Woman in the Mirror: Aging

Rosalind Jackson-Stewart

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I woke up one morning and didn't recognize the woman in the mirror. My skin looked the same...my eyes, my eyes carried a kind of tiredness that sleep can't fix. Something in me was shifting with no warning,

No warning. No blueprint. No mother’s voice at the edge of the bed saying, “Baby, this is what comes next.”

See, I never got the talk about hot flashes and memory loss, about body aches and silent griefs that come wrapped in heating pads and lavender oils and a kind of loneliness that no one has named yet.

I didn’t know that aging would feel like being an orphan in your own body. Mama gone. Grandma gone. Godmom gone. Nobody left to say:

“Here’s what to do when your hormones lie, when you cry for no reason, when your thighs soften and your fire flickers and your mind plays hide and seek with your own damn name.”

Nobody warned me that perimenopause comes not like a whisper but like a storm with no calendar, ripping through your routines with the audacity of every woman who had to pretend she was fine when her insides were fighting themselves. Nobody said that you'd start to fear mirrors, that your reflection would look like your mother and daughter at the same time. I hate that I can't ask her, that I'm stuck researching on Google for questions that don't apply, that the ceiling never has words - while I pray my ancestors will text me instructions in my dreams.

My heart races for no reason, and sleep leaves without notice.

Ain’t nobody taught me how to love myself when I wasn’t soft and twenty. When I wasn’t bounce-back-and-glowing. When I was just tired and tender and trying not to scream at the shrinking waistlines and the damn ceiling fan that can’t cool me anymore. Mama died before I knew I'd have lifelong questions- before I understood how desperately I would need her. Grandma died with every answer to every question I didn't know I would have, and my Godmom gave me just bits and pieces of what I didn't know would never be enough. Where do I grieve a mother who can't tell me how to be one to myself now?

So here I am, living in a body that feels like a foreign language I never learned to speak, full of questions I never knew I needed answered.

I need to call my mama, I have questions:

Did it feel like this for you?

Did you curse your reflection and still find a way to bless your body?

Did you ever feel so foreign in your skin that you wanted to unzip it and start over?

I never got to ask:

How do you learn you, again?

Did you touch yourself without shame?

Did you cry when you felt like a ghost in your skin?

Did you stare in the mirror, wondering?

Did you?

Did you miss your mom the way I long for you?

But I’m asking now.

I’m asking God, the wind, the moon, the photographs that hold my mama’s eyes.

I’m asking my own reflection to be patient with me as I become a different kind of woman. I have to be the mother and the child, the lost and the leader, both question and answer. I may be orphaned by time, but I am rising anyway.

Trembling hands and a trembling voice, I am writing the guidebook I never got.

I’m becoming the elder I never got to sit beside. The voice I needed when life changed completely.

Aging, they said, would be graceful.

They lied. It's gritty, sacred, and terrifying; it's holy work.

You are not alone. You are not invisible. You are not orphaned—you've become the map back to what you need.

You are the page your daughter will read on repeat and the prayer your niece will whisper when her body begins to hum.

You create your own language in real time, out loud - a matriarch in bloom. You are an ancestor becoming.

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Rosalind Jackson-Stewart

Rosalind Jackson-Stewart aka Roz

A fierce mother of five, loving grandmother of 21, Rosalind is full of an overprotective, all-inclusive love for those who belong to her. She loves fiercely, completely, and believes in giving one hundred percent of herself.

A lover of words, random facts, researching, and the Bible – Roz writes her thoughts, dreams, and inspirations to share with her closest friends.

A firm believer of love, life, laughter, and loyalty, seeking any opportunity to take a quick road trip or a mini-vacation.