctor. I used his name and spoke with an authority I didn’t have, and she didn’t believe. I would have done anything to have lifted the weight of her perpetual anxiety. 

I look out across the wildflower fields of my sister’s farm to the immaculate stables on the rise above the lake. “You own real horses now. You ride your black stallion and creamy palomino every day.” 

Back at home in my old stucco four-square, I feel lazy as I stuff a drawer closed on my sweaters without properly folding, buy a new blender rather than searching out a 10-year warranty and ordering parts. 

I’m only marginally invested in saving possessions because I have a feeling the things around us are as insubstantial as stage props, no more real than the façade of Main Street in a Western film. What appears as mass, is in reality, only energy. In the blink of an eye, all that you own, all you protect, all that looks real, could be gone. Will be gone. Nothing lasts no matter what you do. 

Except this: Children well loved, will go on to love well.  People you cared for, will care deeply for others. Those you made laugh will pass on that joy, long after this world has forgotten your name. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

  

 

When I was a young Navy wife, living alone in Norfolk while my new husband’s ship deployed to the Med, I got to know Jim and Helen who lived in the white rancher across the street, bordered by an urban landscape of pink crepe myrtles. A middle-aged man in the Merchant Marines, Jim was a practical, down-to-earth guy, with tattoos I couldn’t decipher and one fading blue mermaid on his right forearm. You would have thought we had nothing in common but our St. Dennis Avenue address, but our interests overlapped in two other places. Jim loved butter brickle ice cream and he had lived a past life. 

Jim was serving on a ship that had docked in the Scottish port of Aberdeen when he went ashore with three shipmates in search of some Brewdogs and steak. Walking up a hill into town, Jim said, he suddenly knew he had been there before, that although he’d never been to Scotland in this life, he had lived in the village they were approaching. He could describe exactly what he would find on the other side of the rise– the stone walls, the old priory, the ancient clustering of cottages and the exact layout of the town. 

Ours was a brief intersection of lives, but I moved from Norfolk at the age of 23, newly aware that people who appear nothing like you, can be very much like you. Can wonder the same things. Fear and long for the same things. Be intrigued by the same mysteries. 

While living in Virginia I also became aware of renown psychiatrist Dr. Ian Stevenson, who spent his 50-year career at the University of Virginia School of Medicine compiling data on the phenomenon of reincarnation. Duke University’s Rhine Research Center has been researching this and other paranormal phenomenon for decades as well, as have other major universities around the country. 

Years after moving back to Maryland, decades after knowing Jim, I became curious about the phenomenon as a possible tool for personal growth. Could any of my emotional conundrums, particularly the intractable ones, be rooted in an unremembered past?  I doubted I could be hypnotized, and even more so that I’d access a past life, but I made an appointment with a highly trained hypnotherapist in Baltimore and to my surprise, something actually happened that day.

As I lay on the leather couch, responding to the therapist’s prompts, I was suddenly standing outside the walls of an early 17th or 18th century fort with a stockade fence enclosing it. I didn’t look a thing like I look now except that I was a woman in that life as well.

I had been standing alone since dawn, searching the entrance to the dark woods encircling the fort, waiting for the return of someone important to me. I waited all day and as night fell, I surrendered my search and re-entered the safety of the enclosure. There I continued to wait for days, weeks, months, and years. 

I had a vague memory of raising two little girls on my own inside that fort and finally, as I died in that life, lying on a pallet as the two little girls, now my grown daughters, tended to me, I was overwhelmed by the knowledge that I had wasted that life in its entirety waiting for something that was never going to happen, for something outside myself to change my circumstances, to make me happy again. 

The grief of that revelation—that I had wasted a lifetime waiting— was stunning, abrupt, like a physical blow. It was as if a freight train that had been on silent approach for centuries had blasted right through me. Later, as I wondered about the whole experience, I thought that yes, I could have just imagined that story, maybe conflated the plot of a movie or book, but nothing explained the gut-wrenching grief.  

Reincarnation is a normalized, assumed reality in three-quarters of the world’s cultures, but it has been a controversial topic in the US where we frown on the concept of getting  do–overs. We’re pretty strict about that along with our Judeo-Christian work ethic. Do your best and do it now because this life is a one-and-done. It’s a practical paradigm that covers all the bases. But.

Maybe it’s different for each of us. Maybe it’s a choice. Is one lifetime enough for you? 

