letters to whale watching

an excerpt from my work in progress

I’ve been working on my manuscript, Feels Like Home, a sapphic romance/literary fiction story about a woman named Marley, who is very much based on me. The basics are: Marley’s mother passed away and she goes to her hometown to deal with the death admin. Sound familiar? The book is fiction, but it’s essentially half-memoir, narrowly hiding in a novel.

I have channeled my soul, my grief, my heart, and everything I have to give into this book.

And it shows.

It’s still a first draft - and it’s missing about 5,000 words, all of which are planned and plotted and waiting for me. Since I took a break after November ended, I downloaded the manuscript on my Kindle. This is a great hack for editing - the different format makes it so much easier to consume as a reader vs writer. As I started reading, I realized…

I loved it.

I’m working on (hopefully) doing a scene a day, a much slower pace than Novel November, but means the first draft will be completely done by February 1st.

It reads better than any of my other first drafts, and I decided to make an ambitious decision: I’m going to put even more of my heart and soul into this manuscript so that I can query it in April. Wish me luck, and buy me a coffee, because this will be a lot of work. But it’s work I love.

In the meantime, I wanted to share this tender exerpt of a scene I just wrote. It’s based off a journal entry that I found in my mom’s journal: in 2009, she wrote that she wanted to go whale watching. And she mentioned it over and over again.

And she never went whale watching.

This made me incredibly sad, that my mother had this one dream, a big but certainly not unattainable dream, and she never got to do it. I vowed that I will go whale watching in her honor. This moved me so much that I decided to write it in my book, and this is the scene where Marley is on the boat, getting ready to see a whale for her mother. They said write what you know, right?

Be gentle on it, it’s a first draft and a work in progress. But enjoy, in all its imperfection. xoxo

image from Alysia Dahir on Pinterest (isn’t it pretty?)

“How are you feeling?” Rae looked at me with careful eyes, as I had felt her doing ever since we boarded the boat.

On the drive here, I had been so consumed with my gooey, lovey feelings that I almost forgot the reason behind the impromptu road trip. Now, though, sitting on a boat that my mother should have been on, that she had always wanted to be on, that she could never be on, it was settling over me.

It wasn’t even that I necessarily wanted to be on the boat with her. It wasn’t that I missed her.

And also, I did.

I had grown accustomed to this feeling years ago, far before she passed. All my life, especially my adult life, I knew what it was like to miss my mother. And nothing quenched or eased the missing, not keeping my distance, and certainly not spending time with her.

In fact, I think spending time with her made me miss her more.

Maybe it was less missing and more yearning - I have yearned for a mother that I could experience safety with, could be at home with. I yearned for what Rae had with her mom. I didn’t yearn for a perfect mother, because I know those don’t exist. There was no such thing as a perfect family, no such thing as a childhood that left you entirely unwounded.

I just wanted a mother who didn’t keep wounding me over and over again without relenting.

Perhaps it was because she was gone now, because she couldn’t hurt me, because I knew how the story ended now, but I could fully feel the missing without being confused, or guilty, or pretending I didn’t.

For the first time in my life, I didn’t feel the need to pretend that I didn’t want my mom. I didn’t feel the need to pretend that my broken heart ached for her, even though she was the one that kept breaking it.

And, also for the first time, I didn’t feel the intensity of rage, anger, injustice, or the current of need to have my hurt seen by her.

I just felt sad for her.

Because I had my whole life in front of me. I could make decisions about my life and what I wanted. If I wanted to move, I could move. If I wanted a dog, I could adopt one. I had relationships in my life, I knew how to share my heart with others - maybe not well - and I knew that as high as I felt on the cloud of our new love, my relationship with Rae would take work. But it was work that I wanted to do.

I could find a whale watching company that offered excursions in November.

She couldn’t.

She didn’t.

She was often the villain in my story, and validly so. But she was the main character in hers, and her story was heartbreaking. Her story featured an abusive father, an emotionally unstable mother, an unhappy marriage, abandonment, addiction, isolation, untreated mental illness, a daughter that needed distance from her (for good reason, yes, but devastating for her nonetheless), and a deep belief in her bones that she wasn’t capable of doing anything. That she wasn’t worth anything. That she wasn’t worth freedom, joy, experiences, laughter, connections, and help.

No matter how much she hurt me, my story would keep going. I was living a life I was (mostly) happy with. Seeing her whole story, now that it ended, it made me just feel sad for her.

Everyone was quick to tell me that I should forgive my mother (people who didn’t know half of what I was dealing with, might I add), and I wondered if I ever could.

Turns out, I can.

I didn’t say all this to Rae, though. But I would later. For now, I wanted to be present in every moment of this. Every glow of gratitude and every splinter of grief, I wanted to be present for all of it.

So, I just said, “I’m feeling good.”

you might also like…