Is Middle Age Apologizing For The Terrible Person You Used to Be?
Or is it finally about growing up?
When I was small, I wanted the world to move. One summer in Sunset Park, I swam from one end of a sixteen-foot pool to the other. For hours, I cleaved through the water until my body burned. Until I had whittled down to brittle bone. Tawny and hungry was a look I was going for. And there would be moments when we were flush. Maybe a check was cashed or a dollar pinched from a pant pocket, and we would flee to the hot dog stand and devour that hot meat and soft bun until our faces were slicked and glossed and our stomachs full.
Our hearts were pulpy back then, flush with love even though our bank accounts were anemic. But it was Brooklyn, 1987, and my friends teased me. Girl, you can write. Write about me, they all chorused, elbowing their way into the pages of my small spiral notebook. Teachers would pull me aside and tell me the same thing. I didn’t understand what I had was a gift, it never felt like it. More like a thimble of water in the Sahara.
More like I had a tool that would help me make sense of a world where a strange man stood over my bed and watched my sleep. We liked watching your daughter sleep they told my mother over a telephone line when she didn’t pay the sharks their interest. Watch the sharks circle and swarm. Tear through and devour until there’s nothing left. The remains of you are pieces of skin scattered on the ocean floor.
But there was never a time I wasn’t writing. When I didn’t make space for it. When I didn’t diagram sentences and manipulate language until it was something new. My friend Kira, a brilliant poet, once wrote a line:
there are others here begun an age ago the beacon this very night then
you took already the word hibiscus where landscape where fires
determined to finish
A friend who told me I could do whatever I wanted with the English language. Pervert nouns and turn them into verbs? Sure. It’s all play, she said. The same friend who read my second book and told me she planned to press a hot poker against my back until I finished it. Because I had found my voice and command of language. I had finally broken through.
This seismic shift, this finding my voice after decades of writing and having published a first book to a bit of fanfare, was an awakening I hadn’t anticipated, but it was one I experienced because I had time.
I had resigned from a job that was slowly killing me. That spring of 2013, I boarded a plane to Europe paled down to bone, shaking, and physically ill. I remember days of just staring at the sea in Cinque Terre. Seeing old friends in Rome. And when I finally made my way to sleepy Biarritz in the off-season, where it rained most days, I went to the beach every morning and stared at the barnacle-covered bounders at the foot of the ocean.
One night, while watching TV, an idea came at me, like a torrent, and it would become the first chapter of my second book. I stared at what I’d written in disbelief because it felt like I’d created something in a foreign language. I knew I’d written it, but it felt inconceivable that I had. And I couldn’t make sense of it only that I felt confident in my writing for the first time ever.
I had command over language that I’d never had before. I felt a happening though I couldn’t tell you then what that happening was or would be. But that happening, that quickening of pulse and heart, is what I’m feeling right now. At 45. A woman who has felt she’s lost so much time.
It wasn’t always this way. I wasn’t always this way.
“At what point is believing so close to knowing, that any difference between the two isn’t worth the fuss, finally? A tamer of wolves tames no foxes, he used to say, as if avoiding the question. But never meaning to. You broke it. Now wear it broken.” — Carl Phillips
I wasn’t always calm or kind. In fact, I was cutting and cruel. I could blame my mother, for growing up in a home where I was taught to never cry, never love so much you felt incomplete. Where vulnerability was a weakness and to this day I still find it hard to ask for help. To let people know I hurt. To show them the cuts and say it’s possible, yes, it’s possible for me to bleed.
But that would be easy. Blaming my mother would be an excuse, not a reason. Besides, she’s long gone now. Lying in a small box, covered in dirt and rock. Only my memory of her remains and that too is fading. Her voice, the graveling of it. The Kent 100s she smoked down to the filter. The Bacardi she drank and peach pies she ate. The way I buried my face in the thicket that was her hair because it was the only time I felt both terrified and safe.
Years ago, I got into a fight with my pop and he looked at me as if it were the first time he’d seen me and he said, you’re just like her. You look like her. You hurt like her. You wound others like her. And I shook away the truths like clothing I was desperate to shed, until years later when I could see the truths for what they were — facts. A woman dodging mirrors for decades because the sight of my face — our face — was too painful to bear.
I had become my mother’s daughter.
I could blame the legions of people I excised from my life over the fact that I never learned how to socialize as a child. I spent most of my childhood alone, with my mother, or in an unhealthy relationship with one best friend. Always a girl, always me looking for someone to take care when I busied myself with tucking my mother into taxi cabs and filling out hospital forms at the age of 10 because the cocaine was too much. A heart quickening. A child bearing the weight of her mother. A child desperate for a childhood she can call her own.
