Lab Notes

The Vow Never Grew

September 2, 2026

I am eleven. My hair falls in dark red curls, flipped at the ends. My belly rolls visibly over jeans too tight to close. This hurts. Twinkie wrappers scatter the floor while Luke kisses Laura on our first color TV screen. My freckled face turns toward the world, aching to be kissed. My deepest wish is a boyfriend, someone to talk to for hours, someone who stays.

I watch my parents' friends' relationships break up miserably. I watch my own friends' relationships break up too, and none of it holds any rhyme or reason to me. The local Jewish Community turns my family away for an inability to pay. I feel that turning away again, in every relationship that ends the same.

I turn toward my sister. I turn toward my brother. I love them so much. I make a vow inside this round, snow white body. I will find true love. I build my whole life around true love.

I marry at nineteen, a man whose gold terry cloth underwear makes my whole body brace, bracing becoming its own kind of language. I divorce at twenty-one.

I meet a man singing Roberta Flack across a barroom, and I follow his voice straight into love, overriding my mind to learn what my body wants. I meet a third man, and months later watch him handcuffed on the evening news, a bag of stolen money standing where honesty should have stood. This is my season of exploration, of inner growth after divorce.

Confirmation.

I am not like the couples who broke apart around me. Not me.

I move to San Francisco alone. I gain forty pounds learning the shape of my own skin, buying size 14 and keeping my skinny clothes for when I meet the one.

Then an offbeat invitation arrives. Go camping, Daniel says, a close friend of Marilyn's I am meeting for the first time. I never do this. I go. Daniel and I are both Marilyn's closest friends. We sleep under a sky full of shooting stars. I feel awe move through my body for the first time in my life. I want to learn more about what my body wants. I try to shut the unkind voices in my mind.

I build a life with him. I build my Self.

The eleven-year-old rides inside me still. At seventy-five, her hair has grown wildly unruly. Her belly finds calm in chocolate chip cookies. Her burning wish to be truly known has followed her the whole way, patient the whole time.

I untether the vow that once made her smaller to hold it. I trust the vow itself to reconfigure, still true, while I finally account my Self within it.

This is my leadership. I welcome every curl, every roll, every wish to be known, first in my own body before anywhere else.

I touch my wrinkling face the way I once touched hers. The vow never grew. I did. I only made more room for the vow to stand in.

Notes from Taye →