Month One
I step back and realize that I would never be friends with her or be around her if we weren’t related. Too many differences. Too much lack of self awareness. Did she just say someone else was self-centered?! Maybe I feel like she’s a little sexist. Maybe I feel like she’s a lot of the type of person Christians mean when they say “respecter of persons.” I think supercilious is the right word. Maybe I feel like she would never speak to me if we didn’t have all these years. Would never think about me or wonder how I am.
And maybe all of that is a revelation to me. That the real shortcoming is mine. That I am a selfish girl who isn’t rich or cool enough. Unlike another woman I see her interact with. Hang on every word, smile at, fawn over. And this behavior I interpret as like – love even – is what I want from her. Is that so selfish? Probably. But maybe I can write that down here and tell myself that I can be better.
Maybe I can acknowledge that what really gets under my skin is that I am almost 50 and I still look for approval from people in my life who I decided were important a long time ago and never re-evaluated. Now who is a respecter of persons? Maybe I can acknowledge that what really gets under my skin is the way I know I am being listened to and having information sorted like a…machine that does…sorting. One pile for things that are good for the family gossip tree, another pile for the things that are good for making fun of me later, another pile of the reasons she is angry or disappointed in me.
That first pile? That’s where my relationships and jobs go. The second – my hair, my excessive fertility, my height or lack thereof. And that last pile – the fact that I once sent back a Christmas table cloth I was not going to use because my spouse and I don’t do any Christmas things. Or the fact that you have to say please and thank you to me because I’m not… I was going to say a dog or a servant but I truly don’t even feel that way. Please and thank you are things you say because you are a kind and decent person who sees other people as humans and cares that they go out of their way to care for you.
And there it is. Care. It is interesting how I think a lot of the tension comes from a sense of entitlement to care. And a sense of duty for it. What I have always calculated as an owing went to one person as my elder. So ten years after that person’s death is a hard turn for me to unpack my grief that I could not care her away from death, care her to good health, care her to happiness and then build enough of that back for someone else who in so many ways just isn’t her. My mother. Just as hard on me. But hard in love and hard in support and hard in having my back too. No piles. Just honest conversation, raw emotion, an innumerable series of lights at ends of tunnels. This. Is not that. Never will be. And so I arrive at a point where I realize that I have to stop holding another person accountable for not being my mother.
You can’t change how your elder relatives show up in your life. But you can close that hole you keep exposing hoping for them to fill with things they do not have. And you can pray it gets filled with a life God promised. Even at the edge of 50.
I’m writing these reflections on turning 50 as a repository for thoughts and ideas that maybe will turn into something deeper at a later date. But for now it’s just space to put all the things I say I’m putting in the parking lot but then forget to come back to later. If this really is the middle of my life, I want to spend it becoming more unapologetically me and I want to come back and remember what a time I had doing that.
This note was given shape by my readings of Hunger by Roxane Gay and Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. I’m so thankful for these two early January visits with good writing where I found the courage to challenge the truth of some long standing relationships. And love Black womanhood in me as it unfolds in new miraculous ways.
See you next month.