In the Season of Becoming
I cried a lot today. The kind of crying where you can’t quite name the emotion behind it— only that your body feels too small to hold what’s rising in it.
So I’ll tell you about today.
Actually, we’ll start with Monday. After 23 years, we finally replaced the original builder carpet in our bedroom. It had done its duty — three kids, two cats, my husband’s boots, my occasional art projects. To replace it, we had to empty the entire room. Things we hadn’t moved in nearly those same 23 years.
My closet is the size of a small bedroom, and I consider it sacred space. My mornings begin there. My chaos lives there. It holds not just the present, but my past—and a small stack of memory boxes on the top shelf.
Fast forward to today: plush new carpet, soft as a cushion underfoot—the fanciest I’ve ever had. And finally, time to move everything back. Things like my memory boxes.
But no one simply puts a memory box back on a shelf once it’s been disturbed. You have to open it.
I lifted the lid of a shoebox and it was as if someone had threaded an old movie reel through a projector. Sepia toned scenes of my life as a wife and mother sputtered to life against the walls. Forgotten things, suddenly loud.
I’ve kept every letter and card my husband has ever given me. I reread the ones from our dating years, our first anniversary, the day we brought our daughter home. I accuse him sometimes of being emotionally unavailable — turns out, maybe I just don’t always listen. I have 27 years of his honest heart scrawled inside Hallmark cards.
There were homemade notes from my kids, letters from former music students, the tiny caps my babies wore home from the hospital, locks of their hair, bold preschool handwriting declaring love in oversized, wobbly letters. Oh–and my undoing– the little red leather shoes my second son wore everyday of his three year old life. God, I was tired then. Always tired. Always attached to another small human. Always craving a little “me” time away from the very babies I now ache to hold again. Babies who’ve grown into these fascinating adults that I adore. How odd that they are one and the same.
There were notes from friends, old business cards, a yellowing photo of someone with “Friends Forever” printed along the frame’s edge. We’ve barely spoken in 15 years. My college ID. My high school ID. My middle school ID. So many versions of a face I still somehow wear.
My mom had saved letters from boys I don’t even remember. But they loved me. I used to be a girl boys wrote love letters to. And yet I somehow remember being perpetually lonely.
And then the journals. Twelve of them. A girl ought to be careful reading too far back into who she used to be. I didn’t recognize the girl in those pages — and yet I did. I ran my finger along the torn edges where I’d ripped a few pages out long ago, leaving only a note that I had expelled the poison and didn’t need to remember it. My younger self redacted the files that my older self now read. I checked the date. September of 2016. What had hurt me then? I don’t remember. Not the poison, anyway.
I wish that girl had known how fast time moves. How easily moments slip through your fingers. I found photos of myself, rail thin, and still remember believing I was fat. Like so many women, I’ve carried that belief at every size, in every season — even when you could see the outline of my bones.
What lies we learned to tell ourselves.
I’ve reached the season of life where there are likely more days behind me than ahead — unless I get lucky. It overwhelmed me, being surrounded by the evidence of my whole life so far, distilled into fading cards and curling photographs. Is this what remains of those vast, beautiful years?
The memories of my blond, blue-eyed children feel so loud now in this mostly quiet house. Gratitude and grief swelled together into some new emotion I don’t have a name for.
This stage of life is strange. So much living still to come. So many memories yet to be made. Love hums through our little family, and our story — not at the beginning, not near the end — is unfolding in the messy, ordinary middle.
And still, I hesitate on days like this. I feel the ebbing of the past even as I try to hold it close. Who we were is turning into memory. Who we are is still taking shape.
I am grateful to be 52 — writing, teaching, finally free from the bone-deep exhaustion of young motherhood.
And still, a longing so sharp it steals my breath rises when I picture those three little faces, my husband in his thirties, my life when it was in its beginnings. I even found a picture of me laughing the day my husband asked me to marry him. Goodness, what she didn’t know, that girl I used to be-- all of it still living somewhere inside me, fading just out of reach, even as something new stirs to life.
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