2023 Year-End Reflection

My theme of ‘23 went places I didn’t think it could go, opening me up to how a word expands beyond a standard definition once life has its way with it.

Dec 23, 2023

The morning of Monday, November 6th, I dropped my daughter off at school, came home and had a full blown panic attack in my bedroom. Disrupting the quiet of a temporary empty nest until 3:15, I imagined what the text would say or how her tone would start the conversation on the phone, a way for me to know the worst had discovered her without the words. She would tell me the cells had mutated and spread without restraint. And the thought of it caused me to hyperventilate and become tachycardiac, my mind in sync with the digitized numbers that spoke of a heart rate. 140, 143, 144, 146…

I had to get everything out before the news because then, the only choice was to be strong. It happens sometimes, the moment where the child holds up the parent. unknowingly. consciously.

That day was—according to the calendar that marked beginnings and break ups to disguise an obsession with numbers—close to the two year anniversary of me ending my year-long relationship with 15mg of an anxiolytic. Coincidentally 1,111 days since cement was poured on the end of that other relationship. Apropos for an earth sign, autumn took from me too, yo-yoing between forceful removal and painlessly. It’s always a season of simultaneous sadness and celebration. But in a year that tethered on the uncomfortable side, yeah, I was expecting the worst.

Because two months into 2023, I met a stranger in Mexico who happens to live in Maryland and did genealogy work. When I asked “where are you” back in February, I built a residence in the place of ready, believing the answer to a 28-year-old question had finally arrived, brought to me through this woman who could lead me to my father. I’d done the work, explored options—why wouldn’t I be prepared? So when she asked for a copy of my father’s death certificate, I was attentive to the angles of my phone and placed it in the right light, like preparing the deceased for a funeral, only I was bringing something to life, finally.

Ryan Roslansky March 2023 interview with ESSENCE CEO/President, Caroline Wanga for LinkedIn's "The Path"

But we hit road blocks—denials in the birth of a daughter from a potential uncle whose deceased brother and family are also from Vega Alta, Puerto Rico; who also live in the same city and state of California listed on the receipt of death. Having lived for 35 years at that point without a father, I never considered what denial would do to me, pleading in e-mails that I wasn’t in need of anything except to know where I came from. I made promises to strangers. I went from believing I was ready, to begging that this be right, paying for premium packages of the Whitepages to prove true my existence; piecing together names of possible relatives whose blood I could’ve shared to make my own portrayal of a family tree. I sorted through e-mails that bounced back, hastily deleting the ones from mailer daemon, and held on to my cell longer than necessary with closed eyes to process an automated audio message telling me a phone number was no longer in service. Disconnection continued to follow me in different form and in no time, I saw it as a dead end. So I just stopped. Completely. Once again, I was left with me.

Into-Me-See.

“They were not holding hands, but their shadows were.” — Toni Morrison, Beloved | self-portrait

I am a parent that sees herself in her children and not in the “he makes the same faces I do” or “they look just like me” kind of way. This was the year that when I thought my journey on my father came to a close, it met me again in the sadness of my oldest that swelled up and spilled over about his own dad’s presence. In undergoing inner child work, I’ve realized a lot of what I needed growing up was simply to be heard—manifested through a loud, hard-to-miss speaking voice as an adult—and I try to use those realizations to help me raise my children.

Already a year of being triggered by a father’s absence, I didn’t want to impart my experiences in my own journey onto him, so he went back to therapy and uncomfortably talked about what growing up with us as his parents did to him. I listened and more so, had to take ownership in what I allowed, which naturally brought about a humiliation I hadn’t yet dealt with. That me loving someone out of an addiction layered in grief was really me trying to save them and prove to myself that I wasn’t so powerless; that staying with someone because I didn’t want my children to also experience what it was grow up without a father in the home was an excuse to hold on longer. I had to get close to shame and I thought of my own mother and what she kept from me, uneasily understanding now the intimacy between stains and secrets.

My oldest, trying to understand the happenings of how his brain is wired, was diagnosed with ADHD, and started medication this past summer. So that he didn’t feel alone, I showed him the last refilled bottle of anxiety meds I hid behind the rubbing alcohol, hydrogen peroxide, and Tums in the bathroom cabinet that I kept as a sort of souvenir, but a journey I’d since forgotten about.

Buspirone, taken once by mouth, twice daily for a year, for a total of 730 times.

His mama owned an orange-tinted plastic bottle with a backstory, too. We talked about all of the things in reference to the white label that housed pharmaceutical names: the diagnoses that bind us apart from the DNA, and my actions around our physical house that, too, had a name. “I have obsessive compulsive disorder—that’s known as OCD; I’m sure you’ve heard of it; a phobia of…; depre…”

Erica in prayer at a beach in Tulum, Mexico captured by Brandie Freely on February 2023 — In prayer. Candid captured by Brandie Freely | Tulum, Mexico | February 2023.

His diagnosis, an answer, brought us closer together. It brought him inside to his center to find recognition of himself and his layers. It brought to me an awareness of where I went wrong and what I had no control over, what I had to come to terms with. Sometimes, the child holds up the parent, unknowingly. Into-Me-See.

(My youngest son and daughter began individual therapy in October; the four of us attend family therapy twice a month.)

