Reflections on turning 49

Sometimes it's your children who remind you that we must constantly look at things in a different way

Summer 2024 at Idyllwild Arts in Cali where I taught memoir for the 2nd year

On December 9th, I turned 49.

It feels strange to know that in much of the writing my mother left me when she died last year, she was 47 and 48, writing letters to her daughter about her life.

She’d only live to 69, an age that used to feel far off, distant the way 49 once felt.

I don’t know when she started writing the stories she left me. This is what I do know:

I was in my early twenties when I told ma I am a writer. She dug into the same bookcase she had in the living room since I was a kid (which still held the Compton’s Encyclopedia set she bought from a door-to-door salesman back in the mid-eighties) and took out a legal pad filled with her writing. “Yo comencé a escribir mi historia,” she said as I flipped through the pages. Her hand was so hard, the backs of the pages felt like braille.

When I started reading she yanked the legal pad from me and laughed when I reached for it. I whined, “Lemme read. I wanna read.”

“Cuando yo me muera,” she said, still smiling.

I’ve thought of those pages so many times over the years. I thought about them when she died last June.

My memoir begins with this scene.

When I went to her apartment weeks after she died, I went looking for that legal pad. I found much more than I expected, but I never found that legal pad.

She mentioned several times throughout her pages that she was 47 & 48 as she was writing. This was just before I had my daughter, her second granddaughter, fourth and last grandchild, the only one from me.

When I told my mother I was having a girl, her face twisted, “I don’t like girls. Girls come to this world to suffer.”

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I spent much of my last day of 48 just looking at the sky, the silhouettes of trees against the blue and wispy white clouds, the elegance of the trunks and branches, the way some of them jut out and others bent like ballerina arms.

I put seed and suet in the feeder on the deck and waited to see who would discover the feed first. It was a red bellied woodpecker whose belly is in fact not red or so I thought until I did a quick google search: “Oddly enough, the Red-bellied Woodpecker is named for its least distinctive feature, a light wash of red or pink on its belly that can only be seen if the bird is hanging upside-down.”

Next came the blue jays, then then the nuthatches, a male red cardinal, then a female, then the black capped chickadee.

If you told me 20, 30 years ago that I’d know all these different birds at 48, I’d laugh at you. There’s so much I’ve done , so much I’ve become over these years that I couldn’t have imagined I’d do or be back then. Those times feel like not that long ago, and also feel so far away.

I feel more myself than I ever have. And also, a part of me feels lost. But this is middle age, right? They say you’re supposed to have it all figured out by now. I don’t. I’m not sure I know anyone who does. What I do know is that my brain has been telling me lies. It’s been telling me that I haven’t done enough, haven’t become enough…but if I step back and really look, I am filled with a feeling that scares me…

It’s not quite pride.

It’s not contentment.

Nor is it completion.

The closest word I can think of that feels right in my body is: awe. It was my daughter’s performance onSaturday, December 7th that made me feel this.

For the first time in all her years of being a dancer, my daughter Vasia was in charge of an entire performance—the choreography, recruiting dancers, teaching said dancers the choreography, rehearsals, costumes, lights, stage directions, everything. What I didn’t know was that my daughter dedicated this piece to three generations of women in our family. She titled the piece: Giving me the capacity for wings (inspired by my memoir in progress A Dim Capacity for Wings). The synopsis in the program reads:

My piece explores the intergenerational transmission of emotions, habits, personality traits, ideologies, and beliefs, both positive and negative, across three generations: myself, my mother, and my grandmother. I will showcase how a deep connection to the earth has been passed down through these generations, from my grandmother to my mother, and finally to me. The movement will reflect both the styles I've trained in and my personal growth in improvisation, creating a powerful embodiment of this legacy.

The stage is black. A white screen at the back of the stage turns on. Words are typed:

“My mother always tells me to put my hands in soil when everything I’m carrying becomes too much to bear. She says it will take it and put it in the most beautiful places.”

The stage goes black again and the performance begins.

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The next day, December 8th, I went out and put my hands in soil. It’s late fall, the ground is nearly frozen, resting, so it was more cleaning that I did. Moving energy. Shifting. Giving the soil this sadness I’ve been carrying. My daughter reminded me that the earth will take it and make it beautiful…

I thought about the mirror my daughter held in front of me, like she was saying: “Look ma.” I felt held while I watched the performance… By my wife who was next to me, filming to my left, and my daughter’s best friend, a gorgeous Haitian young man whose energy reminds me of my brother. (That my daughter has that is everything because Carlos was everything and who doesn’t wish that for their kid?)

I felt seen and held by my daughter. She put into movement what it’s been like to be one of these three generations of women…

I set out to not raise my daughter the way I was raised. To not do to her what ma did to me. My daughter helped me see that I’ve also given her the nourishing lessons ma gave me—the ones I learned in the backyard oasis ma created in the war zone that was Bushwick, Brooklyn in that era.

Image by Meryl Meisler, Bushwick circa 1982

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Excerpt from “In Search of My Mother’s Garden,” a chapter in my memoir

Dear Ma,

I was all of four years old but I remember when we moved into that first floor apartment on Palmetto Street in Bushwick, Brooklyn in the spring of 1980. The same apartment I grew up in. The apartment you never left. That was the year retired film actor Ronald Reagan was elected the 40th president of the US and a new music genre rose out of the Bronx onto the national stage with Sugar Hill Gang’s Rapper’s Delight. That summer a heat wave scorched the city. You didn’t let any of that stop you. 

