I have had three epiphanies in my my life, or at least what arise to epiphany in the context of my life. These framings... spotlights... guiding beacons... revealed themselves during times that were dark and difficult. All three of them have been life changing. Having spent a good deal of my life as a Roman Catholic (one of the greatest genealogical disruptions of my life - but that is a different blog post), I am uniquely trained to be watching for and ready to receive such celestial messages (kidding).
Really for me, they are less celestial than cerebral. There are always these things that are dancing around the edges of my mind and sometimes they come into hard focus. With that focus comes both relief and a call to a particular kind of action that is most taxing and sacrificing.. These epiphanies have been directional - moving me away from patterns and people that were keeping me stuck in toxic spaces and proximities.
The most recent epiphany occurred today. I have been miserable, lonely, broken, sad, etc. and desperately seeking a life mate. This is going about as well as one might expect, when the internet is involved, and one is far too desperate to sit still and let the universe do its work. My husband died in 2014 after a long illness. We hadn't functionally been partners for about seven years before his passing. But we had a long and good relationship before his illness that I miss deeply and keep trying to replicate... replace... recreate... rebuild... relocate...
Since it has been about 2 billion *literal* degrees this weekend, I have been sitting in front of a fan reading. I am visiting Roxane Gay's writing this fateful - fate filled - moment when I come across her thinking about "girls", Gay writes that "Every woman has a series of episodes about her twenties, her girlhood, and how she came out of it." (Bad Feminist, pg.52-53) My brain did that thing it does in moments leading to revelation - it spoke ... "what got you out of 'girlhood' [Noelle], was a man". I wasn't surprised, nor did this strike me as the epiphany level material it turned out to be. The subsequent mental responses, however, held my attention.
You had no mothering, no maternal compass, no fathering, no paternal reflection and no actual girlhood to speak of.
Your "girlhood" was filled with trauma, violence, fear, rage and stolen copies of Seventeen.
No one taught you how to be a "girl", "woman", adult female identified person or, for that matter, human.
You had two children while fighting through a "girlhood" and adolescence you were not really participating in nor experiencing in ways other "girls" did.
The thing that drew you out the other side of your "girlhood" was Michael, the man you married.
For you, "girlhood" - the survival of and exit from, "the feminine", your female identified realities, are predicated on a man - a dead man.
I went on to finish Gay's chapter "Girls, Girls, Girls" and what revealed itself to me was that the disruption - genealogical, social, emotional, familial, psychic - created a void where relationships with female identified folks should have been. While other 15-25 year old female identified folks were helping to shape EACH OTHER'S realities - for good bad or indifferent - I was almost completely alone. To be IN OR come OUT of "girlhood", there needs to be a contextual/relative space which orients their "girlhood", and more importantly their "girlness" on/in/around. In the absence of other female identified peers to contextualize the location of my ghood (I really like that) ... I simply didn't HAVE one ... I performed "girlness" as a sexual space only and, frankly, my "woman-ness" was predicated on the same of which marriage was a part.
By virtue of the adoption system, I was given to and raised by a woman who had no female friends of her own. My adoptive mother also performed her "woman-ness" as a sexual, male-protected-perpetuated reality. This led to her almost 30 year relationship with a married man. This is how I understood, and what shaped both my journey through "girlhood" but also my "woman-ness". My husband was married when we met.
The way that Gay's "girlhood" is resonating with me, I understand this space to be a liminal space that is shared - perhaps must be shared - with other female identified people. I spent my "girlhood" in near isolation from my peers. My adoptive mother did not allow me or my sister to have friends. We did not have birthday parties, sleep overs, nor friends just casually stopping over. I don't remember my sister having friends either. We were also not allowed to go to other people's houses with any regularity. I have a few precious memories of going to a friend's house or sneaking out. What we did have was TV. And so, our journey through girlhood was very much socialized to young adult shows, that were not as abundant as they are now, and my grandmother's stories.
Imagine your entire sense of "girlhood" and the destination "womanhood" shaped by Nicki Newman on Young and the Restless or Brooke Logan on the Bold and the Beautiful. My journey's destination was not "womanhood" it was marriage... and so I did.
The messy years between 1989 and 1995 were that of trying to mother two little boys, working multiple jobs at a time for minimum wage, keeping custody of my children, partying hard with no money, and finding a life mate in every terrible bar in our miserable little post-industrial hell. Some of the experiences that I see depicted as "girlhood" are familiar to me as things I experienced between the ages of 20-25. Those experiences came at high prices that were paid not only by me but my children. They didn't feel like spaces of "coming of age". They felt like near death scenairios and a lot of scraping by.
I met my husband when I was 25 and he was 39. I always felt, and I think he did to, that he saved me. He rescued me. He taught me to do the adult things I needed to do. He taught me how to parent. He couldn't, however, fill in the gaps that "girlfriends" might have occupied.. He, being 14 years older, hated my friends and separated me from them. And so my context for "womanhood" was AS married - no matter what. I lived that context for almost 20 years.
My "how she came out of it" wasn't an internally driven journey. I was pulled out of it by an older man. It was a moment. Life changing, and probably for the best at the time; it was about the saving and shaping up to be what my husband needed in a partner. And it was safe, and it was warm, and it was better than any life I ever knew. But, it wasn't a coming of age story - it was a savior story. I was the subject not the protagonist. And, until today, I had no fucking idea it was happening (epiphany as promised).
So many things about my life are slamming into focus today. These gaps in my genealogical access, to other women and female identified intimate others - cousins, sisters, aunts... my genetic mother, these things impacted my life far more than I could have articulated. I knew I was missing something. I didn't realize I was missing everything.
When we think about genealogical disruption we think about jails, death, adoption, etc. But, there are so many other ways that we are severed from ourselves - removed from our bodies, in real time - ongoing time. This disruption, "girlhood" disrupted, shows up in the simple things I infer that other people take for granted. Coming of age stories... "girlfriends"... family...
To come of age, one must be born and have access to who they are, who they were, and who they were born as. Adoption and the resulting childhood traumas and violences have left me with mostly the present and a very limited sense of who I was during my marriage. The rest has been not only disrupted, but destroyed - unrecoverable.
And so now I am wondering... how do I write me... right me... How do I frame relationships that are going to hold me, here, where I arrived today. Do I go make "girlfriends"? Is that a thing at 49? What should I expect from those relationships? I have female identified friends at work. I have called, and consider, some female identified friends "besties". But, I don't know how to get those relationships to do things that Gay is telling us about in her writing. I feel like I have yet to "come out of" "girlhood"... and it shows in my intimate relationships ...
I am feeling like the answer is that I don't need to be rescued ... I need to emerge ... but I have no idea where the exit is and the things I need to lead me there are inaccessible. I don't have enough life - literal time to live - to recover all that was taken and withheld from me. I cannot relive the 17,896.883 days that have occurred in my absence - the absence of self - my self
Myself.
There was and probably still isn't anything about this shit in Seventeen...
More soon...
Baby girl (ascending from girlhood)
