“What if God loves us the way we truly love our children, walking around outside with them and watching them eat cinnamon toast and listening to them talk to imaginary friends on imaginary telephones, and they are becoming and we are becoming with them, because of all this, this life with them, is planted in us and stays in us and it’s what we know of love,” The Used World, Haven Kimmel.
The Used World is the third Haven Kimmel book I’ve read this summer. It started with my friend who is an awesome writer, Elizabeth Massie, telling me about A Girl Named Zippy, Haven’s bestseller of a memoir. I am writing one, just like it seems everybody else is doing. I admitted to Beth one night that I didn’t think anybody would want to read my story. I am not famous, I have not been horribly abused, or overcome an addiction. She said, “Read this book.”
It sent me on a journey of reading Haven Kimmel, a writer of mostly happy childhood memories. Her fiction is very different and goes really, really deep. The quote I started this post with is one I keep in mind every day as I schlepp my daughter to dance camp every day.
She is nine, no longer a baby in my lap, but nonetheless, I am inspired by her and her sister nearly every day. If I allow myself, between packing lunches, getting baths, fighting about the tv, and gameboy, I can see Spirit in them. I hope it never goes away. I hope the world does not leave them bitter and turning away from love.