My defenses go up at the hint of a raised voice; abandonment wounds are open scars to pick at with a bout of anxiety whenever a text goes unanswered for too long; I think I may have done something wrong when silence is the preferred method of communication without my consent.

Yet, I became a neophiliac to the undertaking. I loved learning about what made me tick and what tickled me, and found myself more interested in self-study than I was playing 21 questions with a potential lover. Sex was phenomenal this year, but I believe it had more to do with the acquisition of pleasuring and enjoying myself, than in the temporary of another. I didn’t engage in it for no other reason than I wanted to for myself, dichotomizing release and remain, a deviation in the familiar of doing so to keep a human close.

Into-Me-See.

How could I put into practice everything my body took inventory of this year in this state of standing by, living in the pause of waiting for results that weren’t mine? I returned to my breath, my finger in a pulse oximeter that read 99% with a heart rate being brought back to normalcy—125, 115, 110, 105 with each exhale. If nothing else this year, the last 51 weeks was an assignment on release, emanating dopamine and doubt, knowing what to disconnect from to understand what to develop into. And so I let it go. All of it. The fact that I didn’t find my father this year in spite of hope opening those doors in Mexico. The guilt that found a corner in my crevices and spread until it spilled out of me like a disease of my own. The desire to be someone else’s until I appreciated the knowing I had to be my own first.

My mother, who I resumed talking to less than a month before, would call me on my own trip to the doctor’s, 20 minutes after the panic attack to tell me it wasn’t the c word. Out of fear except to say “fuck” before it, I still can’t say the word in its entirety, knowing once it tastes air, it would appear. And she, without saying it outright, said that there was still time. For us to get it right. For us to be better, even in the multitude of chances.

On my old blog, I wrote that “I was a mother who still needed mothering”. I’ve outgrown that space, but those words stayed true and alive, and it was in a synchronized “thank you God” over the phone that labeled her contact ‘Ma’ that I realized the relationships I’ve sought out have been a substitution to what I wanted from her. My first tastes of intimacy was sitting on my mother’s hardwood floors, in between her legs yet again, those times to have my hair braided. A turned and tilted head meant a neck crick next day, but her fingers, rubbing grease across combed parts meant a story lived on my scalp. Neat braids meant she was well and if they weren’t, that she, a single parent, had little time to work with. She did the best she could with what she had, a realization I can only see now living an unexpectedly mirrored life to hers.

Statement Peace: A Self(e) | Tulum, Mexico | February 2023

At the end of the same week of the news, my daughter takes the place of my spot on the floor and my mother braids her hair, thicker than my own. I wonder if my daughter will see the familiarity of closeness as intimacy with time, too. I take notice of the difference between then and now in that my daughter tells her grandmother to stop less than halfway in, a command I couldn’t dare give at six, which leaves half her hair braided and the other half out. When I tell my daughter it makes no sense to leave it this way, not only am I faced with an attitude, but the awareness a day later that my daughter wants to tell her own story in her hair. That she’s fine with continuing a legacy of connection between Black mother and child, an initiation into grounding for melanated girls sitting on cold floors, but that she has a voice in how this’ll go. That her mother’s story with her mother is not her own, and her grandmother’s story with her great-grandmother’s not her own. I hope, if nothing else, my daughter sees her ability to speak up as an act of intimacy with the self, one of overflow into every other relationship she’ll come into in her own life.

My name is Erica—real ones call me E—and my word for 2023 was intimacy. It was a theme that closed doors and opened some, but with each of the people standing behind it—placed there strategically to my knowledge or placed there by God to my dislike—I was able to see where I stood. Where are you was the question of the year and 357 days in, I see I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be. It‘s how I could reconnect with my momma after six years, putting down pride from a place of ego; it was how I could say sorry to my son for what he saw and how she could apologize to me for what I didn’t know. Writing has brought me many sentiments of “thank you for seeing me,” but the doing of life was how I had to see me.

If my twenties were a period of asking who am I, my thirties questions where am I? 2024 is a year of return. Going back to go forward. With answers to retrieve what is mine. I’m unsure of where the next stop is, but even if I spin around with my eyes closed, I know I’ll land where I need to be.

I wrote my first fiction piece. Who knows if it’ll ever see the light of day, but I hold close the remnants of a childhood by way of a vast imagination that conjured up a story of how my parents met, eight months before my mother finally told me the non-fiction version. I think of Erykah Badu: “Spelling is a spell.”
Materializing my word of the year by doing a boudoir photoshoot for my 36th birthday with Jatnna Garcia Photography. Definitely in my top three favorites of the year and I never felt more proud of my body post-children than I did in our afternoon together, 150+ photos later.
My youngest son making the decision to begin his loc journey on his entrance into adolescence, changing how I see the importance of hair to Black boys, usually reserved for girls alone, and how I saw him as a child now making long-term decisions for himself.
My oldest starting his high school experience playing for his school’s JV football team as cornerback.
Hosting Thanksgiving for the first time at my home, five years since moving to Maryland.
Leading a workshop on alchemizing your motherhood story at The Conscious Motherhood Circle Retreat in Charlotte, NC.
Surprising my daughter with a weekend with a friend she’s never met in person.

What was your word or theme of the year and how did you see it live in your life? How does your word/theme of 2024 connect to what this year taught you?

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