Under An Almost Full Moon

On Turning 44

On May 21, 1981 at 11:57am in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, I was born under an almost full moon. My parents’ firstborn and ‘just in time for lunch.’ I was brought back from the hospital, all 8 pounds, 10 ounces, to the Cape Cod on Whipporwill Drive, my nursery freshly peach with little stenciled white bunnies. I didn’t cry a lot, my eyes were big, and I loved bath time. My mother didn’t breastfeed, and my father liked giving me the bottle. I was an easy baby, for the most part, and everyone wanted a turn holding me because welcome to the world, little one.

Not a newborn photo, but one of my faves of me as a babe.

Now, forty-four years later, I sit here in Boulder, Colorado, a long way from Whipporwill Drive, and not just in miles. My life has curved and cracked and widened in ways I couldn’t have imagined.

In my first decade, I learned how to comply, to be good. I followed the rules, said yes to the games everyone else wanted to play, and apologized even when I didn’t know what I’d done wrong. I was sensitive and intuitive, which made me lovable and, sometimes, overwhelmed or overlooked. Often, my feelings felt like way too much.

In my teens, I learned how to scan a room and shape-shift, how to shrink what was true in order to be chosen. I found power in achieving, in being helpful, in doing what was expected. But I also started to hear something quieter beneath the noise: a whisper that maybe there was more. I resisted the lies I was told, the stories I was fed, and launched into my role as a truth-seeker and a lover of nature and forged toward the light.

My twenties were full of questions. I followed paths I thought I should, and ached for a life that felt like mine. I got married, became a mother, and slowly, gently, began pulling at the threads of old stories and of patterning passed down over many generations. I remember nursing L. and watching him in his milk-drunk sleep and promising to do it differently. I started my journey as a healer.

In my thirties, the unraveling sped up. The grief of the loss of my father cracked me open. So did love. So did the end of love. So did deepening into motherhood. I found parts of myself I didn’t know I was allowed to name. I stepped into queerness, into therapy rooms, onto yoga mats, into my voice, into writing again. I began to listen.

Now, in my forties, I am learning to stay. To stay with the tenderness. To stay with my wild. To stay with myself, even when it hurts.

Last summer in Bangkok, I stood barefoot outside a temple, gilded spires reaching toward the sky, their intricate carvings shimmering in the mid-July sunlight. My red dress clung to my legs, sweat threading down my back.

I placed my sandals on a rack amongst the other shoes and took K.’s Crocs by the heel strap between my pointer and thumb. They used to be white but were a dingy gray and black on the bottom where his bare feet had slipped into them every day for weeks of travel. I tossed them into the pile, too, then walked toward the entryway.

A guide placed a lotus flower in my hand and nodded toward a bowl of water. It quivered against the weight of its bloom then bowed and received the water. I touched it to my forehead. A few drops of water, the same temperature as my body, rolled down my skin, into my eyelashes. I flutter blinked a few times, and one drop continued, a slow descent down my cheek.

For a moment, everything stilled: the din of tourists, the weight of the heat, the years of effort. Just me, the flower, the water. I didn’t rush. I let it be what it was: a moment of quiet belonging.

Then we entered the temple.

The coolness of the stone floor under the soles of my feet. I moved slowly, following others entering, the hush of the space like honey. Before me rose the Emerald Buddha, impossibly small atop a towering altar layered in gold and flowers and mirrored mosaics. I sat cross-legged on the mat and brought my palms to my body. One hand over my heart, one on my low belly. Not in reverence to something outside of me, but something very sacred within.

Something that had endured.

And there, in the shadows of incense, sticky crowds of tourists, and centuries-old devotion, I wept.

L. placed his hand on my back; K. put his hand on my thigh. I grieved alongside my children, which felt spacious and real.

I didn’t cry loudly. There wasn’t a dramatic crumble. Just steady, soft tears that rolled one after another. Grief, gratitude, release. I wept for the girl who always wanted to be good enough. For the woman who tried so hard to be chosen. For the former partner who held regrets. For the mother who carried so much. For the part of me that, through all the becoming, never stopped listening.

Who kept returning, time and time again, to walk with me back toward center. I wept because as much as I felt like I wasn’t going to be okay, a bigger part of me knew that I always would.

And now, it’s one year later. I used to think healing looked like clarity, like certainty. But now I know it’s more about capacity. Capacity for joy and sadness, for stillness and change. It lives in the messy middles, the thresholds, the liminality, the quiet yes that comes before you even know what’s next.

Somehow, I’ve arrived at a juncture that feels like a prism, light refracting in all directions, illuminating everything that’s right here. It’s bright, and the whole place is glowing. The grief that once lived in my lungs has loosened. I’m breathing more easily now, and there’s a fire burning inside me, warming the entirety of my being.

Next weekend, I’ll sit in a room with writers I admire, part of an advanced workshop I once only dreamed of. I’ll pitch my memoir to an agent who might believe in the story I’ve worked so hard to tell. My children, twelve and fourteen, are wild with delight and entirely themselves.

And I feel mostly good. Quietly, unexpectedly good. Not because everything’s settled, but because something in me is.

There’s a sweetness to what lies ahead. A new rhythm I’m just beginning to hear. A flicker of something blooming—an iris, already leaning in toward the light.

So here I am, forty-four. Tender and wild. Rooted in what’s true, open to what’s next.

Still listening. Still coming home.