First, I was who I was.

An old friend recently gave me a birthday present, a copy of Anna Quindlen’s memoir, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake. She begins her introduction, Life in the Fifties, thus:

It’s odd when I think of the arc of my life, from child to young woman to aging adult. First I was who I was. Then I didn’t know who I was. Then I invented someone and became her. Then I began to like what I’d invented. And finally I was what I was again.”

The words, “First I was who I was.” Elicited from deep in my gut a resounding “Yes!” I was a present little child. Natural, at ease, cooking my own hot dog lunch on a gas range, much to my mother’s horror when she came into the kitchen and found me perched on a dining room chair, hot dog in hand, poised over the pot. I told her I was waiting for the water to “breathe.” My word for boil. I was who I was.

Years later my mother said to me with all sincerity that there were times in my babyhood, toddlerhood, I would give her piercing looks, beyond my years.

Finally as a five-years-old, with my father preparing to walk out the apartment door for a business trip, he paused in the open doorway to give me a lecture about riding my bike, on the sidewalk only, never in the street or the alley. I looked at him and said, “Don’t you know I was here before?” I can close my eyes and see his eyes widen. As a young adult, we would talk about that moment. He said the hair on the back of his neck stood up.

Was the child living from essence, speaking from essence? Perhaps. And then, as Quindlen writes, “Then I didn’t know who I was.” What happened to her as a child? What happened to me? What required the rise of personality? What’s the arc of my narrative?

                                    (To be continued…)