Matrilineal questions

I am older than my mom was when she lost her mother

I wrote the following post over the summer (in the northern hemisphere) and it has been sitting on my drafts since as I waited for what felt like the right moment to share it. Since my mother’s birthday is this week, this might just be it.

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I am older than my mom was when she lost her mother.

The realization hit me the other morning, during my reading time, sipping iced coffee. Between one paragraph and the next, I stopped, looked up, and did some quick math before confirming the feeling that had hit me in the pit of my stomach, for no real reason.

Not only that, but I passed that age a couple of years ago.

It is strange to think that so many life events have happened at different points in time for both of us: she got married before I did (but I was living with Life Associate before that), I didn’t have a child at the age of 28. But the loss of her mother, of my grandmother and godmother, was something I had not considered until very recently.

Do people have a moment when they realize they have officially and unquestionably turned into an adult? This might be mine.

I’m not saying I considered myself a perpetual teenager of sorts, but for several years it felt like I inhabited a generational haze, probably not helped by the non-stop discourse of millennials as inconsequential younglings (even though many of us have already hit forty). I wasn’t a kid, but was I a proper adult? Sure, I’ve been filing and paying taxes for years now; sure, the gray hairs haven’t stopped coming and standing out; sure, I can’t eat a bag of chips in one sitting and feel fine after. But none of this seemed to sink in—the in being the operative word. These were things that were happening, to me and around me, but I allowed myself to live in this suspended age where some things had changed and others very much not. I don’t feel like the same person I was when, ten years ago, I was getting emotionally and administratively ready to move to NYC and start my PhD, and thank goodness for that. But I also don’t see myself that much older, that much fundamentally different. Add to this whole thing the strange experience of time that the student-worker liminal space of a doctoral candidacy imposes on us, not helped by the compression and distention of time doing a significant part of it during the height of the covid pandemic.

Where have the years gone? I ask myself, gray hair and glasses, shaking my fists angrily at the clouds.

Wait, no. That is very much not it.

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I was around four when my grandmother died. There are many things I remember about her, and of her, but considering how old I was and how long it has been, it is safe to conclude that these are mostly memories of things I once remembered.

Like how she would always have buttery toasts and cookies waiting for me in a large jar in her kitchen cupboard when we came to visit. How she would take me for “rides” in her lap when she was wheelchair-bound after surgery. I remember her strawberry bush and her rosebush, and the statue of the Virgin. I remember how much I loved being with her, and how much my mom looked happy to be with her.

But I don’t know much about her, beyond what I’ve been told. I know a lot of what I have gotten and learned from my mom, the quirks and annoyances and gestures that I have gathered into and for myself over the years. But I will never know how many of these have a longer history, whether something comes from a longer heritage line.

Heritage was actually one of the central topics of my doctoral work, and I was particularly interested in how material stuff—natural and human-intervened items—were used by various royal women and circulated along their family lines to create a sense of belonging that transcended direct bloodlines. This included, but was not limited to, clothing, jewelry (and loose precious stones), and, of course, books. Every item that was gifted or inherited brought with it a piece of their previous owner, every new proprietor adding to these layers of identity history: a book was royal because it was gifted by a royal person, and it recognized in the new owner a little something royal about them as well. Things, those we select to be part of our lives and those we reject, are quite central to the making of who we are, for ourselves and for others.

My grandparents were not wealthy people; they certainly weren’t royalty. But I know of two things that have come straight from my grandmother to my mom and then to me: a ring of hers my mom gave to me; the need always to wear earrings when leaving the house.

I wore the ring on my wedding day. And earrings, of course. Multiple, on each ear, because I couldn’t stop at one pair.

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In the book I am currently reading, É sempre hora da nossa morte amém [“It is always the hour of our death amen”] by Brazilian author Mariana Salomão Carrara, the protagonist-narrator is an amnesiac seventy-plus old woman who sometimes swears by having a daughter, sometimes swears by never having had a child. Some things are consistent throughout the variations of the scenarios her mind conjures in an attempt to make sense of her life, like the Volkswagen Beetle her husband had (known in Brazil as “Fusca,” a car my dad drove when I was a child), his name (Antônio), and the fact that the ideal is forty-years-old.

At one point, she says “forty, which is the age we should always be, the right to be forty at all times, from beginning, to end, should be assured to humankind.” [“quarenta anos, que é a idade que deveríamos ter sempre, ao ser humano deveria ser assegurado o direito de ter a todo momento quarenta anos, do princípio ao fim.”] It’s the age to which the narrator returns, again and again, the age of full enjoyment of life, of perfect companionship with her best friend—or daughter—or both. It’s an age I am coming closer and closer to reaching, that my mom reached several years ago, but one that she did not get to enjoy with her mom. Does she too think that forty was an age of plenitude? Does she envision mine turning forty as something of a rite of passage to her as well?

I didn’t grow up hearing “what would your grandma think?” but sometimes I ask myself that question.

I bet my mom thinks along the same lines.