More than

The morning is damp, as rain drizzles slowly against my window. Today I struggle for words, and my tongue and brain are twisted into knots that not even nimble, deft hands could untangle.

My middle age has embraced me, and I her, my younger self dead and buried. Soft mid-section and skin that still tans firm, but has the just-turning feel of tissue paper starting to crinkle. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror as my head turns, and find that my neck has formed a dimple; a soft v of skin collapsing on itself. I straighten and it disappears.

We women, bearers of children and sometimes not. Wives and purported help-meets and doctors and writers of words so intertwined with life that an interpreter is necessary to convey the emotion of it.

We women are there for all, picking up the shards when a spouse has a downfall or rearranging our tiredness to acquiesce with our bodies as needed. Letting our loved ones dissolve into our malleable laps, absorbing all their pain, and carrying it as a cross on our hardened shoulders.

I shouldered much when I was young and naive, it being my own choice and action. I rendered most of my soul, tucking the emotions I held silent into my gut and swallowing them daily; the barbed words that I wanted to say, nearly choking on them as they made their way down.

I buried this girl nice and neat.

Nice girls don’t say what they mean or want, as I taught my daughters and son the value of the exact opposite. I vowed they would have the courage to say all the words they felt.

And sometimes, after the chasm of mothering has widened, and you find the space you dwell in neat and clean and bereft of tiny feet, there is a sweet breath that blows on your neck. It tickles the parts of you that have lain dormant for the years you left them hidden.

I became not just mom or wife or cook or cleaner. I found myself reborn — Missy — dreamer of words lilting and fierce on the tip of my pen and finger. I found her and held her, cradled her, and revived her with hot ragged breath.

I saw my own love through a different lens and used different words I’d never allowed myself to use. The syllables fell off my tongue and I waited for reaction, for a push back that never came because ardor is a good thing to retain; accord and passion and the mingling of lives. I slipped off the skin of my naivete and submission and found greater things on the other side.

My body, still strong and limber, holds me upright as I move about my silent house. I hear myself breathing steadily as my computer clicks out a steady rhythm. I engage in work that frees me, a layer of dust on my shelves and laundry that though before compelled my days, now holds no sway. A glass of wine for concentration with no contrition, because I like how it slides down my throat; warmth.

I find things I needed compassion for in my early womanhood — and never received — are now things I must give to others. I stiffen and let the role reversal anger me. I speak words out loud that define how I am feeling, instead of holding them in to fester. I will never let myself be put last again.

I am not soft of mind, but fierce and full of edges; planes to be discovered in wonder. My brain is a vast and complex circuitry that has been exposed to the brightness of day, underused and dormant until now. I open her up, my still firm legs and arms using their smooth muscles, take aim and fire. I absorb all and expel all, as women do, the power we hold tangible. I will not be bound and sunk low, in the soft pillows of our form, only used for comfort.

See me as I am. See me not for my gender and what she can do, for though I embrace her, I am not just her. I am more, and all I was ever meant to be.