Very shortly after Thomas was born (like an hour after), my friend Hannah, having immediately done Thomas’ birth chart, texted me “born with the moon in cancer, he’s little green!” There, a flash of recognition, a reference to a beloved song in a moment when I had all but forgotten who I am and who I’ve been. My friend reminded me, maybe accidentally — you are Amy, you are alive, people know you, there are things you love. I had just given birth. I was nearly completely wrung out, suspended in time outside of time. I could have been anyone in that moment, an archetypal “mother,” but I was still myself. Hannah reminded me. You have favorite songs! I suddenly remembered myself. It was a strange moment, returning to my own mind in my own body, though everything had changed and I’d been through something extraordinary.
(this is me as a baby. looks like my baby. genetics are really wild.)
Most years I write an essay on my birthday — three years in succession I did anyway, twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six (links at the bottom of the essay if you want to read anything from the past). I missed last year, twenty-seven, stuck underneath pandemic and pregnancy I guess, both so consuming and strange. This year I didn’t want to let it pass me by. I’m still myself, right? In spite of all that has changed, I am still a person who writes a strange birthday essay? Who stops to take stock of whatever is there? Yes, that is who I am.
This will be brief. I don’t have much to say. I am busy. I have hardly been thinking of anything except motherhood — the endlessness of it, the way all my cells have died and been remade over some unspecified amount of time (rolling) so I’m somehow a whole new person — and I’m worried no one wants to talk about that.
On my birthday, yesterday, I was struck with nostalgia with surprising force. I wanted to remember myself. I’d been avoiding it, I think. My life has changed more extremely than it possibly ever has before. It’s a little bit painful to look back. I miss every place I’ve ever lived, every street I’ve ever walked down and loved, the roads, the hallways, the trees. I miss the lakes and rivers, the apartments and houses that have been mine. I miss who I used to be.
But I am! I am myself! For all that has changed, there’s some incredible progress I’ve made! Some development, like an image coming into focus. Some things I had really hoped for that now feel real, not just maybes. The nostalgia doesn’t feel that useful, I guess. Special, important, but not useful. I feel so tenderly toward myself. I also feel so clear on how I have changed. This all probably sounds murky, or maybe obvious, but it’s a big deal to me. To Rilke’s directive “you must change your life” — I say, honestly, I have! I have! I have, and I will again. I’ve learned that change is a thing I can survive, embody, hold within me. That feels intrinsically linked to motherhood. Someone wise told me, as a word of advice, “babies are change.” They were right. I’m more adaptable than I thought I was.
On the evening of my birthday I put on Greta Gerwig’s Little Women, a film that I deeply love, that is important to me, one that I felt so identified by when it arrived, just at the perfect time — the tail end of my Jo March years. But that’s the truth of it — that really was the tail end. It came out in December 2019, just a few months before the pandemic, before I became pregnant. I could feel the shift coming for me. I wrote about it, talked about it with friends. I named the change, calling like a bird, sensing it like a scent on the edge of the wind. The tide turning. Time to move. In some ways watching and processing this film helped me step forward with confidence, or at least commitment. I’d lived my girlhood. I’d met and married my husband. I’d started my career. I’d failed so many times in so many weird and obvious ways, I’d hurt people I loved, I’d made big things happen just by sheer force of will. I’d taken definitive steps, hit the tops and bottoms of myself as I knew them. I’d lived in a big city and in the woods, both. So much doing, so much figuring out what I was doing, it was time to lose it all again. It was time to be undone.
I wrote this in an essay shortly after watching Little Women in theaters three times in a row:
This decade was about myself. It was so personal, so internal, so deep and wide and unspeakable. I don’t think this next decade will be about me so much – I sense that even now. I think I’ll have to shed myself, die a little, lay some things down. That’s good. That’s hard.
And that’s exactly what happened. I knew that stepping into my next decade, into motherhood, caregiving, cultivating, would undo me and it has. I was pregnant in a pandemic, I gave birth, I did things I didn’t know I could do. And last night, when I watched Little Women again, I couldn’t quite see myself in Jo anymore. I’ve never felt that way before. It was a surprise, a bit of a grief. I knew it was coming, but it still stung.
