Run the Numbers

My mother had me when she was 23 years old. I remember the night she turned 30, and though I know I was only 7, it seemed like I was much, much older. I was lying on the living room rug on my stomach while Dances With Wolves played on our tiny wood-panel TV, and she emerged from behind her bedroom door. Always extremely slender with long red hair and bright green eyes, she generally looked prettier to me than everyone else's mom. I guess it was the crisis of turning 30 because she had put her hair up into a ponytail. She looked at me and said in a wavering voice, "Oh, I guess I'm too old to wear my hair this way now." For whatever reason, I've never forgotten her fallen face that night, though she has since told me that her 30s were the height of her life.

I still think about that moment. I am only three years away from 30, and though I know it is annoying to talk about it to people that will inevitably say, "You're still young," I've had a delicious time finding things that make me feel young still.

I had coffee with my friend/son Louis the other day, and I was telling him about this box the Bunny and I found in the basement. It was labeled "Teenage Years," and I'd yet to open it since my mother carted it from her house to mine. Spilling out everywhere were the stacks upon mounds of pen pal letters, love letters, school notes, photographs, snippets of paper memos and receipts that were supposed to mean something but whose significance I could no longer recall. I guess the most complex part was trying to reconcile the photographs of me as a middle to high school aged girl with the woman I've become.

I did not take after my mother's slender frame. From an early age, I had hips and breasts spilling off of my short body in the fashion of my father's side of the family, though I did not inherit their long legs. I always felt very uncomfortable with my girl's mind in a woman's shape. I suppose that is adolescence for everyone, right? My lazy left eye'd smile from before I wore contacts/glasses coupled with my naturally wavy hair in a humid, Southern climate and my proclivity for loud and vintage clothes all stared back at me from these old photos. Despite this appearance, I never felt like I was ugly. I was very confident as a young girl, and I guess this is the reason that, though I was never promiscuous, I always kept a lot of suitors. The girl I found in that box was my hero, I swear it. She wasn't hot. She wasn't even cute, really, but she acted like she deserved the world. She expected nothing less. I was at ease, for the most part, with my awkwardness, though I never stopped hoping to outgrow my curves.

My slender mother is still tiny. I remember a day in high school when she came home from shopping and getting gas. She was wearing a short denim skirt, though my mom generally dressed pretty prudish. She said, "Oh, these boys honked at me from the bypass while I was pumping my gas. I think they thought I was younger. Oh well." She turned to the sink, and I swear I saw her grin a bit. She was nearly 40 then, but her legs were slender and tan and her waist was tiny. I'm certain those boys thought she was no older than 20.

My mother turns 50 in November. Sometimes I watch her standing, again, by the sink in my parents' kitchen. When I was a religious girl, I used to beg God to make my body like her's--clean lined, straight hipped, small breasted, and muscular, but now I like my jiggly breasts. I'm at peace with my parentheses hips, and, I suppose, there's no point in wishing for something so shallow anyways, right? I'd say I'm at least 75% heterosexual, as there is nothing finer than the semi-dirty and rough smell of a man, but the quarter me that finds women attractive is drawn to the drippig curves of an all girl figure. I guess that makes me roughly a 2 on the Kinsey scale.

It has taken a few decades, but I've finally learned how to navigate these wiles through plenty of spaces. I teach a poem every semester by Eavan Boland called "Anorexic." The extended Adam/Eve metaphor is quite clever, though the speaker's desire to return to a time "before the fall"--to retreat and become as small as a rib--is very disturbing. I suppose this is the best part of getting older: I can no longer understand these wishes for diminution.