I discovered new faint freckles on the back of my hand this morning. I wondered, studying their tint and shape and placement, if they would become like the age spots my grandmother wore, a smattering of paint speckles underneath her beautiful rings and manicured nails. I wondered if they were like delicate visitors from the future, whispering of something to come that I won’t really understand until I reach it.
…
The thing about being a mother is, you both instantly are one and are always becoming one. From the second I knew I was growing Iris, I was given the title of “mother” whether I felt like one or not. And still, there were nine months of preparation and days and days all of these past thirteen years that I have discovered new meanings to the word that was one of her first and all of the ways I must adjust myself to keep becoming.
…
I waited days for my period last month, which is difficult for any woman, hoping to be pregnant or hoping to not be. And I, I’m never late. But as my body has been traversing this new middle-aged ground, I’ve found that some things can no longer be counted on. On the other side of this, I will be a woman too changed to bear children. It is, as clearly as I can put it, after all this time, an identity crisis.
…
When I was a young girl, young enough and old enough to imagine being aged but young enough and old enough that I couldn’t conceive of it happening to me, I admired older women with reverence. It was something about the air of a woman, you see, something that I believed would eventually happen to me, albeit without ruining my porcelain smooth cheek or my taut eyelids. I dreamed of a day where I stood—always on a city street corner, always in a fabulous coat, always in elegant shoes—but that’s it. That I stood. That I was sturdy and secure and knowing.
I would watch the women with this energy, and they were all the way, all over beautiful, even with their laugh lines and sagging bodies. Something about they way their skin and flesh folded made them feel…inhabited. But as I watch the slow progress of my own drooping physicality, I realize how ready I was to be like those ladies I admired, but I hadn’t anticipated this process of becoming.
…
Art is often like motherhood, and what I am trying to tell myself is, I both am, instantly, organically, and, at once, am becoming. To be a writer is to be possessed of an inexplicable desire to write—and observe, record, rearrange, all the things that come with it. I, simply, am that.
Becoming a writer can mean a lot of things. It is growing, stretching, learning. It’s reading, so much reading. It’s learning to trim, sometimes purge, to let go of what feels beautiful in the moment for something even more refined and true.
And because we are humans in societies of industry and community, becoming a writer is also publishing all of this work. Not having published doesn’t make me not a writer, but there is a sense of having so much more to accomplish, so much more to become.
…
There was so much momentum at the end of 2023, and I rode the wave of energy like a person younger than my actual self. We are rarely just the age we are; sometimes we are younger, sometimes we are older. Which is just life: a collection of experiences in certain phases that all bump into each other on one side or the other. I both am 39, and am also becoming 39, until the very second that I turn 40, and then am and am becoming that.
We are already as we are and also are never fully that thing. Some occurrences are inevitabilities, but they can’t be counted on, not in the ways we want them to be. We will agonize over the arrival of something long-awaited or striven for, and once it appears, it is a relief and something grieved all at once. A moment is passed. We know something certainly, where once it was just an idea we imagined. We trade possibility for knowing and it is reassuring but also uncomfortably transformative. Likely, it creates more questions than it answers, and we have to start the search all over again, even though we just found what we thought we were looking for.
I understand: the identity crisis comes for those who keep going, and those elderly women I so admired at the brink of my youth, appeared to me stoic and sure—but only because, they never settled for certainty. They didn’t freeze themselves into place. Every line on their faces was accepting a fact of life, and every sag in their frames was created in pivoting, heading a new direction. You are what you are, but you also are so much more, and you have to keep going to find out, you have to watch your new self take shape.
…
These past few weeks were difficult ones in the process of becoming a writer, filled with silence and rejections and I’m not sure which of those is worse. But I would do myself a disservice if I didn’t give honor to what was becoming, even when it didn’t feel like it.
Our new reading series, Reading Den, launched on Wednesday, to an overwhelming response. The Denver Post picked up our story, and last Sunday, Adam and I were featured on the front page of the Life & Culture section. No doubt, this skyrocketed our expected 20-30 guests to more than 60, and on Wednesday evening, at Fort Greene bar in Globeville, I realized, Colorado writers and readers don’t want to be—don’t have to be—alone. It was really lovely and energizing, and I can’t wait for the next reading at the end of this month (details to be announced soon).
…
Whatever you’re waiting for that you think will make you who you are, just know, you already are that. The beauty of life is just becoming what you are more and more, day by day, hand freckle by sparkling hand freckle.