One scene in particular — Laurie looking up after leaving Orchard House for the first time, having brought Meg and Jo home from the party in his carriage, seeing Jo in the window pacing in her attic workspace, candlelit, writing. Jo, having all the time in the world. Jo working, building herself into whatever she would be. I watched that moment of that film and stood apart from it for the first time. For so much of my life, that was where I was — pacing the attic, deep focus, in the middle, endless time to follow the thread of the thought, of the dream. Now I’m somewhere else. Now I’m down in the kitchen, scrubbing. Now I’m waking for the baby. Now I’m scribbling but bracing for the cry. Now I’m interrupted. Still me, still writing, still candlelit, but different. Not that vision in the attic anymore, youthful truth. I have grown up. I’m more Marmee than Jo, but not really, that’s not even it. More like Jo starting the school, Jo after her book is published (what then?), Jo married, Jo worried, Jo working, Jo becoming a mother to her first newborn boy. I’m in the part of the story that doesn’t have a blockbuster movie, a bestselling book. I’m in the lesser-read sequel. I’m sort of nowhere at all.
I think I’m okay with that. It is what it is, at least. My life, ongoing. I’ve changed before, I’ll change again. I was a baby once. I really thought about that yesterday, on my birthday, the fact that it is the day I was born. I was breech and stubborn, would not turn — so I was born via c-section a few days before I was due. I was born, then I was a child, then I was a teenager, then a young adult, now a new parent. All these shifts deeply felt. I want to honor all of it, all the ways I’ve been. I want to honor where I am now, what has changed, the fact that it’s deeply different than where I was before. I came across this paragraph from the essay I wrote when I turned twenty-five — the idea of a very special imaginary birthday party where the guests are myself at every age. What a strange idea, what a dream!
If you come to my party, I will be the one crying and wearing handmade pink pants. You can eat some pizza, though I can’t guarantee there will be much left for you. You will say things to me, but I won’t remember them. I will say things to you, and you’ll say, “What?” Maybe six-year-old Amy will be there, wearing a cotton dress with sunflowers on it trying to dance for everyone in the room. Maybe twelve-year-old Amy will be there, sitting near the food table reading the chapter-book she brought with her. Maybe seventeen-year-old Amy will be there with long, straightened hair wishing fervently for a boy to notice her. Maybe twenty-year-old Amy will be there, loudly laughing with her friends in a corner, noticing nothing else. Maybe twenty-two-year-old Amy will be there holding her fiance’s hand and smiling at everyone. Maybe infant Amy will be there too, passed from person to person, with wide-open brown eyes. Infant Amy could be anyone at all, but she is me, impossibly. Why does that make me want to weep? Maybe that’s why I’m crying at the party, the incarnation of it all! Who knows! This party, a crazy party, and not very chill at all, but full of the truest of friends bearing witness to who I’ve been and who I will be. The party has nice music. It’s in a room with large open windows looking out over a meadow. It’s hot but not too hot. We all have drinks and keep setting them down and losing them. Wooden chairs. There are flowers, unkempt, about to wilt, and everywhere. There are secret angels there too. I am made of gratefulness, I am twenty-five. I have seen a quarter of a century, I am deeply confused, and I will go on climbing.
I want to invite myself as I am now to the party too, bleary-eyed, sometimes rage-full, somewhat quiet and calm and self-possessed. Myself a new mother, learning who I am within new boundaries, constraints, surprises, wild joys. Is that who I am now? I’m not sure. It’s easier to tell in hindsight. I am twenty-eight. I don’t know yet what is unfolding right underneath me.
Ha, I said this would be brief. Well reader, it’s my birthday, and I lied!
Links to the other birthday essays: Twenty-four, Twenty-five, Twenty-six — all of which are found on Synchronized Swim, a blog my brilliant friend Jessie and I diligently wrote weekly for YEARS. I’m amazed by that even now. It feels like a treasure, and though some of the writing isn’t quite polished (we were writing weekly! that’s a lot of essays to figure out!) a lot of it is sort of evergreen and somewhat magical, at least in my opinion. Some of the work of the previous season of life, evidence of the commitment and tenacity that was slowly bearing more fruit than I thought it was, and I’m grateful for it.