I remember the awe of holding three perfect babies in my arms. Of being taught early on that nature is a prayer made manifest. Witness the white dogwood and redbud in the spring, blooming like raspberries and cream along the roadside. The heron descending over the cove as gently as light. Life is a reckoning of riches.

 Reverence reigns.

I look out my window at the orange maples ablaze against a thin clear twilight. Jupiter is ascending in the east and will shine brighter than all the other stars in the sky until a new day breaks. But right now, I hope I am granted the wish I wish tonight. 

That we do live more than once. 

Not because regret, and I have many, calls for a do-over.

But because the glory of all that has been good in my life, makes me want to do it all over again. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

 

If the house catches fire, I’ll knot my twisted bedsheets together and scramble to safety from an upstairs window. Plan B? Jump to the mulberry tree after rallying the family for evacuation. If the pilot has a heart attack… if the brakes on the car fail…you get the idea. From the time I was in elementary school I have strategized the means by which I will save my family if disaster strikes. Tidal waves, earthquakes, collapsing bridges—there’s a plan.

In novels and short stories, it’s called “saving the cat”—the moment when the protagonist–who may have some pretty overt failings, redeems himself by running back into the burning building to rescue the cat. But when I was 8, I learned you can’t plan for these events. You have to already be a hero, and if that’s what you’re made of the moment finds you.

Summer was stir-fry hot. My older sister, her pretty friend Patty, some neighborhood boys, and I were crabbing off the end of our pier while our collie, Beau, kept an eye on us. Normally, we combed the seaweed for doublers within wading distance of shore or searched for unwary crustaceans clinging delicately to the pier pilings. But this time we’d procured chicken necks and that’s where the trouble began.

The smell of creosote baking in the midsummer sun, the saltwater breeze off the river, dragonflies flitting about in the beachgrass, all conspired to create what could have been a typical July afternoon. There were more kids than crab nets so there was the usual jostling at the end of the pier as we tied thick twine around each boney crook of chicken, securing the other end to a piling with an untoward number of knots before tossing the bait in the water. I’m not sure, but I may have been vain about my knot tying. I may have thought they were exceptionally tricky or tight. Someone, my father or perhaps a Girl Scout leader, had taught me to tie a slipknot, a bowline, a half hitch and a square knot.

Ernie, or more likely, Reese, peered over the end of the dock where we had several lines dangling and yelled, “Doubler! Give me the net!” We clustered shoulder to shoulder as he began gently tugging the string, inch by slow inch, towards the surface. The crabs, which had begun the ascent as mere murky outlines, were now crystal clear just inches below our own rippling reflections. A 10-inch hard shell with a softy attached. With one quick scoop of the net and a flip of the wrist, Reese had the pair scrabbling in our rusty bucket. The chicken neck lay on the splintery dock, a boney hook on a homemade line.

In that split second, before anyone could stop him, the enterprising Beau lunged between our legs and swallowed the chicken neck whole, the string still secured to the piling. Six kids shrieked with excitement at the new development as the dog began to take huge, panicked gulps of the string, in an attempt to finish it off now that the chicken was stuck in his gullet. We desperately tried to unknot the twine as the distressed dog retched but the string had gotten wet, then dried in the sun. That chicken neck might as well have been soldered to the piling.

As we realized we couldn’t pull the chicken out, and no one had a knife, what had been exciting, was fast becoming an emergency.

Suddenly, the resourceful Patty fell to her knees, grabbed the string as close to the dog’s mouth as she could get, and started to chew. Time slowed as the dog gagged, Patty chomped away, and the rest of us stared, silenced by the gross ingenuity of this development. The sun beat down, the dragonflies danced for their lives with only a few months to live, and after an intense minute the string gave way. The dog polished off the last couple of inches with a happy bark, and we erupted in a rousing cheer.

It has taken me years not to live as a strategist. To cross the Bay Bridge admiring the sparkling shimmer beneath the span-shadows, instead of wondering how long I can float on my back when the guardrail gives way.

I don’t know if this daydreaming was a hope for attention or a childish savior complex. Or perhaps it was where the mind of a child goes who, for good reason, has learned she has absolutely no control over what happens to her. Who has learned that fear is a required course in childhood, but fun is an elective. Who has learned to prepare for the worst because no one’s coming. But for all my preparation, research shows heroes don’t stop to plan or to reason. They act instantaneously and intuitively on an innate urge to serve. The good they do is instinctive.

