Your prompt for the day:
Write a letter to your younger self. Thank them, praise them, scold them, comfort them—engage in whatever way you feel led with one or many versions of your younger self. Whatever comes to mind.
Now, let’s shift to exploring your older self. What would you want to say? To ask? To request? Tell your older self what you are doing now in service of them. Tell them what the ideal situation might look like when you finally meet—where might you be living, what type of work might you be doing, who you might be spending time and space with.
Dear 11 year old me:
I don’t have a great recall of what life was really like for you. You had a secure group of friends who you felt comfortable with. You were naïve about poverty and addictions and anything that might make your friends’ homes different than yours. You were still very much a little girl, playing with your cut-out dolls and having sleepovers. Your life at home felt safe and comfortable and you defended yourself from comments about you being rich, living in a big house. The Beatles hadn’t been on the Ed Sullivan show yet, so except from your friend dancing to Neil Sedaka, you were not part of the teen music world yet. Your clothes were all handsewn by your mom, and sometimes you wanted them not to be. Your feet were much bigger than your small size. Boys were just people in your class, generally a nuisance, but not something to look closely at. You were in a very high achieving class so you didn’t stand out, perhaps because of your shyness, but now that I know you better, I wonder if it was insecurity. You knew you would be a nurse – that wasn’t debatable, but like most of us growing up in the 50’s you thought that when motherhood came along your career would stop. Walking to school you imagined your life ahead, inventing a family with 4 children, whose first names all started with K, and was a perfect family with mom staying at home, and dad going to work.
You didn’t know what your “grown up life” would be like, that is for sure. You couldn’t have imagined that you would be motherless by 16, and that you would be a widow at 67. You could not have imagined your life with your love, far from perfect but good in so very many ways. You couldn’t have imagined the very difficult path that you took to being a mother of three (not with all K names). You could have never imagined the pain of loss, nor the joy of birth and adoption. And you never could have imagined what an absolute delight it is to be called Grandma. You think you knew what a nursing career would be like, but you could not imagine that your nursing career would be one that moved alongside your motherhood, again in ways unexpected. You wouldn’t have known that your mind would want to absorb medical information and that this would lead to a life long love of learning. You couldn’t have imagined so many fears that you would have to conquer even up to your seventieth year. I imagine that your thought an adult had it all together, as that is the view you were looking at. You might have imagined the stubborn and strong woman you would become, for that was very apparent by age 11. You didn’t know your workaholic father all that well at 11, so you wouldn’t know that you would grow up with many of his personality traits. Some of that has served you well, but maybe not all.
Vitally Real 