An off-trail timeline

Dear friends,

Some teenagers go to prom, sleepovers, high school dances, play wild with drinking games, experimental drugs, or exploratory sex. Some do as they’re told, work hard, advance their education and their status. Some work hard in the sun, or in food service, supporting their families, helping them survive. Some live inside apocalyptic cults, preparing for the end of the world, reading the forest the way other children watch television.

For years, I mourned the girl I might have been, had things been otherwise. Sometimes I imagine her laughing, playing, sharing secrets. I wonder who I might have become with a softer beginning.

But there are no mile markers in the forest, and out here, we’re free to arrive late to anything that still calls us, living on an off-trail timeline.

When I was young, I learned the roles of good mother, good wife, good professor, good neighbor, gathering titles and responsibilities around myself like stones, hoping they would make me safe.

My mother was thirty-three when my siblings and I carved the word Mother out of wood and painted it for her birthday, trying to make something solid enough to hold the idea of her.

When I turned thirty-three, I had four children in school, a tenured professorship and a long-term marriage. But I didn’t know who I was. A man I loved gave me a copy of Jitterbug Perfume for my birthday, and inside, he wrote something that made me feel like a woman for the first time.

My twin daughters are now thirty-four.

When I was that age, identity felt like something I had to build so solidly that no one could knock it down.

Now I understand identity as something alive, thriving on invisible forces of growth and change.

I think of myself as a creature growing new antlers each season. They’re tender at first, vulnerable, covered in velvet and blood. Then they harden, and help me clear branches and defend myself as I move through the forest. Eventually I shed them and I begin again, and again, and again.

Aging has given me the ability to trust my animal body and to appreciate my strong legs, my experienced hands, and the weathered skin that has carried children, hunger, grief, pleasure, and decades of becoming.

let’s stay close to what’s alive,
m

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