Girlhood Is Like Godhood
every so often i sit down and write my obituary. i sit and step back and think about this here life i’m living. i measured my width span and take up notes on how far i’ve gone and how far i would have left to go if not for my untimely death. i romanticize myself the way the media would in order to get a story about a fat brown girl to sell.
so much of womanhood i’m finding is learning how to sell myself. learning which parts of myself i can market to others. to men i am young, wide eyed, a virgin, soft, quiet, and yet bold and fiery with a confidence usually reserved for my much more desirable counterparts. to employers i am ambitious and dedicated. i give more than 100% over extending myself for the pursuit of wealth. who would show up if they were not being paid, but also i can’t leave others hanging even though the companies greed is at fault.
i am giver. i give and give and give. often times this is at my detriment. not only of my energy or my time, but more often than not at the expense of my dignity and my heart. i don’t know how to exist if not to cut up parts of myself and offer them up for free. knowing so much of myself is a tiresome task and living in an age of cynicism does my mind no better.
so knowing so much about myself. knowing how much i give and give and give i know that these are the very reasons i am alone. alone and most often times quite lonely. i have most times not felt at home with my family. i have sought validation in friends that cared not for me. i have changed my exterior and scrubbed my interior in order to fit and mold myself in spaces of inclusion.
the conversation is dead and dry and stale of the mixed experience in america and in the south. or so i have heard time and time again from college essay editors and chronically online black women. i can understand my great privilege and prioritization over fully black women while also acknowledging the pain of never being accepted in either white or black spaces. but it is so much of this understanding that drives and shapes my beliefs and voice. my undesirableness comes not from my hue or my culture, most often from my waistline and dress size (and perhaps my personality, perhaps). these intricacies fascinate me.
i often marvel at myself. though i haven’t gone far i have traveled much. i have not reached a destination in my life yet but i am where i never thought i would be. when i go on first dates i am astounded at how vibrant i am. i am zest and spice and rosemary and thyme. soft and strong and bold and calm. i am astounded when i speak to other women how much they are like this too.
how i love being. how i love the existence i was born into. how i wish i could be reborn time and time again. life is difficult and it serves an exhausting task to each and everyone granted a tomorrow. to live and do and see and hear and speak.
and when the devil stands on my shoulders to knock me down i stand and hold my head up at all the life i had the privilege of living. living and living and living and i’ve misstepped, but god how i lived!
“and i’ve misstepped, but god how i lived!”
my grandmothers were both wed at about my age. my mothers mother would give birth to her first son and in two short years my mother. she would go on to live for her three children for the next nearly 30 years of her life. every ache and sorrow, every smile and laugh would be in the wake of their existence.
how much life can be lived while raising up lives of others? a million lives. so often mothers are shunned away from this life and though i strain and struggle with the notion my mother must live her own life separate from my own i thank her for living it. not just for me, not just for my sister, but for her own damn self.
every mistake she made, every misstep she took she got to make all on her own. she fell in love and out, she struggled and she worked, not just for the roof over our head but for her own sake. for her own passion, for her own life.
i think of the many mothers i’ve had. the ones that had a hand in raising me. the ones that pushed me to be kinder or fed the bitch i would become. the ones that loved me and loathed me. women have a part of them that nurtures the world. whether they care for you or not they lend a hand to raise you and to guide you along your life.
even in my short and arduous nineteen years of life i’ve mothered and raised and helped push the next generation forward into who they are today as they will do the same. life is not lived in a vacuum of moment to moment, but in a great story of community and crossing paths. i stand in a city built for men who never considered my existence and yet the city speaks to me and raise me up.
the city hugs and comforts me. if breathes a new life into the old corpse of mine. i know not what force brought me here on this day and compelled me to sit and sip and write, but i know that this chapter in my small story in my small novel in the great story of life on earth will teach and shape and move me.
who i was when i walked off the plane two short weeks ago is not who i am now and it is not who i will be when i depart someday in what seems now as the distant future.
so i will sit and sip and write my obituary and my letters for the press and i will keep writing until one day my final letter is written and published with a picture of me and my children and their children and the family i created and carried with me in my small pocket of existence on this great mother earth.
