TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith and this is The Slowdown. 

Family relationships and connections are…complicated. There are people in my life that I call “cousin” who aren’t related to me at all; they’re the children of my mother’s oldest friends. We grew up together, sharing holidays, birthdays, and other significant events, so they feel like cousins to me. I also have aunts and uncles who are actually distant cousins of my parents, or in some cases, old family friends, no blood relation at all. My blood family is large, but my extended family of unofficial cousins, aunts, and uncles, is even larger. 

As I said, it’s complicated. Add divorce into the mix, and “complicated” feels like such an understatement, it borders on euphemism. Not only do I have an ex-husband, I have ex-in laws. When you marry into a family, you are sort of adopted into that family. When you leave that family, you have to navigate how to continue—or end—those other relationships. 

I know people who are divorced but who are still in touch with their former mothers and fathers in law, or their former brothers or sisters in law. I know divorced couples who still spend holidays together, even with new partners, spouses, children. Everyone, passing the potatoes and casseroles, around one big table! I also know divorced people who are very happy to have made a clean break to have no contact with anyone in their ex’s inner circle. 

As with most parts of life, there is no “right” way. There are many different ways to be a family. And there are many different ways to take care of yourself and your own well being inside of a family. That can be complicated, too.

Today’s poem unpacks some of what happens when families change, because of death or divorce or other upheavals. I admire the way it looks not only at the variables—what must necessarily change—but also at the constants.

Real Estate
by Richard Siken

My mother married a man who divorced her for money. Phyllis, he would say,  If you don’t 
stop buying jewelry,  I will have to divorce you to keep us out of the poorhouse.  When he 
said  this,   she  would   stub  out  a  cigarette,   mutter   Motherfucker   under  her  breath. 
Eventually, he was forced to divorce her. Then, he died.  Then she did.  That man was not 
my father. My father was buried down the road, in a box his other son selected, the ashes 
of his  third wife  in a  brass urn  that  he will  hold  in the  crook  of his arm forever.  At the 
reception,  after the funeral,  I got mean  on four  cups of  Lime Sherbet Punch.  When the 
man who  was not  my father divorced  my mother,  I stopped being related to him.  These 
things  are  complicated,  says  the Talmud.  When  he died,  I couldn’t  prove it,  I couldn’t 
get  a  death  certificate.   These  things  are  complicated,   says  the  Health  Department. 
Their  names  remain  on the  deed to  the house.  It  isn’t haunted,  it’s  owned  by  ghosts. 
When I die,  I will come in  fast and low.  I will stick the landing.  There will be no confusion. 
The dead will make room for me.

“Real Estate" by Richard Siken from I DO KNOW SOME THINGS © 2025 Richard Siken. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Copper Canyon Press.