I have been doing the math.
When she was the age I am now she had three children in the house, the youngest still in elementary school, the oldest just beginning the complicated work of becoming a person who was not primarily her child. She had a part-time job and a full-time household and a marriage that was asking things of her that she did not always have the reserves to give, and she got up every morning and did the thing. Whatever the thing was that day. Without the language I have for it now, without the therapy or the framework or the understanding that what she was doing was extraordinary precisely because it was not treated as extraordinary but as Tuesday.
I have so much more than she had at my age.
More space and more time and more language for my own interior life and more permission to have an interior life that is treated as a legitimate thing rather than a self-indulgence. More access to rest, imperfect and guilt-ridden and still contested but present, the possibility of it present in a way it was not present for her. More structural support, which is still not enough and is more than she had, and the difference matters even when the more-than-she-had is not as much as it should be.
I look at photographs of her at this age.
She is tired in the photographs in the way that does not always show on a face but shows in the eyes, in the particular quality of a look that is measuring something, calculating something, running the numbers on the life that has to keep running. She is also, in the photographs, unmistakably herself. The laugh is there. The stubbornness is there. The particular angle of a woman who is not going to stop even though stopping would be reasonable and no one would blame her.
I am her age now and I recognize her.
Not just in the hands. In the look. In the eyes that are still running the numbers even in rest, still alert, still paying attention to things that matter. Still, underneath everything, undefeated.
I come from that. I am still coming from that, even now, even here.
