A Faithful Heart - An expressive writing micro essay

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Photo Credit: Šárka Krňávková on Unsplash


This expressive writing piece was published in "Who Am I Today?" The book is an anthology of 40 women's writing from the Women's Writing Circle, Center for Health and Human Rights, Suffolk University, Boston, Massachusetts. 
 
For more of Áine's published writing and teaching information, visit her author website. 

© Under U.S. copyright laws, it is illegal to copy or re-use this text without the author's permission. 

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A Faithful Heart 

Today I am sitting on the sea wall watching four swans and watching the hours and minutes until it’s time to drive my husband to the hospital for another outpatient surgery.

A new swan glides into view.  Now they are five.

Today will be the fifth hospital trip.

From those other visits I remember silly things, like that Saturday-night ER waiting room where none of us met each other’s eyes. Or that snack machine where the potato chips jammed and that I body slammed to release a food I don’t like.  An office where I did my day job work with the cell phone set on high. When it rang, it was not the surgeon, but someone calling across state lines because, she said, she hated to wait for these things.  

Good waiting makes good hospital.  I really wanted to tell her that. 

Books I’ve read. Pages I’ve written. Grants I've edited. Deadlines I’ve met because it’s amazing what you can do while the machines bleep and your patient sleeps and while you keep busy because, really, nobody wants to deal with a bothersome wife.

New swans have arrived. Now they are nine.  

There’s an old, Irish ballad about two island swans.  It’s that one about how swans mate for life, and—oh, yes—there’s a line about the male swan’s “faithful heart.”  

Sitting here on the sea wall I think: Easy for the bloody swans.

Sitting here on the sea wall I ask: Who the heck gets to define ‘faithful?’

Sitting here on the sea wall I think how, once, I thought I could list the component parts (of a faithful heart).  

As I leave the sea wall, I think how, some days, faithfulness is a to-do list that gets done; this thing and then this next thing, one by one by one.

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