I hope if the moment ever presents itself, I save the cat. Or the dog. Or someone’s baby, or an old man with a cane. I want to cure Juvenile Diabetes, to end addictions of every kind. To feed the starving on a global scale, foster abandoned children, bring laughter to the sad of heart.

But I think most of us don’t get the opportunity to save the cat. Instead, we have to live with the cat. Long days and unremarkable years of loving in the most ordinary of ways, steadfast and unacknowledged. Commuting insane hours on the beltway to provide for a family, rising repeatedly on sleepless nights to soothe fevers, and one day, reminding the parent who named us, of our name.

If you were loved this way, by anyone, may you be inspired to love this way in kind. That will make heroes of all of us.
*****

The third time my carry-on suitcase didn’t quite make it over the lip of the overhead luggage compartment and slammed down on my head, I blinked back tears. I had already been enroute 14 hours, rising at dawn on the east coast to make a flight from Dulles to LAX, where I’d waited out a seven-hour layover on a plastic chair by the gate before boarding this flight, which would be another 13 hours over the Pacific to Auckland, New Zealand.  I no longer had the strength to hoist the bag over my head and was quickly losing my grip on not being a crazy person, the kind who sees no reason to put her shoes back on after clearing Security, or once, and I actually did this, hisses, “Get out of my way!” at a startled woman changing direction innocently but abruptly in front of me on a crowded concourse.     

Passengers already seated watched me struggle with placid disinterest. I was getting hot and the line behind me was beginning to bulge when a handsome bald man in Ray-Bans reached around from behind me, lifted the suitcase as if it weighed nothing and deftly tucked it in the bin.  “I was going to cry,” I told him, but what I meant was, “Will you marry me?”

 “I could tell,” he said, and was gone.

People you meet while traveling are assigned to you by fate, like neighbors, but travel is a transient neighborhood which makes for fast alliances, quick disclosures. And unlike neighbors, those sharing your journey are willing to help not because of any chemistry, history, or potential payoff, but because it’s the right thing to do. 

Like the time I flew to Bermuda because my midshipman fiancé was crewing on a Swan 44 in the Newport- Bermuda Race. Unfortunately, I landed while the fleet was still 100 miles offshore and the guesthouse where I’d be staying didn’t acknowledge my reservation. I was young. I’d paid in advance with cash at a shady travel agency in Norfolk. There were no vacancies anywhere.  

The gentle guesthouse reservations clerk took pity on me. After making a call, he put me in a taxi and sent it to his “friend’s” house. The friend was a tall, inexplicably generous Bermudian who happened to hold the position of Running Back for the New York Giants. This world-class athlete owned a beautiful cliff-side home he often made available to team members. I explained my predicament as the taxi idled and he said I was welcomed to stay at his house—no need to compensate him. He’d bunk with his girlfriend in town. Looking back, I am still stunned by the magnitude of this man’s generosity. I remember being grateful, but was I grateful enough?  

My fiancé’s yacht, Shadow, crossed the finish later that afternoon. We celebrated on the grassy lawn of the Royal Bermudian Yacht Club where tan yachtsmen sported shorts and knee socks, bejeweled women wore floral dresses the color of coral and the sea at noon.  We spent a week in a beautiful residence where 122 wooden steps led down to a private beach.

Then there was the time I flew to Madrid in order to avoid spending my first married Christmas alone. My new husband had been deployed six weeks after we were married for the better part of a year and although the destroyer escort on which he served as Damage Control Officer was docking in Barcelona, he’d arranged to meet me in Madrid when my plane landed. 

But he wasn’t there. And neither was the luggage in which I’d brought all the Christmas gifts from our families at home. In fact, the ship itself was missing. No one could tell me why the USS Pharris hadn’t docked because in reality, the ship had been delayed 72 hours by a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game with a Russian sub. 

I hadn’t thought to make a backup plan, but a young Spaniard, with rumpled dark hair and a winsome smile, overheard my predicament. In short order he had me on the next flight to Barcelona with him, without my luggage, yet when I arrived my suitcase was sitting there waiting. Having gone through Customs without me it had been pried open and searched. Christmas wrapping and ribbon protruded in colorful abandon from the broken locks, but to my astonishment, everything was intact.  I turned around to show my Spanish friend this miracle, but he was gone.

I’ve been told the universe always offers assistance in times of change (which I interpret as times of stress), and travel certainly qualifies. These are the people with whom you have the briefest encounters but remember for the longest time. 

