Former Selves...

Yesterday one of my oldest and dearest friends wrote to me of a strange experience. It was her 39th birthday, and she had been feeling blue--too much time at home with a young child, not enough purpose, lonely in a new neighborhood, and longing for her old self. That very morning, on a street corner, she met her old self. It was a young woman, around 30, wearing a colorful Mexican top from Oaxaca. She was cute and smart and charismatic and they struck up a conversation. She was a struggling actor, just like Jo had been, and reminded Jo so much of her former self it both delighted her and freaked her out. She wondered what it meant. But she loved her conversation with the girl, and felt alive, truly alive, talking to her. She felt an instant kinship with her, and the spark of a new friendship. She wondered what it meant. Later she said it was just like meeting her old self. She said she didn't want to be that old self anymore. She just missed her.

I feel like that a lot. Being a mother is so wonderful. But you are forced to let go of your old self. The needs of everyone else take priority. Instead of having adventures, being interesting, learning new things and changing the world, you are taking care of a few people who may or may not even appreciate it. But most of all, all the things that made you YOU just seem to fade away, like leaves falling from the tree. The tree is still there, strong, powerful, with deep roots. But the leaves fall, and new ones grow in, that look and feel different from the old. It is alarming. You know something new is growing, but you don't know what exactly, yet.

I miss my old self. But I don't miss ALL my old selves. I went to my 20th Wellesley College reunion in June. I had the best time. But it was not without ambivalence. As I approached the campus on Friday I felt active dread. I did not love my time there. By Sunday I was grateful for all Wellesley had given me, a love of scholarship, a belief in the power of women to change the world, and a female utopia to see feminism and scholarship played out, beauty, and secret alcoves to curl up with books by the greatest thinkers of all times. I can feel all those things are a part of me. But I do not miss my Wellesley self. She felt unformed, still. I was actually surprised when people other than my very best friends even recognized me. I feel like I must look different visually. I feel so different. I didn't love that self. She wasn't cooked. She wasn't fully me.

But my mid-20s to mid-30s self I loved. She was adventurous and bold, creative and fun. She was a feminist. She was often lonely, always longing for love, but she was feisty and alive and living life to the fullest. When I pull out music from that time, or books, I miss that woman with an ache like Jo missed her former self.

I would like to meet my old self on a street corner.

Or maybe we have many former selves, scattered over the globe, held only in the hearts of those who knew us at that time, in that place. And maybe only a very, very few people in this life get to know ALL of those selves. And those that do we cling to. Like the old Nigerian saying: A friend is one who can sing you the song in your heart, even when you have forgotten how it goes.

This weekend I go to visit one of my oldest friends and most favorite people. She is 42 and terribly ill with metastatic breast cancer. She is my peer and my fellow adventurer. I have lived in Japan with her, hiked in the redwoods with her, stayed in the slums of Calcutta with her, and summered at Stinson with her. I have known all her selves since she was 20, and she has known all mine. We have watched each others various incarnations and struggles. I have watched as she renounced her worldly ambitions and became a yoga instructor and Esalen junkie, a spiritual searcher of the highest order. She has watched as I left journalism (my dream job) got married, had children, and settled down in a big house in Los Angeles, the last place she or I ever thought I would end up. But I have always invited her into my new worlds, my new selves, and she has done the same with me. This fall, at a gathering I feared would be our last, I began crying uncontrollably. I was crying out of terror I would lose her. But perhaps most of all I was crying because she is my history, and I am hers. She knows all my selves. She can pull me back on the right path with a few words, and remind me where it is I want to be going. Where all my selves have been aiming, even when they were still unformed at 20. When/if I lose her, which is something I need to begin to brace myself for, so that I can really really appreciate the NOW, with all the bittersweetness of knowing it cannot go on forever, I will lose part of my history, inscribed by someone who loves me. She knows my struggles and loves and goals and fears better than my parents do, and has known me longer than my husband.

So this Friday morning I head up for a weekend alone with her. I am taking our little red mini--a happy car--and filling it with acoustic chick music that reminds me of my former self, and hers. I am going to sit in her little houseboat on a boardwalk in Larkspur, Ca, under the shadow of Mount Tamalpais, and I am going to savor her, her history, my history, and our history together. And I am going to be with her--so that we can slip back into our thirty-something adventurous selves for one final girls weekend. We will dance and eat raw foods. We will drive around the redwoods of Marin County in my little red mini. And we we sit and tell each other stories, until she falls asleep.

And I will take care of her.