Month: June 2021

The Grief Thing

My father was born on June 26, 1940. Eighty-one years ago today. My mother would have turned 83 on May 6th. And my first daughter, Grace Ayodele, would be a young woman of 18 on December 12th of this year. If they had lived. It’s weird to think of my loved ones at ages that they never saw. Or maybe in their eternal realm, they’ve seen those ages. Perhaps age is a constraint that means nothing beyond the confines of this lived life. I don’t know.

But from where I sit, I feel the gnawing of healed-over grief. It’s not new. I didn’t just lose these people from my life. And though I wish I had gotten more than the time I had with each of them, I’m thankful that I’m not wracked with the ache of new grief. New grief sucks. If I never experience it again, I’ve still had more than my share. But the grief thing is still…a thing. It still lives in me. And when I’m feeling a little bit blue, it can latch on to the amorphous blueness, giving it more shape and substance.

Earlier today, I tweeted something that felt profound at the time I wrote it: Being on submission feels like being pregnant with the world’s baby. My skin is stretched taut, my stomach a knot displaced to the top of my belly. The baby wants to be born and greet the world to which it belongs.

I’m a writer on submission. A writer with another kind and thoughtful rejection under her belt. They are bitter round pills, rejection. They roll around in the stomach, undigested. “I love your vision, your ambition, your scope, but no.” That’s what I was feeling when I wrote that tweet this morning. But though I still agree with it now, I realize that the knot at the top of my belly wasn’t just about my books that want to greet the world. The rejection of my writing from an editor stirred up feelings of outmoded love that no longer has a living person to receive it. Both phenomena can feel like unrequited love.

Don’t get me wrong, grief is deeper and more expansive than rejection. And more permanent. I know that the editors who have rejected my book haven’t killed me or even wished me dead. But that feeling of a round, undigested pill sitting at the top of the belly is somehow akin to my longing to actively love the ones I’ve lost. So because it can feel like grief, it may trigger it, awakening the grief that’s always there within me.

Shout out to all the grief long haulers. I know that the millions of untimely COVID losses around the world have swelled the ranks of our ever-growing community prematurely. I’m so sorry about that. I know that there will be things that will trigger grief in our bodies that some of us will not understand. It’s real and it sucks. But I find that being able to name it gives it a place in my body that is neither too big nor too small. It gives my body permission to make the necessary connections and to show compassion to myself. And then I can lay it down knowing that it’s there but it’s not all there is.

Living Free At 50: My Juneteenth Reflection

I turned 50 a week ago. I marked the occasion at an Airbnb rental house in Indiana with my husband, kiddos, and my brothers. It was the first time I had celebrated a birthday with both of my brothers since we all lived under one roof as children. We ordered great food (takeout because, COVID). We played rambunctious games of Uno until we were worn out.

 These components of this 50th birthday celebration didn’t even exist in my mind when I turned 48. After all, just two short years ago, there was no COVID, no brother living in Indiana, and no reason to choose to spend this most auspicious birthday in an Airbnb playing the card game of my childhood. If I imagined anything for 50, it was of my husband and me (and maybe the kiddos, too) soaking up the sun in a non-English-speaking international location with Instagram-worthy backdrops at every turn. I would have ‘returned’ to my ideal weight and posed in culture-conscious outfits that complemented the toned arms and well-earned wisdom of my new decade. My hair would be a shimmery silver freeform TWA and my feet would kiss the earth as I walked with the assuredness of a woman whose third and fourth books (and maybe fifth and sixth) had already been launched successfully into the world, doing the work of changing hearts while expanding minds.

That’s what I imagined 50 would be. But the real 50 was none of that.
Nevertheless, this 50 was just right. NOT perfect. Still striving toward toned arms and books launched and international destinations. Still wearing masks. (Yes, I’m happily vaxxed but my whole crew doesn’t yet qualify. And newsflash: COVID is not over.) And my hair is a less dramatic but wholly age-appropriate salt-and-pepper mini-‘fro that I sometimes temporarily color blue or silver.

This real 50 is one I cherish in a way that I couldn’t at 48 partly because I hadn’t yet lived my COVID 49th year that was filled with a good deal of non-COVID drama and trauma as well. What all of that was will likely remain unwritten because all that’s lived needn’t always be shared. And not all of it is mine to share anyway. But I was forged in the fire and, by the grace of God, I’ve come out the other side with all of my loved ones who sat at the dining room table playing Uno with me last Saturday. A miracle and a blessing

As I get to know this new year and new decade of mine, I imagine great things. But 50 means that I’ve lived long enough to know that other things will also come. I’m trusting that I’ll be ready for it all when it does.

It makes me think about my foremothers and forefathers in Galveston, Texas who were greeted with the news of their release from chattel slavery on June 19, 1865, fully two and a half years after it had been proferred. Freedom brought elation and an opportunity to dream but also filled so many with the realization that, though they were free of their physical enslavement, they had so many loved ones lost to them, perhaps forever. They had to learn to negotiate a way forward in a land that despised them, lied to them, and labeled them as the country’s enemy. It was a difficult freedom, and even as they grasped hold of and it, it flinched, pulled out its claws, and swiped.

I’m immeasurably grateful to all the ancestors I will never know this side of eternity for their willingness to walk by faith out along their bold, fragile, and wild dreams for tomorrow. That I can choose joy, pursue audacious dreams, and love my family is a gift they have given me. I stand at 50, free to be myself in my glorious imperfections, because of them.