This is for my grandparents.
A dedication and a recommitment to myself.
I started this Substack with the goal of coaxing myself out of my weird-shyness about my writing. It started off OK, but when my Babcia died, the dashboard and the notifications and the press of time to move forward felt abrasive against my grief. My preplanned posts and editorial calendar felt crass, so I stopped posting, hoping it would get easier again with time.
Two weeks ago, just four months after my Babcia passed, my Dziadek (grandfather) died. This time, I did not make it back in time to say goodbye to him in person. I did pack up my bags and my two boys, six and nine years old, and we made the trip to Warsaw for the funeral.
Before he died I had sent query letters out to a few more agents, but once in Poland I did not check my email with the same sense of urgency. There was a new hopelessness; I would never get to share the good news with them even if I did find an agent or a publisher. I wished I had tried harder to get it out in time, I wished they could have held the book, seen a dedication made out to them in print. I wished I could have won an award and thanked them in Polish for believing in me and seen their happy tears on FaceTime.
But the truth is they didn’t know or care about that stuff: the agents, the publishing deal, the actual book itself. The important thing to them was that I had written a book. I told the story of our family. And they were already so unreasonably proud, even of this Substack. They told their friends that I was writing for an important newspaper in AMERICA called SUBSTACK (they pronounced it Soob Stack). They bragged that I had a weekly column that was all mine called THE PATRIARCHY POLKA. It didn’t matter when I told them it was just a blog, that anyone could publish anything on here. They sent links to the articles I wrote to people in emails. It was as real to them as the rest of the internet.
When my Babcia died I sent the essay I wrote about her to my family. With my mom’s help I translated it into Polish, and she printed it out for my Dziadek. On the phone he wept and told me that he read it every morning and every night, like a prayer. “Such a gift you have.” he told me. “Such talent.”
I laughed, I thanked him, I told him I loved him and I said goodbye.
I see now how I didn’t let the bigness of that compliment really sink in. How instead, I let a few rejections overshadow one of the most meaningful endorsements of my work I have ever heard.
My Babcia and Dziadek loved me “nadzycie” which means more than life itself. My art and photographs are all over their apartment. Sharing the walls with posters of paintings by Picasso and Matisse and old Polish paintings of horses and farms and the city. I belonged up there with them and they were proud my work framed and spotlit along with the others.
In honor of my grandparents, I am going to recommit to this space and to myself, to my “important column on the internet that is all mine”. They believed it was great and that I was talented and I’ll need to learn how to believe that now too.
Special thanks to Ann Friedman from the Midwives of Invention for giving me just the actionable feedback I needed to press publish on this and dig back into my query letter. You can sign up for a 1 on 1 with her too for a limited time at https://www.midwivesofinvention.com/retreatsandworkshops