All The Books on the Table

All the Books on the Table, Laverne Zabielski

I had a friend, an intellectual, highly feminist, well read friend. We went to writer’s conferences and feminist theory workshops. Gloria Steinem showed up at one event. Virginia Wolf was discussed and I thought I had arrived. All that searching for the deep down conversation. My friend had bookshelves filled with books, and there were books on the table and more on her fireplace mantle.

I arranged them in a pile. Like a sculpture according to title, as though each title was a line in a poem, and after the pile was complete, the poem was revealed. 

She was an icon of the academic institution. I thought she was the smartest woman I ever met, and probably was. Yet as the friendship developed, even turned to an element of love, she began  to reveal the emotional wreck that she was. Hysterical and impossible to deal with. Came from money, spent her inheritance, and spoke about the values of women and, yet, was clueless to the real work of mothers.  

It became a pattern. 

Some of the most passionate women for women’s rights had very little understanding of what it was to truly live the mother’s life.  All  the books on the table remained.

I cared less and less about  rhetorical intelligence and became more interested in the kitchen table. Coffee talk, when husbands went off to work, and women gathered their buggies and strollers, walked the neighborhood streets, ending up at another mother’s kitchen table. Small talk they called it. Was it? 

We were devoted. The books, nonetheless, all of them still became and become a draw. A habit I must break.  I must stop buying books. I think that if I buy them their contents will seep in if I lay them upon my chest and inhale.

I am pursuing my own books. My latest, the most beautiful. The crafting and placement, arranging words on the page, choosing the font, the size, when to use italics has become the new home decorating, the art by design. And while this book is for mothers dealing with addiction of children, so much of it applies to the letting go aspect of parenting. Letting go of the dream for our children, which is not their dream. 

My book will become part of all those books on the table. I will put it on top because of its beautiful cover. I will hold it in my hands when I want to remember.

Question: What are your thoughts on the hierarchy of intelligence I’m trying to express?