Becoming momma bear
38 is an odd age to be, as odd as any other really, but for me it seems to be the point where I am finally aging up. It feels as if the mis-spent years are behind me, and the responsible years are still to come, yet I look back and there is a whole generation behind who are saying and doing things I wish I could be a part of, but cannot because it is there time. For me age has never been a number, for the last decade I have felt eternally 25, yet as I graduate from a Masters after four years of university, the generation gap has widened beyond an elastic wistfulness into something tangible.
Being older comes with a body of knowledge, lived experiences, that are incalculable. Where firebrand becomes pragmatic. Where wear and tear catch up with vigour. Age is not a number, maybe a mindset, though surely it is a friend that takes us from halcyon frittered youth to encumbered late thirties and beyond. It sits with us in the evenings as hobbies become passions, where six beers become one because of the morning to come, and where all the possibilities of yesteryear braid with reality. Edith sang about no regrets, Frankie about my way, and for me my song would probably be the same, though for different reasons.
As a member of the LGBTQI+ community I am not old, there are those who fought literal battles for rights and bear the scars. No, I am not old. Standing on the shoulders of those giants I see the past as a very foreign country, whose future I inhabit discovered without fists and slurs. Yet why do I feel age creep up on me, why is that my new skin is as elder to the stalwarts now on the field. I find myself at every protest and comment section listening and reading, trying to support where I can, and wanting to patch up the wounds. This is where age is leading me, to become a momma bear through which those stalwarts can stand tall and wave their banners.
My first tastes of Pride and rainbows was in Manchester and Preston, rain-soaked corners on Northern England that dripped with renewed pride in being out and proud. Even today every time I walk down Canal Street I feel a certain excitement, reeling in the jaded anti-commercialism that keeps me from truly engaging any more with corporatized queerness. I still find joy in the small things, in the art, the comments, the sub-reddits, yet in the wider scene the burning desire to commit to an archetype of community or identity has slipped out of my harbour into the dead of night. Age has brought wisdom, yet it tempered my zeal with real-politic of economic and systemic understanding. The joy of the young quenches this jaded heart, re-forging it into something better fit for the fight ahead.
So, what does it mean to inhabit this new skin, to be a momma bear? I don’t yet fully know, or possibly ever will. I know for now that it means stewarding marches, offering first aid, writing posts, researching injustice, and actively engaging with systemic issues that a protest cannot end. I youth I may have been callow, now I may be bull-headed, but the bigger part of me understands that being an elder is more than just my age. It is the understanding that those who follow have voices just as loud and urgent, that they need lifting up, and if I can help them, then mores the power to being 38.
