the year i become a mother

reflections on the last decade

24 is teaching gym classes because a bald man with thick biceps says I have potential and so I learn to do burpees while wearing a mic. But I want to be a writer, I tell a friend, and so he gets me a job in marketing. I am 24, yet I feel like my entire life has already happened: marriage, house, career. The pace keeps me up at night, listening for the train. At the end of winter I tell A. we have to leave. But where? he asks. Anywhere but here. 

25 is paper lanterns floating above a bridge and churning river water. I watch the light and my wish disappear into the dark, then drink too much sangria in the jungle. When I puke red at dawn, I tell myself to grow up, which I do, but only because I learn to laugh again. Light follows me, or maybe I follow it: headlamps in the Andes, strips of moonlight on sand, purple strobes at a midnight concert in another language. We travel for eleven months until home isn’t a word but a longing. Are you ready to go back? A. asks. No but yes.  

26 is French music and cigarette smoke, chopped hair and blonde highlights. It’s a studio apartment in Denver and counting tips. It’s also depression, dirty snow, and drawn-out conversations about what comes next. What are we doing? I whisper every night in bed. We can’t afford Denver rent, so we move into my parents’ basement. I find a desk on Craigslist, open my laptop, and begin to write. It is winter for an entire year. 

27 is a morning train in a foreign country that is now home. I ride to the English coastline where an old castle sits in ruins and eat battered fish in a September breeze. A. works at a brewery in Battersea while I wrestle with ghosts in a damp basement flat. Is writing supposed to be this painful? I ask a professor. She answers with a list of books to read. 

28 is the Senate House library and eating pret sandwiches in Russel Square. It’s quiet rooms and cluttered desks, wine in coffee mugs and pub readings. The year is so ordinary and sweet but also transformative in ways realized with retrospect. It is a favorite year, a forgotten year, a year of putting down roots before ripping them up again.

29 starts in Florence and ends in Los Angeles. I wear heels for the two miles we walk on cobblestone streets to the restaurant on the hill overlooking church domes. We rent mopeds and almost miss a train, fight loudly, then make up in a museum. Everything changes after this, I tell A. Yes, but it’s time.

30 is wildfire smoke, protests on the street below our apartment, and masks dangling next to keys. It’s a collective grief that hasn’t become personal yet. We escape to Utah for my birthday, splurge on a fancy hotel because this one is supposed to be special. I cry watching videos from friends and family, then eat creme brûlée in bed. Sing your 30s, I write in my journal—a quote from a memoir. What I should have written: hold on.

31 is a cobalt sweater and iced coffee. I celebrate my birthday alone, the first of many now that A. is a firefighter. It’s also the first of many birthdays where I will wonder about the baby, our baby (will there ever be an our baby?). I don’t know this version of me or this city where we’ve chosen to live. I tell myself to try and so I go to museums and bookstores, then have a sandwich for dinner.

32 is returning to Colorado where it all started. We drive past the blue house and the gym and the street corner where we stood when I told A. I wanted to leave. On the morning of my birthday, I hike the trail where we got engaged. Nothing feels familiar. We have a birthday routine by now: coffee, bookstore, dinner. The patio has string lights (my favorite) and we share a bottle of wine because I’m not pregnant and my body is numb from the miscarriage. By dark, we’re in bed, asleep. How tired we are from simply living.

33 is letting my heart shatter, then dipping the pieces in salt water. It’s the tracing of an owl on my arm, green paint on the apartment walls. It’s the new year, ideas striking like rock on flint and loving my body after years of trying to control her. I rediscover my voice, the octave deeper than before, like the circle under my eyes. But the ground feels stable. The uncertainty is no longer a fear. An entire decade of rediscovery to get to this place. How good it feels to finally be here. 

34 is the year I become a mother, an author. Can I write this when I don’t actually know? Is it presumptuous to believe my longings can be met? Perhaps it’s an expansion of definitions and learning to make meaning of these words for myself—mother, author. “The sense of ‘that which has given birth to anything’” comes from the Old English.

What does it mean to mother oneself? To mother those around you as they taste grief for the first time? To mother your soul back to life and care for it as you would your own baby?

As for writing—you’ve always been writing. A book deal won’t change that. You can’t make something more true than it already is.