Notes from the Quiet Becoming

People sometimes ask when my stepdad became my dad. I wish I had a simple answer.

I have been thinking a great deal lately about the women I have been throughout my life. Not the different versions of me that came with age, but the women I believed I had to become in order to survive.

There are some lessons you never remember learning.

I learned something recently that I did not expect to bother me as much as it did. My ex-husband is writing a book.

There is something strange about being called the strong one.

There was a time when I never pictured myself becoming an adult. I do not know exactly why. Maybe because surviving took up so much room. Maybe because pain has a way of shortening your vision. Maybe because when you spend your childhood trying to make it through the day, you do not always learn how to imagine thirty years from now.

I used to think wonder belonged mostly to children. To scraped knees and summer evenings. To imaginary worlds and library books. To girls sitting on bedroom floors surrounded by dolls and stories, believing dragons existed somewhere just beyond the edge of ordinary life.

We spend so much time believing life changes us in earthquakes. The heartbreaks. The losses. The moments that split us open and rearrange everything we thought we knew.

I cannot remember a time when little Jenny simply felt like a child. Maybe that sounds sad. Maybe it is. But when I search through my memories, I do not find a girl running freely through them.

There are some losses that do not come with funerals. No casseroles at the door. No sympathy cards. No flowers from well-meaning friends who do not know what to say. Just quiet. Quiet doctor appointments. Quiet tears in bathroom mirrors. Quiet drives home where you try to hold yourself together long enough to make it through the front door.

Before we were women, we were just girls—crowding bedrooms, borrowing clothes without asking, fighting over bathroom mirrors, and rolling our eyes at one another as if sisterhood were something we could ever outgrow.

When people look at a woman like me…