This is my 5th annual state of the self, a speech I deliver once a year on the revelations and reflections of the past year. Every year I have invited close friends and family to listen, but this year I decided on a much more private delivery: alone in a rocking chair with my son.
It was fondue. That’s how I began my birthday last year. With friends, family, and my two month old son, we went out for fondue. And suddenly, here I am, hugging my mother, holding my toddling son, with Nick smiling at me, turning 32 and another round of the carousel of life is complete.
I suppose I could talk about how 31 was my first year as a parent; how I found seven gray hairs in my mop of raven strands; how I fought post partum blues, ran my first road race, began editing my long-ago dreamed anthology, traveled to New York and New Jersey, California and El Salvador, and even flew with Isaiah to Atlanta so he could meet his great-Lola and Fernandez blood.
31 is the year that shook my beliefs in everything, including God and even myself. Isaiah is a chisel, who with one small stab, could crack me into a hundred pieces a hundred times everyday. More times than I would like to admit, I was a mess. Few things in life can mess with me like that. 1) Being a new mom 2) Having no road map on how to be a new mom and still be myself
31 is marked as the year the illusionist died. The illusionist who preferred to think of life as an endless supply of chances. Time, for all of its illusions of abundant opportunities, is actually a dwindling bank with unknown capacity. I don’t know exactly when, but I realized that somewhere early in my adult life, I had subconsciously, nonchalantly, and arbitrarily agreed that my life was as oceanic and boundless as the sky, with no restrictions on how much time I had to live, photograph, love, forgive, and write.
Here’s the not-so-sophisticated newsflash of the year: I don’t have forever.
Somewhere in the space between last year’s fondue and this month’s Egyptian revolution those four hammering words “I don’t have forever” splattered itself on my brain like a gob of sticky gum. It came from my body. I knew tiredness like I never knew it before. I knew anger like I had never experienced it before. I got cranky. I reached palpable limitations of my own biology.
My life got really unsexy this year. More times than I can count, I left the house with a new stain on my lapel or a button loosened. Memory cells vanished. I often smelled like a mix of Aveeno baby soap and maple oatmeal. The pencil scratches of “Things I Want for Me” folded itself into the garbage pail. The ever popular journal prompt “Who am I” disappeared from the pages and meshed into the blurred advice lines of motherhood and survival. I suffered from a strong case of self-forgetfulness. Repeatedly this year, a tiny voice kept asking, “What is it you really want? You better move on it cause you don’t have forever.”
You don’t have forever.
Such ordinary rhetoric. Such extraordinary meaning.
This call to urgency will be answered loudly. I vow to be the kind of person, the kind of mother who greets her son with the shining eyes that know self-fulfillment and community relationship. “Children need to see their mothers happy, accomplished, satisfied. They need models to show them how to fulfill their dreams,” a fellow artist told me. I vow to be the person that remains undeterred from my own dreams, no matter how odd or unconventional it may seem to others. I vow to remember that a safe, comfortable life is not the meaning of life.
I promised myself an intrepid life.
And if that vow calls me to stand with nothing but the feet of shaking courage –
so be it.
Lisa Factora-Borchers
February, 27, 2011