decades

Thus I enter the second decade of this millennium: unceremoniously, sprawled flat on my stomach, sleepy and catlike before the fireplace at my aunt’s house (with errant bits of firewood jabbing irregular pink indentations into the skin beneath my jeans), willfully closing my eyes and ears to the tedious countdown of Carson Daly, surrounded not by friends or music or wine, but by curly-haired children and knitting grandparents and sparkling white juice (because red might stain the carpet).

This is also the year of my third decade, and every conversation I begin with old friends seems to acknowledge this specter bearing down, undecided about how to relate to such an occasion. We scan the pages of popular magazines, more interested in ages than in formalwear. Alexis Bledel is 29? If we’re the same age as Rory Gilmore, all is not lost. But we are not, we conclude, as we expected. Not at all. Even for those who pictured themselves married with children and find themselves acknowledging that this womanhood feels differently than any might have guessed… it feels. Perhaps the internal life of these years could not have been anticipated, nuanced weft to the fabric of reality which for me finds voice better now in Anne Sexton than in Ann Kiemel. So much of that exuberant faith-infused girlishness has been eroded by something wistful that stands on the plain unforgiving ground of questions.

I seek answers to so many questions; I try to chase after them, as if Great Truth might be found in a Viennese pastry shop or a Parisian burlesque, hiding in darkened temples along the Trans-Siberian railway, or even in an admirable Boston charter. There are truths here, yes. Still, many of the answers I long for are slippery ones, stamped softly on my own heart, but which take evasive action when I try to claim them too casually. I still puzzle around, Who or what am I? What and why is my womanhood, if it is not wife and mother? What of my own destiny do I carry along with me in my brain, my memory, my stubborn hair, my small hands, my place before the fire?

I try to read the runes of home videos – giggling five-year old nonsense rhymes with my brother, blocking his access to the trampoline, claiming I only want it for “a hundred more minutes,” and the tall, braided girl who curled up and wiggled loose teeth on her quiet twinkling bearded grandfather’s lap long after her body failed to fit. Petulance, affection, fearlessness. I cringe to watch my eleven-year old self, ashamed as I was at my height and roundness, trying to deflect attention from the hips that filled out hand-me-down stonewashed pleats by perming my bangs, walking carefully, softly. I watch my gentleness, and I read the shame of my sex beneath it. “You were always a lady,” my mother tells me.

A lady, she says, though was I not so often jealous of the solitude and competence that seemed available only to men?

Home videos tell such an uneven tale, patchy ordinary moments pieced into holy peculiarity… the past delivered up as a beautiful foreign film with no subtitles.

My body whispers stories, too. My hands are my mother’s. Though I smooth their planes with shea butter each day, by noon a thousand distinct skin trapezoids peer up at me. I could paint them large, in bright colors and plaster my walls with the perplexing geometry of a personalized mid-century modern. My no-nonsense knuckles, broad on child-sized fingers, make the hands look sturdier and more practical than they are, good for dishes and kneading. I can close my eyes and flash a thousand screens of my mother standing in front of our kitchen sink, speaking words that memory fuses… about pie crust, perhaps, or practicing the piano, or waiting, waiting, having faith that someone special might come along. Yes, I have my mother’s hands, and her fingernails -- round inverted gumdrops, flat on their beds and long, long. I scale their gentle ridges, playing each smooth moon against its cousins. I can close my eyes and trace the graceful lines my mother’s long nails drew down my back as I lay on my stomach in bed so many childhood nights...that calm, blissful moment of connection after the night’s story had closed and before the evening prayer. Delicate strokes from the beautiful nails on her practical mother hand. I am here with you, they said to me.

I do not know what meaning I should make of it all, how these fragments tell me of what is and may be. But I do know this: so often I still find myself with my arms curled beneath me, flat on my stomach in the space between the story and prayer, back exposed, with my mother's fingernails fixed on my own hands now, ready.