I never saw the man in Ray-Bans, the compassionate reservations clerk, the Running Back, or the empathetic Spaniard again, and the sense that I was too young and self-absorbed to take in the magnitude of their kindness weighs on me. Surely, I thanked them; please God, let me have thanked them, instinctively, wholeheartedly, but why don’t I remember expressing my appreciation? It makes me want to do so now.

But not just to them.

The driver who let me merge, the roommate who let me borrow her car, the stylist who fixed the haircut I gave myself, the stranger who got the lug nuts off so I could fix a flat tire—there are so many people traveling together for a brief time. Who’s sitting next to you? 

 I remember what I received, what I felt, but not what I gave in return, and this haunts me. 

 So, I can only tell you, how very grateful I was and how grateful I am, now and forever. 

 And offer help to every lost and weary pilgrim whose path crosses mine.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

This is a piece about the insecure souls most writers possess. I said “most” but I mean me. And by writers, I mean you.

When I publish a piece readers respond to? I get an inch and a half taller and shinier hair. I become present, compassionate. But if I publish a story to silence? I’m personally worthless. Changing careers.

The brain, bless its heart, has a proven negative bias. Let me tell you a story.

If I tell you something delightful about a neighbor you haven’t met and one negative thing, you’ll believe the negative thing. If you hear 9 compliments about yourself and one complaint, you’ll stew on and believe the complaint. You will pick an angry face out of a happy crowd, faster than you’ll pick a happy face out of an angry crowd.

So knowing this, I’m careful when I discuss a writer’s work but I’ve found they (and by “they” I mean “we”) are all the same.

I’ll say, “Bob, your novel is complex, intriguing. I love the voice and plot! Add just a bit more tension to the opening and we’ll start looking for an agent.” As Bob walks away, I’ll hear him murmur into his phone, “Might as well trash it. No tension.”

What is that selective negativity?

When I was a girl, the single most horrifying breach of social protocol was to be labelled conceited. This was a very girl-specific felony. Boys were never accused of such a crime.
A classmate could have flirted with your boyfriend, cheated on the math test but wait! Was she conceited?

Full of herself? Steer clear.

That need for humility was primarily fueled by fear. At ground level, no one can take me down a peg, knock me from a high horse. And anyone who has ever experienced that kind of shame will do virtually anything to avoid it.

We were on a 7th grade class trip to NYC—on a coach-type bus—not the big yellow boxes with worn-out shock absorbers we rode to school, but a silver behemoth with huge windows and hissing airbrakes.

I was so happy, so excited to be on this adventure with my classmates. We were chatting away, laughing, full of good cheer. I may have even felt pretty that day with a plaid skirt, red sweater, a highly organized purse. I know I was high on the electric intimacy of middle school friendship and telling a funny story when a chaperone in the front of the bus lost it.

She had probably been gritting her teeth for 100 miles, teetering on the edge of tolerance enduring the cacophony of this rambunctious, joyous bunch of 13-year-olds, when somewhere just over the New Jersey state line, she twisted about in her seat and roared, “Shut UP! SHUT THE HELL UP!” And then, to demonstrate that her wrath was justified, she looked over the seats, zeroed in on me, and proclaimed, “You! I can hear your big mouth all the way up here.”

I was horrified. It wasn’t just that she’d singled me out—I was only 4 rows from the front and one of the few kids making eye contact with her—it was the word “hell.” It was the phrase, “big mouth.” Her outburst was aggressively personal, and worse, just slightly base. I was as shocked by the lack of manners as by the accusation.

I had never seen one of my parents, or any adult, be rude in public. It just wasn’t done. And in that instant, I intuited a class distinction. Although it’s a judgment I would not make now, in a moment of genuine conceit, I felt socially superior to the woman shaming me and for that I am sorry.

So, I’m wondering whether you, and by you, I mean you, have any of these pocket-shames tucked away.

If you don’t empty your pockets, you’ll carry this energy your whole life. It will fuel your response to things completely unrelated. “Might as well trash it. Why’d a big mouth like me think he could write a novel?”

The surefire remedy to pain is story. So, I tell myself one. That chaperone was exhausted. She had taken a day off work without pay because not enough of the well-off, stay-at-home mothers had volunteered. By New Jersey she had a splitting headache fueled by seething resentment.

And once, though she doesn’t remember this, she was a beautiful little girl feeling exuberantly happy—high on a moment of loving camaraderie with her friends—and someone had made it a point to bring her down to size.

All she knows now is that she boarded that big silver bus with the best of intentions and in the silence of the ruined ride, she pokes her glasses back up on her face feeling justified and confused. Deeply self-conscious and not quite done.