But really it was something I said in a car ride over a bridge to a friend the morning after I’d been violently attacked in my home. I carried that wreckage into the car and didn’t tell my friend because I didn’t have the words for what happened. I didn’t know how to tell a friend I trusted and loved that I’d been hurt. So, I said nothing. I rolled her car window up and down because I have this compulsion to keep my hands occupied.
Until she asked what was wrong, what was really wrong, and I told her I couldn’t decipher the difference between love and loss. For me, they’ve always been flip-sides of the same coin. What I love I would invariably lose, so what’s the point? Better to get rid of them before the hurt. Better to cut their faces out of photographs the way my mother used to do with old lovers. Photo albums I still have with people’s faces punctured and cut out. Better to pretend they never existed.
My friend gripped the steering wheel and I knew she wanted to say something, but didn’t have the words for it. Like I didn’t have the words for the rape that had occurred hours before I couldn’t tell her about. How I’d shower compulsively for weeks and would never feel clean. How I shower twice a day still, and sometimes I feel ruinous. My body fossilized in some sort of Pompeii agony. Swallowing all that ash. Coughing up black.
You can’t live like that, she finally said, to which I laughed and said, it’s fucking preservation. You can’t live like that, she said in a smaller voice. With an urgency and pain I’d never witnessed. Part of me loved this friend because she was a better version of me — a fixer. I called her and she would fix everything.
Until the day when I was finally patched up and ready to move across the country and she would never return my calls again. Because she could no longer fix what was no longer visibly broken.
Often, we break in the smallest ways. Cracks we can’t see.
Find their softest place, my mother used to tell me, and break it.
So, that’s what I did. I made coworkers cry. I abandoned friends. Spoken words I wish I could’ve reeled back and in. How can I explain words were my salvation but also my weapons? I had a whole arsenal of ways I could hurt and maim. And while I thought my wounds had healed, I would spend years removing and replacing their dressings. I hit delete one too many times until there was nothing but the silence I so assiduously craved and had begun to hate. Because I hated what I had the capacity to do with words. I hated the person I was when I knew how to abuse them.
It took me forty-five years of living to change the phrase. Find their softest place and hold it. Help it. Mend it and tend to it. Give it space and let it go. Because it’s often the broken who break in places you never perceived could be broken.
How do I crack open the word heal and burrow myself in it?
Once I brought home a coyote and told my lover we had a new pet. Until it ate our chickens. — “Hunger” by Kelli Russell Agodon
It’s only when I’m older and glutinous to the nines that I’m able to comprehend the possibility of never being full is real. I am parts incomplete.
A few years ago, I tell my friend Steph — I’m going to reach out to Kate. I watch her face rearrange itself into an expression that comes close to surprise, but more like shock. Should I reach out to her? I pause, doubting myself. Quietly she nods. You should.
People forgive. Sometimes they forget.
My hands are an earthquake. 7.8 on the Richter. It’s early evening and I’m dialed into a Zoom call. It’s years since Kate and I have spoken, I think. Our faces cover the screen and our perfunctories are awkward. We’re the same, but older. Our faces register our age and we talk about her son, California, and how it’s softened my edges. You seem really happy, she says. And there’s this pause, this endless space between words, and I tell her I don’t know why we ended things, but I’m sure it was my doing. And I’m so sorry. She smiles and says, I think I made you mad? And then you stopped talking to me? I don’t really know what happened.
It takes everything in me not to cry. But I don’t because Kate and I aren’t the type to cry in front of one another. We’re old New York, hardened shells and let’s not talk about it and say we did, and we’re too old to carry the burdens of grudges and anger.
I am sorry though, I say, and she nods as if to say she knows. I joke that she’s my first stop on the Repair What I Fucked Up Tour. How I’ll spend years reassembling everything I willfully broke. How I’ll find the words to tell people I’m not the woman I used to be, and can you forgive me? Can you forgive the old words, all the wounds I inflicted and picked at until they scabbed and scarred? How can I convince you I’m no longer the coyote devouring the chickens?
Is this what sitting in the middle of your life is like? Apologizing for the years behind you as you tread your way ahead?
Find their softest place and realize you’ve hardened it. And they may never forgive you.
When I was small, I wanted the world to move. Now all I want are glacial paces and time that can be bent and suspended. Now all I want is to sit still. To find new words. Dust them off and shake away the mothballs. Clean them fresh and make them anew. Words like, I’m sorry. Words like, can you forgive me. Words like, let me show you I’m not the woman I used to be.
Middle age is when you realize you are who you are. I remember one birthday. I was 35. My friend said, 'you're halfway to 70.' Now, I'm 65 and in four-and-a-half years, I'll be 70. Middle age is an adventure, so live it fully.
Felicia, This is eloquent and haunting.
Niccely done,
Dr. Ray Healey