Nov 27, 2019
When My Marriage Ended, I Learned to Relish the Space I Was Given
Being left behind is not a disadvantage. It is an opportunity to grow and an opportunity to live life on my own terms.
Crisis Unicorn. Chicken + bee keeper. Author of a stroke memoir, Tell Me Everything You Don't Remember (Ecco/Harper Collins). Her short fiction and essays have appeared in ZYZZYVA, Guernica, The Rumpus, The New York Times, and BuzzFeed, among other publications. Her novel is forthcoming from Ecco / Harper Collins.
twitter: @xtinehlee
Being left behind is not a disadvantage. It is an opportunity to grow and an opportunity to live life on my own terms.
He prefaces all his beekeeping sessions with a proposal to examine hives without gloves. It teaches a beekeeper to be more gentle. It’s easier to be gentle without gloves.
I was single for the first time in eighteen years. I felt unmoored. For the first time in eighteen years, everything was new, including me.
By farming, I connect back to my own culture. To, pun intended, my roots. To what it means to be a child of immigrants and help things grow.
Bees do not attack—just as trauma survivors do not attack, but rather defend. She will not sting you unless she believes the colony’s life depends on her defense. Because when she stings you, she dies.
Nature is never obedient. It rallies forward. This is the reality on a farm: The bounty comes all at once.
The thing my mom told me to do—“Save twenty percent for yourself. Never give one hundred percent to anyone.”—was not selfish after all. Not when thinking about my own survival.
It is no wonder that I am so in love with my bees. They fight for their lives.
“I know that it is scary to say something. That it is easier to think it is none of your business.”
