Did you ever see something that you knew totally made sense to someone else, but looked like total gibberish to you? You feel like you can kind of make sense out of the edges, but the total message misses you by miles. That’s what this picture makes me think of, how it makes me feel. I guess the responsible way to phrase that would be that I respond with a sense of anxiety and inadequacy when I view this photo. I suppose it’s kind of pointless to give this picture credit for influencing my emotions…can you tell I’ve been working with a shrink?
I guess because I have been in therapy for a while now, I am thinking of things like my reactions, my plans, my desires and my requirements, my prayers, my ambitions and expectations, and a lot about my failings. I have done a lot of letting go, a lot of forgiving, a lot of crying, and a lot of hoping. At then end of the day, I am grateful for every step that has brought me to this point, even the steps taken that lead directly to stumbles and falls from grace, the steps that ended in crying heaps on my kitchen floor, or finding my adult self crying in the shower, begging for some new measure of understanding about what this life means in this present moment.
I wrote an entry in my journal on New Year’s Day 2009. I wrote about shooting stars, wishes, prayers, the weight of how we feel when we really want something with our whole selves, or at least how I feel. I could picture my young self, so fresh, so sure of herself on the outside and so terrified of never measuring up to some line she wasn’t even sure really existed. I remembered laying my long chunky body down on the sidewalk outside our red brick house on College Street, half on the pavement, feeling the heat of the day seeping into my legs and the fabric of my shorts, with the other half on the shaded patch of grass, peeping between pecan branches and making shapes out of white puffy clouds.
I can see it now through the eyes of a thirty year old woman, not a nine year old girl. I know words like cumulus, dopler effect, radiant heat, transcendentalism, and I can play the word association game like nobody’s business. When I was nine, I don’t think I knew a whole lot about much. I never would have imagined words like dichotomy, paradigm shift, orthopraxis, or quarter-life crisis.
At that point, I still was sure I would be a doctor, and that by the time I was 12, I wouldn’t be such a fatty. Those were things I was sure of. I was also sure that my room would never be clean enough. I was sure that if I studied and made 100’s, the kids in class would tease me about being too smart, even more than they already did. I mean, I didn’t really even understand why a kid accusing me of reading the dictionary in my spare time was a bad thing. Because of that, I was also sure that by not studying, and being lazy, and still making 96’s and 98’s, and sometimes a lower 90 or high 80 would infuriate my parents at home. Even at the tender age of nine, I realized the need to pick my battles. I also understood that sometimes, you have to sacrifice a battle to win the war. But I wouldn’t learn that phrase until late high school. Once I did learn it, so many things made sense.
I think about that little girl in her front yard. I can see her. I can hear her breathing. I can remember how she felt..so calm and so frantic, at the same time. She already seems to know that life is most firmly and fully lived right on the edge of things. She doesn’t know it, but hormones are beginning to charge into her blood stream by the bucket full. In just a few short months, she’ll start her first period. She will be amazed at the power of her own body, but she won’t have words to put with that feeling for at least ten more years, and even then, she’ll only think them very quietly, because she won’t understand that it’s ok to be a girl and like that about yourself until she’s at least 25. Then, when she turns 28, she will realize that she’s becoming the woman she always wanted to be, saying the words she’s learned and now knows what they mean, and why they mean what they do. I wonder if whispering any of these things in her ear would make her feel any better, or if she would even remotely understand what I was trying to tell her. I’d like to think I was a pretty smart little kid, but I don’t think I was quite that smart.
I don’t know if telling her anything would be a good idea. I mean, if you could soothe some of the anxiety of growing up, even if it was just to tell yourself that things will get better, would you do it? If you knew it wouldn’t tear the space time continuum, or create a black hole, or alter the course of human history, would you tell yourself that it was all going to work out? Would you trust the fates enough to tell yourself that as a nine year old? Would you be worried that you might be speaking too soon, that the bottom would surely drop out in the present, and that you’d be telling a lie to your nine year old self about things being alright, eventually? In the final analysis, it’s probably a good thing we don’t have that choice. We are most likely best served to believe that the past is always prologue.
But I wonder about that little girl, with hopeless hair, blue grey eyes, and the vague sense that she is on some kind of track toward something. She knows exactly what she needs to get by—she knows she is loved and Loved by something bigger than she can really imagine. She knows she likes to pray, and she wants to know God. She believes in miracles and knows that at some point, because she lives in a universe that is still so very black and white, fairy tales really are real. She even still half-heartedly believes in Santa Claus, because she likes the idea of believing in a nice idea, even though she won’t know that’s what that feeling is for another 15 years.
I think about her, and I look at her in my memory. I want to tell her that we eventually get a handle on all that hair, but that we have some unfortunate mishaps and fall into some tragic fads along the way. It won’t be cheap, but it will be interesting and colorful on the way.
I want to tell her that when she is an adult, those eyes that seem to never be the same color two days in a row will be her best friend. She will learn to use them to look past the surface. She will learn that people trust her eyes, and she will use that influence for good, because she will learn that betrayal is the cardinal sin, and even though she won’t read Dante’s Inferno until she’s 28, she will understand the feeling much earlier. She will be grateful when people compliment her eyes. That will be something that makes her feel set apart and special and she will have to try not to be vain about them. She will also have to learn to deal with the fact that she has a horrible poker face. This will mean that she’s going to have to learn to tell the truth, but to be careful with her words. She will know the flavor of “first, do no harm” long before she learns about the Hippocratic Oath.