I see her not from the eyes of an embarrassed adolescent but through the eyes of a mother who has yelled at kids, too. Totally, indelibly, regrettably lost it. And across time, I want to tell her it’s okay, I want to tender memory with mercy. She was doing the best she could. As am I. As are you.

As I recount that story, I feel taller with shinier hair. Present and compassionate.

I feel full of myself.

And finally, finally, finally, that’s a good thing to be.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.

The distinction between writing, which is therapeutic, and actual therapy is often thin, but I try to stay in my lane. I’ve lived with therapists, coached therapists and (good news, readers!), had a lot of therapy, but I’m an editor—the analogy being that although I’ve seen the ads for Hair Cuttery I’m not qualified to trim your bangs.

Of the many excellent reasons I’m not a therapist is the requirement to keep a secret. This is also why the new rule my sisters have put in place is requiring discipline. We zoom every week and often talk about our families. I used to pass on updates among cousins, children, aunts, uncles—as gifts, really. Stories are the currency of our intimacy, and we exchange them in kind. None of us is interesting enough to be the whole story. We need other characters, sidebars. A few mistakes, tragedies, and romances not our own 

My extended family doesn’t see each other often so my impulse has only been to connect the outliers. But it’s come to our attention in sister-zoom that this is a slippery slope to betraying a confidence, so now there is a new rule to keep from misunderstandings. If any one of us is sharing something that has to remain in zoom-room, we have to identify it like the security access zone around a nuclear power plant, smack a Top-Secret label on it.

Of course, we’ll all honor the agreement but at a cost. Science proves secret-keeping rachets your amygdala into overdrive, making you more irritable. The energy of self-censorship compromises the hippocampus as well, due to the release of excessive cortisol. This compromises memory, learning and the immune system. 

Neuroscientist David Eagleman reports that when you have a secret, the part of your brain that wants to tell is in constant conflict with the part of your brain that wants to keep the information hidden. Keeping a secret is spelled s-t-r-e-s-s.

Yet according to Forbes, 97% of us have one or more secrets at any one time and most of us routinely have as many as 13. Some are positive. I look into my best friend’s face and though my lips are zipped my brain is shouting, “I bought you that necklace from Sundance!”

I learned my first secret at the age of five. My father drank. I’d discovered little vodka bottles stashed in the pantry behind 5-pound Domino Sugar bags. I knew from their location the bottles were a secret—and because they were secrets, they were a source of anxiety and shame. I think I’d already imbibed the idea that there is only one sin: unkindness. And to expose someone’s vulnerability by revealing something they wanted to hide was unthinkable. 

And though I now understand that my father was self-medicating and the victim of his body’s chemistry, the weight of this secret bore down with a shame and sadness so great I’m surprised I could walk. I had my own gravitational force field ten times that of the earth’s until the night I finally confessed this knowledge to my mother. 

She was attempting to rock me to sleep but I had a secret. The part that wanted to tell was in a battle to the death with the part that needed not to. And we were both 5 years old.

It seemed to take hours before I could finally whisper, “I know Daddy drinks.” My mother kept on rocking me, and finally said, “Some things are too heavy for little girls to carry. Give this to me. I will carry it for you.”

I don’t think there’s a perfect, one-size-fits-all formula for this conundrum: the need to hold sacred other’s confidences versus the need to be transparent, free of subterfuge. 

I’m looking at an oil painting my mother gave me as a wedding present when I was 22 years old. It is 24 by 26 inches in size, in a gold frame with a linen liner. It is the most creative, intimate, and loving of gifts. It’s of downtown Annapolis from the top of the State House on State Circle looking down Maryland Avenue towards the Naval Academy Chapel where the wedding would take place in a matter of days. It is a painting of the town in which I’d live most of my adult life. Give birth to three children. 

And it is a terrible, terrible painting. The artist was so unskilled that the buildings and street are painted without perspective, no vanishing point—you can’t tell the State House is actually on a hill. Storefronts are flat and angled the wrong way, signs float unattached to the businesses they were meant to detail. One building has been painted in and then erased, leaving a brick-colored smear in the sky.

Brain science says secret-keeping disconnects you from your sense of self, but maybe sometimes your sense of self depends on keeping a secret. My mother was so pleased with her choice. I hope I never gave away how I felt about it. 

I trusted her with my first secret, but I’ll keep this one to the end of time. 

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.