“I learned a woman is never an old woman.” —Joni Mitchell

Someone during the Joni Mitchell tribute on NPR said something about how she helped us explain, us, meaning many young women in the seventies, who we were. This was true, but I wanted her lyrics to make mystical and acceptable what I felt deep inside, alone, angry, and confused about everything pertaining to human relationships. My friend and I drank wine at sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen and listened as Joni addressed a faceless lover explaining that she was attached, ‘I could drink a case of you’ but also able to move on, ‘and still be on my feet.’

None of this was true for me. I adored my wonderful, terrible father, who remained ‘constantly in the darkness’ with occasional glimpses of his great love and hopes for me. I had boyfriend after boyfriend who projected their feelings on me, and when they discovered my fears and sadness, my addictions, and my anger, they shared their rage and disappointment and moved on. I remained stuck, craving intimacy, drinking to numb myself from the pain of loneliness. Oddly, I was that girl that attached men, men attached to other women, decided I was the only one who understood them. Often they would show up late at night or call from far away, begging me to help them understand their feelings. But that was never enough.

Of course, we didn’t think we would ever grow old. My coming-of-age was marked with death, the death of rock stars, politicians, soldiers in Vietnam, mass murders, and friends. It was also marked by massive social upheaval, the hippies of the sixties becoming the lost souls of the seventies, followed by Wall Street, working women, power suits, I’ll sleep when I’m dead characters of the eighties. Woven through this was the endless, vicious dance of racism, beginning with the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King and, in 1989, the accusation and sentencing of five teenage boys for a crime they did not commit as we moved forward in our need to justify race hatred.

I was delivered in 1993 from the worst of what was to follow with the birth of my son. Motherhood changed everything. This body I had alternately starved and maligned, worked out to the point of collapse, was no longer an enemy. This body had formed a perfect human being; this experience allowed me to forgive my parents and understand how love could be so immersive the rest of the world ceased to exist. It was no longer my right to despair and complain. All of the reasons I became a writer and a teacher came into sharp focus. I no longer entered a room, walked down a street, or arrived at a party longing to be desired. I was enough, as she sang on The Last Time I Saw Richard,

“Only a dark cocoon before
I get my gorgeous wings and fly away
Only a phase, these dark cafe days.”

These gorgeous wings belong to sixty-five-year-old me. A long time ago, someone patiently explained how I could make a man take care of me, pay my way, assume ownership, and give me lots of things. I was sitting in an outdoor taverna in Corfu, writing alone, eating fresh feta and just baked bread, and somehow I knew this was not why I had remained alive to simply reflect someone else, to be the slightly out of focus girl who was quiet and forgiving.

“No,” I said. “That sounds awful.” Now I swim a mile in my ill-fitting one-piece, fully aware of who I am, who I have always been, and Joni, you were part of everything. You were never one to concede, conform or surrender. You moved swiftly from one situation to another, shaking the dust from your shoes, leaving memories and possibly broken hearts, but you remained true to your vision, spoke the truth, and didn’t look back.

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach

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