A Woman in Decades

I turn forty on a Wednesday, and for me this is a long-awaited day. I have wanted to be forty since I was in my twenties. Why? Because the idea of turning forty is ripe with a sense of true womanhood. You are not a woman, not really, until you are forty. Everything before forty is trite, experimental, and full of the work that will bring you the fruits of forty.

Being forty means I will finally have it together; I will no longer be able to rely on excuses as to why I haven’t been published, why I haven’t been successful, why I still feel like a little girl inside aching for something I can’t quite articulate or get my hands on. Forty is the beginning — not the end or the middle. It feels as if I have been longing for this time — waiting for this extraordinary decade to come and wrap itself around me, cocooning me until I emerge as a full and complete and established woman. I have been waiting for this year, this week, and this Wednesday for a long time, decades, and now that it is here, I can look back at my life and reflect on where I have been, where I have come from, and what I can do to get to where I want to spend the rest of my life. Here is my life in decades — in decades’ worth of lessons that have gotten me here — to the revised version of my forty self:

First Decade:

The first ten years of my life were turbulent and precarious. There was no wall to hold on to and no solid and reliable gravel to hold my feet in place. I was constantly moving, like the gypsy my mother latched on to — the gypsy that blackened my childhood and tainted my innocence. This decade was as stark as his soul, as dark as his skin, as foul as his deeds. This decade was all about surviving and keeping my head above water. I learned that fathers abandoned their families, mothers were equally violent to men, and children bore the brunt of adult corruptions and wore the scars of life’s unfairness. But I escaped.

Second Decade:

The next ten years of my childhood were fraught with forced silences and an adoption that opened a door to another world only to have it shut behind me with only windows through which to breathe. I lived in a home where walls confined me, floors chained me, and my tongue was forbidden to utter the horrors of my experiences. I was quiet and studious and I learned to please those around me by doing as they bid me. I had no voice, no will, and I learned to scream and fight and hold on to myself in silence. The only place you could find the real me was in my poetry.

It was at the end of this decade that I fell in love, found my voice, became a teacher, reunited with my birth family, took back my name, and struggled to find my self, not the self that had been forced upon me like a thick layer of skin that never quite fit. I learned that prisons are self-imposed as much as they are imposed by others; only courage and determination can destroy the house that imprisons you; and that pleasing yourself is more important than sacrificing yourself for others, no matter how much you need their approval.

Third Decade:

This decade made me a mother — of both books and children. My memoir,Drowning Squirrels, which recounts my challenges with my mother’s prostitution, our homelessness, and my orphanage and adoption, took its first tremulous breath a year before my son took his first. This decade was bitter-sweet. In writing, I collected files of rejection slips; I found and lost my agent; I learned the fine art of revision; and I learned how easy it is to give up.

In mothering, I was overwhelmed, as this was the toughest job I had ever had in my life. With five pregnancies and only two children making their way out of my body and into the world, I had to face the limitations of my body and my life — I had to endure the kind of loss that only women who miscarry feel — the desperation, the self-blame, the lack of power, the sense of failure. The long