It was 11pm on a Tuesday. I was halfway done with the third glass of wine that I knew I shouldn’t have had. But I lost that negotiation with myself nearly every night back then.
My husband and one year old daughter were already asleep. It was just me and the dog on the couch.
I wondered, not for the first time, if he also thought I was a fraud.
I had just closed down my work laptop for the night. I was a full-time news producer and a full-time stay at home mom during a never-ending pandemic, and I had no idea how I landed here.
From the outside, I looked like a success. The people I spent my entire adulthood trying to impress finally were. I had married my high school sweetheart, we had just bought a house. I had the adorable growing family, the career—all of it.
And I had never been so miserable.
For some reason on that Tuesday night the thoughts I tried to drink away, to eat away, to scroll away kept bubbling back up. I wasn’t happy. I was the opposite of happy.
But I was doing everything I thought would make me happy!
Everything everyone said would mean I’ve arrived!
I have no idea why, but it popped into my head to read my old yearbooks. To see if there was some clue there where the misstep was, if there was a misstep.
Down in the basement in the box of my old stuff from my parents house, a notebook fell out that I hadn’t seen before. It was my notebook, actually. The kindergarten notebook I used to write out my first letters. I smiled as I flipped through them, but in the middle I noticed the handwriting changed from my five-year-old self to one much more familiar: my mothers.
The page was dated May 28, 1992. My first birthday.
There was a small note at the top that explained she had written these first few ones as letters in an envelope, but she liked the idea of writing them in this notebook better so she transcribed the first few over.
My mom had written me a birthday letter for every single year, up until I turned 21.
They were nothing extravagant nor super detailed. She just took the time, every single year, to jot down what stood out to her. What people noticed about me, what she noticed about me.
What teachers had said. The things that year I got lost in. The things I tried that were definitely not my thing.
“One whole month of dance for you this year! You kept telling me it was the worst month of your life. But damn it, we paid for the month in advance so you went to all of them!”
More than three decades later, I am still the worst dancer in the room.
She wrote about how I filled notebooks with stories as soon as I could string a sentence together, how I loved learning to cook with her.
She wrote that I would get lost in books for hours, and about how wandering around outside for an hour or two always made me feel better. They were never meant to be big, sweeping declarations of who I was. They were simply a little note about what she noticed about me each year. She never even told me about them, just slipped this book into my box of stuff that she brought over when we moved.
She had no idea that those little notes would become something so much bigger.
I sat up until well past 2am reading and rereading them all.
A few years later, the internet got obsessed with a theory that if you want to know what your true purpose is—what will actually make you happy—you just had to remember what you used to get lost in as a kid.
I realized that I never had to remember it, because my mom had written me a manual.
Little by little, I started rebuilding my life in a way that felt like me, and sounded a lot more like the girl my mom spent years writing about.
I started filling up notebooks again, and eventually this Substack.
I started cooking, and losing whole afternoons meandering around the neighborhood with my daughter.
I quit the news job, stopped drinking, had more kids and stopped chasing the career I thought would define me.
Looking back, what actually happened was that I found the person I was at thirteen, before the world got a say. It took a few years. But I got her back.
I let me define me again.
As parents, we have no idea what small thing we do will end up having a huge impact on our kids. My mom, to this day, doesn’t know what these birthday letters have done for me.
Lately I’ve found myself wondering if my mom would have noticed all of those little things about me if she had been interrupted every few minutes like we are today.
If every boring moment in the day had been filled by a screen.
If every question had been answered before she had the chance to wonder.
Those letters weren’t the product of some brilliant parenting philosophy. They were just the product of paying attention.
And sometimes I worry that attention is becoming one of the hardest things for parents to hold onto.
I try to think of that every time I remind myself to slow the f down. To make the heart-shaped peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, to read the favorite book for the fifth time. To teach them how to press their favorite flowers in the same giant book my grandma taught me with.
And yes, I write them each a birthday letter every year. Never more than a page. Just some things I noticed over the past year about who they’re becoming. I try to note what lights them up inside in case one Tuesday night in their thirties they find themselves clamouring to remember where that spark went.
Because that’s all we ever want, isn’t it? For someone to notice us. For someone to truly see us, not what the world says we should be.
I’m realizing as a mom that’s my number one, and most favorite, job.
To watch the magic of them becoming themselves. And to, one day, remind them of who they were before the world got a say.
I can picture my mom in her pajamas up late the night before our birthdays at the kitchen table, writing in our kindergarten notebooks and smiling to herself.
She thought she was writing birthday letters. What she was really writing was a way home.
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.