I watched you standing by the window one morning, surveying the backyard, coffee in hand, the steam fogged the glass. There were piles of trash, and the makeshift barriers that separated ours from the surrounding yards were made of plywood, clumsily nailed together and falling apart so there were gaping holes in spots. My eyes landed on the tree in the far left corner of the yard.

Days later, you climbed out the window and went to work, sweeping up the years of garbage, bags that smelled of something dead or dying, cracked flower pots, a fork with twisted tongs; and threw it all over the dilapidated fence into the junk yard next door which was already piled high with trash. It was one of the many rubble strewn lots that dotted our neighborhood back then.

I tiptoed past you and stood at the foot of the tree; I’d learn later it was a plum tree. A past resident had painted the trunk a dull salmon color. I picked at the chipping paint, pulling some trunk with it, patted the tree and whispered, “Hi. I’m Vanessa.” I was scrawny, a wee thing really, but already unstoppable. 

Decades later I overheard you tell someone: “Vanessa was always big. Even when she was little, she was big.”

I started grappling up the trunk, scraping my legs and hands, peeling the pleather off my sneakers. At one point, a sharp branch stabbed into my side. I winced but kept climbing. You screamed at me to get down, “Te vas a dar un mal golpe, machúa!” But I wasn’t bothered by being called a tomboy. I saw nothing wrong with doing things girls weren’t “supposed to” do. Who made those rules anyway? You cut your eyes at me while I kept climbing. “No vengas llorando cuando te caigas, ¿oíste?!” It took me weeks, but I didn’t give up, and neither did you. 

You weren’t the Martha Stewart type of gardener with a sun hat and apron. You worked in a sofrito stained nightgown or a t-shirt and shorts. You found an old shovel and took to tilling the soil, using your right leg to push the shovel into the ground to bring up the dark soil and squirming earthworms. When the earth wouldn’t give, you got on all fours and used your hands. Then you went out and bought the seeds. When you laid them out on the kitchen table, I saw that each packet had a picture of the potential inside: peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, squash, herbs like peppermint, cilantro and rosemary, flowers like geraniums and sunflowers. You handled the seeds with a tenderness I envied.

I can still see you now, your hands in the soil, the dirt is caked in the creases and under your fingernails. You stand, raise your face to the sun, close your eyes, your lips curl into a toothless smile. You inhale so deep, I watch the air swell your belly and climb back out. A satisfied sigh. It’s the most content I ever saw you.
***

The first time I put my hands in that soil was after a storm. I sunk my hands into the black mud and brought it up to my nose. I still remember the way the smell wafted into me, a smell I swore I knew and that it knew me. I sat there for a while, inhaling the smell that was somehow both familiar and foreign. How could I know this earth? We’d just moved there and I was only four–what did I know about what the earth could give if you just put a little effort.

All I knew then was that I felt a strange, strong connection to that dirt, its scent, the way it made a space in me and stayed there, like it was touching on something ancient, that existed deep in me before I was even me. But this is the adult me speaking. The four year old Vanessa just felt the pull, the want to be lying on the earth, hair slick with mud, dirt pilled on my neck, underneath my fingernails.

I’ve smelled that same scent and felt that same pull many times over the years. This string, an umbilical cord, has never left me.

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Yes, my ma was hard. Ma also gave me lessons about the earth and its capacity that I carry to this day. Lessons I’ve shared with my daughter, who has in turn put into her art, the way she lives, pursuing her dreams relentlessly.

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My birthday was also the last day of my undergraduate Advanced Nonfiction Workshop at my alma mater Columbia University. It was my first time serving as an adjunct at the university. I had an incredible semester with a group of brilliant writers who took on topics they normally wouldn’t have touched but said they did because I gave them the courage and safe space to do so.

I love teaching and I’m really good at it. It’s taken me a long time to say this with my whole chest. I know teaching at an Ivy League university is an enormous accomplishment, and yet it pales compared to what my daughter showed me this past weekend.

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I recently got a rejection that hobbled me, and sent me sinking me deeper into a depression that I haven’t quite climbed out of. I started questioning so much—why I do the work I do, if it even matters. A few days later, I shared what I was feeling with my daughter. We were sitting on the bank of the Hudson, staring at the water. She’d cried to me the night before about how tired she was with her six class load & various jobs teaching dance. My beautiful daughter looked at me & said: “No, mom, you can’t give up. You can’t let what one person said stop you. Your stories matter, ma. They save lives. I know because they saved mine.”

If I’ve done anything right in this lifetime, it is her. I haven’t given up on writing, but I also haven’t touched my book since…

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I’ve been reminded over the past few days leading up to my 49th birthday that yes, I’ve done more than enough, but what I’ve done that makes me the most proud, that makes me feel the most accomplished, that fills me with awe, is raise my daughter into the amazing young woman she is.

I picked up my pen again. And I opened up the doc that is my book… I’m still staring at it, but I know for certain that I am ready to go back in.

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I recently watched Dead Poet’s Society. Today I’m thinking of the scene where John Keating, played by the incomparable Robin Williams, stands on his desk and tells his students:

I stand upon my desk to remind myself that we must constantly look at things in a different way. You see, the world looks very different from up here. You don’t believe me? Come see for yourself. Come on. Come on! Just when you think you know something, you have to look at it in another way. Even though it may seem silly or wrong, you must try!”

Standing in that audience watching my daughter be brilliant was my version of standing on a desk. I hope I remember always how different my life and the world looks from this angle…

To my daughter: You are the gift.

To myself: So are you, V. So. Are. You.