ma’am.

Every Sunday growing up, I saw ladies of the church dressed to the nines, tailored dress suits, nylons, and matching hats; some even wore gloves. Their faces were flawlessly made up with Fashion Fair cosmetics, and they kept red sponges in their bags to absorb the oil. These ladies smelled of White Diamonds and money and carried peppermints and embroidered handkerchiefs in their purses. In the winter, they wore stoves with fox heads hanging from their shoulders. For those sweltering summers, they would cool themselves with 20-year-old paper fans on wooden sticks, featuring images of JFK and MLK on the front and the local Black-owned funeral parlor on the back. Assassination and funeral homes go together like peanut butter and jelly.

We called these women, ma’am. They were older but not yet our elders; they were in the middle, somewhere between the maiden and crone. We still addressed them as Mrs. Suchandsuch or Mrs. Whoever, but after every question was asked, the sentence always ended with ma’am. For some reason, I thought it would take a million years before someone called me ma’am. I’d be walking with a stick, living in a shoe with twenty kids before that happened. But it didn’t take a million years. I only had to reach 40 years old to feel truly old. I thought I had more time. It turns out that I had entered the era of ma’am, and there was no turning back.

I was conflicted about how I felt regarding this, intrigued at first by the fact that younger people addressed me with respect. Then I realized that it wasn’t respect but a courtesy to the older woman. Me. I was the older woman, and everyone knew it. I was over forty, and I looked over forty—the arrogance of my delusion and vanity that my age was a secret only to myself. While waiting for a friend to arrive at the movies, I saw a lady wearing a shirt for the movie I was about to see. I knew my friend had a group of ladies with her that I had never met, and I thought she might be waiting for our friend.

 She smiled and looked down, answering my questions as a shy child does to an adult. No, ma’am, this and yes, ma’am, that with an uneasy giggle as if I caught her masturbating. I thought she was the same age as me. As I walked away, I looked at her again; it was obvious that I had at least 20 years on her. The mind is scary and will believe whatever lies you feed and digest it until it becomes your truth. This is the essence of delusion, the gateway to psychosis. If I had thought this, what else had I believed? What other fantasies was I making up in my head? The ladies of my childhood were elegant, honorable, worthy of respect and adoration. I couldn’t see myself like them.

There are many mirrors of illusion, vanity, and worthiness, being only two, and both plague me daily.