nor has there ever been a blueprint for something as wild as womanhood

the women i knew and the women i know

Thirty was always a big thing in the distance — sometimes simply waiting, other times looming, but now, for better or worse, I have reached it. Resolutions feel less important than plans. I am less interested in the repairing or tidying of my current self and more keen on figuring out where the hell I go from here.

I guess I’ve been a woman for a while, if you take the “eighteen is an adult” philosophy as truth. (I don’t.) But, 2025 will be the first year that I enter
undeniably as a grown up and it’s pushed me — completely against my will, might I add — to reflect upon the grown ups who preceded me. The hands that burped me, the lips that shushed me, the eyes that smiled back.

In all my dewy, opaque memories, I can’t recall a woman who wore thirty this way; that’s not a proclamation of uniqueness, but rather an apperception that what’s next is completely and utterly up to me. There is no blueprint. The idea is terrifying and lung-stopping in its mystery.

The women of my youth were, for the most part, passengers. My grandmothers, my mother, my aunts — all products (sometimes victims) of the men in their lives. That’s not to say that the drivers, their husbands, steered them astray; I only mean that they didn’t have a ton of say. Of course, I’m sure there’s only so much I could pick up on as a child, but I remember eavesdropping on many a conversation between my mom and a friend, or my Nana and a churchmate; the talks were almost always centered around a “him.” They were almost always never positive.

The women shared stories of the before times about as frequently as asteroids fall. It sometimes felt like their pre-marital lives hadn’t existed at all, like my grandmother was but a thing that my grandfather picked from the supermarket shelf, along with the sauerkraut and motor oil. She liked yellow and drank her coffee with way too much milk and sugar. Was it the only sweetness she knew?

Men don’t take up much space in my life. I share blood with many, sure — there’s my brother and and my father, my brothers-in-law, my uncles, my grandfather, cousins. And there are the boys, sweet and small and yet to be burdened with the ponderosity of manhood. But they are akin to finches or sparrows; there, but fleeting in their presence.

It’s been over a decade since I’ve heard a man’s voice tell me what to do. The authoritative voice in my head does not thunder with the boorish bass of testosterone, but with the candied lilt of kindness. I don’t hate men. But my life, for the most part, has not been shaped by, for, or with them. They are not a thing from which I’ve had to liberate myself. Without a calloused hand to steer sway sweep me — where I end up is certain as dandelion fluff. The idea is terrifying and lung-stopping in its mystery.

I want to wear my thirties like a vintage mink stole, a cashmere turtleneck, a Mulberry silk scarf, an emerald green feather boa, golden rings. Loudly, loudly. I am uninterested in the song and dance of losing and finding and losing again; even at my lowest I wish to never wish to part with myself.

My mother wore her thirties like a secret, like lingerie, like a whisper of white chiffon against her cashew skin. I’m sure it was there and beautiful and plush when it wanted to be and lightning when it didn’t, but it was not a thing shared with me often. When it was, it was by accident: an angry sob, a mis-sent sext, a spot of blood on the toilet seat.

The first time I attempted a tampon, I left the plastic applicator on and clenched my thighs like a vice grip, utterly confused about why blood still ran down my legs. I didn’t feel comfortable asking those questions. Being a woman seemed a private quest; a thing to figure out on one’s own.

The women I knew sought joy at the expense of responsibility. It was not their fault that they could not hold both at the same time. (Or was it? Had their mothers taught them how?) Joy, the tricky thing, was found not at our dining room table, but in tall bottles of Grey Goose; in second cell phones; in the rebellious embrace of affairs. Our own kitchen was void of feminine touch, but when the women themselves got together, laughter leaked like warm light from the cracks of the kitchen door. What was the joke?

The idea is terrifying and lung-stopping in its mystery.

The women in my family, from left to right: my maternal great-grandmother, Celanire, my paternal great-grandmother, Shirley, my maternal grandmother, Myrna, me, my mother, Tiffany, and my paternal grandmother, Linda. All from New Orleans, Louisiana.

(It’s a common advisory not to fall in love with a writer, but no one warns you about giving birth to one. The way they will spin your pain into their own and blame you for both. The way they’ll wrap your neck in their umbilical cord and call it a scarf. The way they’ll later hum truth like a lullaby. This is not my intention.)

The women that I knew were at first passengers to their men, and then to their children. (And they all had children.) My mother entered her thirtieth year with two toddlers and a fetus in her womb. Her life belonged to us as much, if not more so, than it did to her. I shudder at this thought, with both guilt and fright.

Between the ages of six and eleven, my family spent every Thanksgiving and Mardi Gras break at Disney World in Orlando, Florida. (Which, for me, was a wonderful, magical thing.) But my mother would’ve been thirty, -one, -two, -three, -four, -five and -six, meaning that every “vacation” that she took in the first half of her third decade was sticky, snotty, and not what she wanted. Did she ever know the soft crash of a wave without the pierce of a child’s screech? When did she meet the ocean?

In my memories, there are many restaurants with paper tablecloths atop the cloth ones. (I don’t know if they were actually as prevalent as they are in my head, or if these meals were the most impactful on my childhood for one reason or another.) Us kids would scribble and scratch rainbows and butterflies, cats and dogs and flowers and the night sky. My mother would always, unwaveringly, draw a lashed eye with a single tear. I thought, great, my mom is having fun. I thought, wow, she’s drawing with us. Never, what are you looking for? Never, why does the eye always cry?

The idea is terrifying and lung-stopping in its mystery.

My womanhood is loud and supreme.

It does not compete with motherhood or men or anything else. The same is true for the women in my community. Every gathering — be it a Tuesday night on the sofa or a Sunday morning in San Miguel — is a gala. We have been afforded the oft discounted luxury of choice; we have met the world and ourselves; we like both.

Of course there are a plethora of variables that make this possible — my queerness, my income, the passage of time. Unlike (most) men who have known a sort of freedom for longer than they have not, we have become incrementally more liberated with each generation. I’m not so dense as to believe that I am who, how, where I am, without their contributions, the women I knew. I have been gifted with a sweet elasticity; thirty reverberates like the moan of a saxophone.

Now, there is joy both at the table and in the glass; we dance with bare feet; we laugh with the door wide open. How did we stumble upon such luck?

The idea is terrifying and lung-stopping in its mystery.

Outside, the pines weep rain, the wind blows salt. The final days of my year will be spent here, on the coast of British Colombia, a place whose rocky shore my foremothers toes have never touched.

The windows of the house are tremendous and frame the gray-blue sky as it pales into the sea. It looks like the rest of my life.