BY MAGGIE SMITH
I've never been good at math. After nearly failing algebra in high school, I chose to attend a liberal-arts college in part—in large part—because there was no general math requirement.
Even now I’m sometimes criticized for using “bad math”—unrealistic statistics—in the poem I’m most known for, “Good Bones.” In that poem I wrote, “The world is at least fifty percent terrible” and “For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.” For the record, I realize there aren’t an equal number of birds and rocks on this planet. I’m well aware that though the world often feels “at least half terrible,” it’s not a provable percentage.
I’m a poet, not a mathematician. But each time “Good Bones” goes viral, typically after a tragedy, the literalists make their presence known in the comments: “You need to take a math class! These ratios are impossible!”
After the song “Yesterday” was released, did anyone complain to Paul McCartney, “You’re not half the man you used to be! That’s impossible! You’re still a whole person!” I doubt it. Still, feeling less than whole—particularly in one’s grief—is a pervasive metaphor.
When I was newly divorced, trying to make a fresh start for myself and my children, my thinking about my family and my new life was shaped by absence. I looked at us and saw what was missing instead of what was there. After a major loss or upheaval, it’s natural to think in terms of before and after. For me, there’s B.D., Before the Divorce, and A.D., After the Divorce. It’s natural to lay the shape of your new life over the template of your former one, and to see all the contours that don’t line up.
We had been a foursome as a family, so when my—our—children first had overnight visits at their father’s rental house, I thought of myself as the quarter missing. When the three of them were together, they were three-quarters of the family we once were. When the children were with me, we were missing a quarter too. No matter the arrangement, I saw us as asymmetrical and off-kilter. Incomplete.
THE MATH OF DIVORCEis painful: division and subtraction. When my marriage ended, we divided our assets, our furniture, our dishes and pots and pans. We divided our time with the children. We divided our friendships: Who were more his people, and who were more mine? We subtracted, too, again and
