Photo: Robert E. Rutledge
This is part of a running series. Read the previous Wonder Chronicle: On Childless Cat Ladies
It’s my birthday.
I’ve always been loud about my age–I’m still here, fuckers! I’m alive!
For too long, I had been told I “didn’t look” whatever age that I was. It was said to me as if it were a compliment. It was not. It was instead the loathing of aging that we are socialized into.
I am 57.
I stand in the power of my age and refuse “praise” for looking younger than I am. How joyless!
My 20s without exception and at least half of my 30s were miserable because I felt I had no power. And now here I am, joyful in my power, being told I “didn’t look” this age I feel I’ve finally earned.
I am 57.
And I love it!
For the first forty years of my life, August 1 was my birthday.
I loved how in the humid haze of summer, my birthday was crisp in its cool precision: August not because of the Roman emperor after which the month is called, but for the aspiration of my name’s meaning. Mona as in aspiration, hope, desire and dream.
“That wasn’t the day you were actually born, but we registered you on that day,” my parents would tell me.
Excuse me, what?
Our names, much like my alleged birthday, are aspirations that our parents gift us–grow into this, they’re telling us.
My parents, unlike the Arabic language, were not rich when I was born on the last Friday of July 1967, but they chose August 1 because pay day is the beginning of the month and they wanted everyone to be able to buy me a gift.
It was never about gift as in ostentation but gift as in joy.
My favourite birthday gift ever remains a small, yellow transistor radio that from August 1, 1977 on and for many more years was stuck to my ear whenever I was not in school: my earshot to the joy of music, the charts, who was number one.
Where was Mona? Look for the yellow radio.
Where is Mona, now? Look for the yellow hair.
When I turned forty, the crisp coolness of August 1 was not enough. I needed more: to be forged in the dreams and desire of self-knowledge. I wanted more: to look, not my age, but the aspirations and hopes of my parents' name for me.
The metaphorical transistor radio beckoning to my ear promised the joy of Me.
And so I found the calendar for 1967 and found the last Friday of July and gifted myself Five Days of Birthday, July 28-August 1: one each for aspiration, hope, dreams, desire, and joy for Mona.
Mona at 7, recently arrived in London
The first time I got on a plane was to fly from Cairo, my hometown, to London, my new hometown. I was seven. And I loved yellow.
I am now 57.
Where is Mona, now? Look for the yellow hair.
Photo: Robert E. Rutledge
Find your yellow!
My goal: that you are found by wonder.
My wish: that you intensely live.
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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. She is editing an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell! And Other Stories: Adventures in Menopause from Across the Personal and Political Spectrum. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.
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