Mother, Send The Hummingbird

By this time next week, I’ll be forty years old. An age that to a twenty-something-me felt like a faraway and baron land has rolled out before me in shades of lavender and sage. It is not as I expected it would be. I am not who I expected to become. All of those seeds sewn, some in fire, some in tears—blooming in soft pastels against a backdrop of lush summer trees and fading neon skies.

I spent my first four decades trying on clothes. Who should I be today? What shall I call myself? Why don’t you like me? I had so many questions, valid questions, but I was querying the wrong audience. I remember the first time my mother took me shopping for a formal gown to wear to a high school dance. I must have tried on twelve, sick about the way my hips had started to protrude from the rest of my body. It was as if my girlhood was being ripped away in that fitting room. I wanted to know what was on the other side but I wasn’t done with not knowing.

Manhattan reminds me of measuring tapes. More specifically, cold fingers invading my personal space to gauge my dress size and confirm my irresponsible eating habits. My modeling agents seemed to share the same disdain for my hips as fifteen-year-old-me. I was dressed in costumes like a doll and no one bothered to ask whether or not I fancied them. At a showroom gig, where I paraded in outfit after outfit for prospective buyers, an Italian woman in a four thousand dollar coat spoke about me as if I weren’t standing right in front of her, as if I were an inanimate object, This one has too much thigh. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy the opportunity to play the part. Freeloading on the dewiness of my youth, I pretended that it was enough to be twenty-eight and pretty in New York City. For a while, maybe it was.

Everything got so confusing after thirty. My overstuffed closet, full of relics and past lives, seemed to be taunting me each time I passed by. This one doesn’t fit you anymore. You haven’t spoken to this man in years, why do you still wear his jacket? The blue-sweater-you was the best and she’s gone. I started dressing in weird layers. A nostalgic underpinning, a tired vintage blouse that had let loose of a button or three, torn designer jeans I could never afford again, crisp new sneakers in a hopeful shade of white, winter shawls in the spring because the cold was lasting longer. I couldn’t seem to get rid of anything, so I carried it with me.

A woman gets to a certain point in life where the only two options are to keep packing it into tight spaces and hold her breath, or exhale, and burn it all away.

At thirty-four, I lit the match. I sorted the mementos into piles—mine to keep, other people’s junk. I sat alone and paid homage to all the girls I was before, each one deserving of her turn to speak. I forgave them for all the times they tried to squeeze into parties, or marriages, or apartments, or dresses too small for them. I stopped romanticizing numbed-out-know-it-alls and shrinking violets and started dreaming in pages of story and patches of honey squash. I went back to the garden of my childhood to dig up what I’d planted, to remember.

I am not my mother’s forty. She had three daughters, a suburban home, and a lifetime of worry and secret longing she would never live to tell. I have two acres of dirt, a one room house, and a fever to tell you every rotten and magical thing that’s ever happened to me.

Forty feels like a starting point, not to a farewell tour for my relevance and sex appeal, but to my awakening, to my harvest season.

I thought of my mom on Tuesday, her birthday is exactly one week before mine. Always has been. I spoke to her about the flowers I wish I’d planted in April, lamenting the absence of hummingbirds, admitting it was my fault she wasn’t showing up in her signature fluttering glory to remind me that she’s near. I worried I had disappointed her, maybe she didn’t like the lavender paint in the bathroom or the dried sage in the kitchen window.

Today, during a podcast interview, I was asked if the death of my mother had made me want to pick up a drink and break my sobriety. I told the story I’ve told a hundred times before, the story about how that’s not appealing to me any longer, to skip the brutal stunning reality of what it means to live a life and grow old and say goodbye and reach for it all through space and time and wait for signs from another realm to give it all meaning. I told the story about the girl who lived in fitting rooms and kept quiet when she meant to be loud. I told the story about my upcoming birthday and how it felt like taking flight, not taking a knee.

That’s when she came.

Against a fading pink bubblegum sky, as if to say, You’re Ready, mama sent the hummingbird.