She never quite loses the knowledge of the love she has or the Love she receives. There are a few moments that are awfully low, and for that I do wish I could give her a happy thought to store away for tearful mornings, letters she will wish she had locked in a drawer but sent because it was the right thing to do at the time, and letters that arrived at just the right moment. She won’t learn the true meaning of the phrase “situational ethics” until she is almost 30, but all of those letters and their aftermath and afterglow, they all prepared her to savor the meaning and the occasional mercy of the same.
I want to tell her to be careful with her love, but at the same time, I want her to love with her whole heart, every single time. I want to reassure her that seven years from where she sprawls out on that patch of concrete and grass, she will fall in love for the very first time. And it will feel better than anything else in her whole entire life will feel. And it will hurt worse than anything else in her whole entire life will, in ways she can’t imagine. She will learn to be thankful for that first love, because that’s the feeling she will always try to match, because it was so amazing and vivid. She will be grateful for that first heartache, because she will know that she will always come out stronger on the flip side, because nothing is as hard as the first time. She will learn that regret is a necessary component for nostalgia, and nostalgia is what reminds you of why you are happy to not live in the past.
She will learn things about God that she can’t imagine now. God will be huge and infinite, and sometimes even at nine, she can see the edge of what that means just at the moment she stops saying her prayers and slips off to sleep. But she will also learn about God as a God of small things, too, impossibly small in the face of infinite depth and breadth. She will learn about all sorts of paradoxes. She will find herself in the Bible, see stories from angles that would seem so foreign and alien to her nine year old mind. She will be enthralled by Elijah. She will befriend Peter. She will come to know Jesus as her brother, her friend, and her savior in a thousand new ways.
She will wish there were times when she could walk away from the knowledge that God’s will is where she wants to be, because sometimes that means being uncomfortable and angsty. But she will know a deep and profound center of things, she will learn to live away from the mountain-top experiences, and find deep peace in the middle places. I wish I could tell her that the peaks and valleys are going to be intense, but that the middle places are where she will catch her breath and see some amazing things. I want to tell her that she will dream dreams one day that will remind her of God’s promises.
I want to tell her to that the story of Gideon will be something she needs to find and own. I want to tell her that Bob Marley is going to be important. I want to tell her that one day, she will learn about synchronicity and non-violence, liberation theology, and experience the steadfast love of Jesus in the most ordinary and mundane ways.
I want to tell her not to worry about her nervous stomach, or her big feet, or the fact that she hasn’t learned to use her humor to full effect. I want to assure her that she will get a first kiss, she will learn how to dance. I want to tell her that it’s ok to want things to be fair, to be better than they are. I want to tell her that while her idealism will be tempered, she will always, even in the darkest of places, not ever really be able to suppress the hope and conviction that things are going to get better.
I want to tell her these things. Not give her specifics, no cheat sheets about the math portion of her college boards, or boys she should never kiss, or girls she should never be friends with, or the colors of her dreams or the flavors of her birthday cakes, just give her a little bit of hope. Give her a little bit of sunshine to keep in her pocket. I wouldn’t dream of telling her of the heartaches, or the train wrecks, or the small and large deaths she will witness and feel. I won’t tell her about the horrible haircuts, the blown test grades, the hangovers, the way that some mean kids grown up to be mean adults. That would take out some of the flavor of the gumbo life will offer her.
I imagine that when I am sixty, twice as full of years and experience as I am today, I will imagine my 30 year old self as I am now. I’m on my regular side of the bed, farthest away from the door. I have on a pair of boxer shorts I stole from my grandfather when I was in high school or junior high and a pink shirt I spilled bleach on while I was cleaning my bathroom the week after I bought it. The cat is grooming himself at my feet, and I’m in the first house I ever owned. Everything I own is in this house, its all in one place, for the first time since I was 18.
I am afraid most of the time that I will end up single, childless, and alone with several more cats, and that people will think I wasted my life. At this point, I kind of have a hard time disagreeing with them. I can’t come to terms with the fact that all or some of those things may end up being true at some point. I don’t think they will end up being true, and that’s mostly because I can’t manage to beat the hope out of the nine year old sprawled on the pavement in front of the house that my brain immediately flashes whenever I think of “my house”, even though I haven’t lived there in over ten years.
I hope when I’m sixty, I’ll want to come back and tell myself mostly the kind of thing I’d like to tell my nine year old self.
Don’t worry so much. You’re going to be fine. You are going to see some amazing things, and some things you’d rather not see. You’re going to laugh and cry a lot. You will doubt yourself some of the time. You will sometimes believe in things that aren’t all the way true, but you’ll eventually figure things out, and fix what you can.
You will need to read the letters in your bottom drawer periodically, to remind you of things you have forgotten, and places you still have left to go. You will still revel in the simple things, like hot cement and cool grass and big white clouds. You will fall in love, as many times as you need to, and one day, it’ll be for all the marbles. You will have amazing friends who will hold your hope on dark days, and you will do the same for them.
People will die, in big and small ways. You will keep picking up rocks, be enchanted by mysteries and mystics, and want to be at the beach every Summer Solstice. You will sing the song you were meant to sing, say the words that are written in your heart, and have more than you can ask or imagine. You will be loved and Loved.
I know I wouldn’t understand my sixty year old self anymore than my nine year old self would understand me, right now. But I’m sure, if we squinted just right, at the edges, where things either come together or blur, we would know what we meant.
mil besos,
rmg
