On the Eve of My 40th Birthday, I Consider

in which it's actually the eve of the eve, but whatever, you get it

Have I ever told you I am my mother’s daughter?
I am not afraid to go back in time,
to have the moon reflected in my big brown eyes
as the terracotta roof arcs its terracotta arches.

— Analicia Sotelo, “My Father & Dali Do Not Agree”

Pt. 1 — not the truth, but a truth

“Rebecca loved gossip. She knew it was where the truth lived.” So Leslie Jamison wrote in The New Yorker, about her dear friend who was working on a book about Peggy Guggenheim — and I’m obsessed with this line, and the concept behind it, or at least I have been since early February, when I first read the piece and wrote that down.

Rebecca didn’t finish her book about Peggy. Instead, she died, and Leslie took on the ambitious and daunting task of finishing her book. (She did it. She finished it. The book is coming out this summer.)

I loved this essay so much, and how Leslie captures Rebecca, and their friendship, in other great lines like, “Rebecca craved beauty like oxygen or water, a vital element.” and “Opening Rebecca’s files was thrilling and unnerving. It felt like talking to her again.”

You might be wondering what any of this has to do with it being the eve of [the eve of] my 40th birthday. It has nothing and everything to do with it, and that’s the point.

Pt. 2 — dream travel

We have to find new subjects. We have to keep ourselves tidy. We held hands the whole way home. We hung around a long time. We joked about what if there really was a heaven, then he would be married to Mom for eternity. We laughed and laughed.

— Sheila Heti, Alphabetical Diaries

On Sunday, I told Natalie how, leading up to turning 40, I’ve been missing my mother in an intense new way. “How many years has it been?” she asked. A lifetime, I thought. “22, almost,” I said.

Earlier we’d been walking and talking about relationships and family and work and all the things you talk about when you’re taking a walk on a Sunday afternoon with your friend, but now that I was sitting across the table and saying this, I felt exposed and silly, like someone had stolen my journal and started mock-reading it aloud to the class. But then Natalie looked back at me and I knew she really got it, because she has also lived a lifetime without her mother, and on top of that, she just gets it because that’s what a friend does. When I blinked back some tears at the table it was about missing my mom and carrying all these decades of wanting her back but it was also because sometimes, you just have to be seen, really seen like that.

A couple of nights later, my mom was in my dreams. We were in a fight, mostly because I was upset she had told Phil that Nannie (my great-grandma) had died but didn’t want me to know. She was also trying to give us both special phones so she could communicate with us, and I was mad that even in my dream she was basically acknowledging that she was dead. Yes, I know no one cares about other people’s dreams but it’s almost my birthday and this is my subject so deal with it. I love how the nonsensical can feel completely sensical in a dream state like that, and how in this fight with my mom, I was in Nannie’s house again, and I could actually smell it again, and my mom was as clear as she was on a summer afternoon in the 90s. I remembered everything, because I was there.

But I woke up still wondering what it all meant. Maybe it meant nothing at all.

As I often do, I thought about that psychic in Madison, and how she told me it probably takes a lot of energy for my mother to visit me in my dreams. How, she said, I should open my mind to other forms of communication from my mom — like, maybe I’ll be walking, and if I see a feather, I should consider that maybe it was from my mom. When I tell you the very next day after the psychic suggested that, I was with my childhood friend Eileen and her daughter Noelle, walking just in front of us, cried out, “Look, Mom, a feather!” and picked it up and turned to us, waving — would that be more interesting than hearing about dreams and sessions with psychics? Would you believe me? Would you wonder, too?

Because the thing is, I don’t want a dream phone, I don’t want a feather, I want a new subject, I want to call my mom and laugh, and laugh.

Pt. 3 — with all that said,

You are too grown-up to forget that most things feel the same, up close.

— Yrsa Daley-Ward, “THE ROAR OF PATHS UNTAKEN IN THE ORANGE PEACE OF DUSK”

I like that I’m turning 40, and my friends are turning 40, too. Like Yrsa Daley-Ward wrote in this poem I also can’t stop thinking about, “There are so many other things you might have been.” Yes, I might have been so many things. I might still be. I’m happy and I’m sad and I’m brand new and I’m vintage and I’m here.

“Tell them to quiet down, and go on about their business, for none of them is sweeter, more real or alive than the very thing you are becoming.”

Happy birthday, me.

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