She looks at me and I look at her.
So very, very familiar, and also foreign.
Some days she seems a completely different person.
For the actuality is, she is…and she isn’t.
I wander through a corridor of memories.
Ponytails, lopsided, looped with elastics crossed over the bright blue balls at each end.
First grade. Frightened.
Sixth grade. Sick to my stomach when I and three fellow students are moved to the next class and a new teacher.
High school and hardly award winning or popular but mostly bookish and nerdy and awkward.
Married and moving some 800+ miles.Excited and delighted. Homesick. Lonely. Happy. I begin to discover the Both/And.
Doctor appointments and labor pains and a hospital and C-section. A baby!!! Our baby.
Hormones and happiness. Healing and hard days. Exhaustion and also the deepest joy. A tiny baby nose that was just right for kissing. Questions without answers and a slow dawning that imposter syndrome packs to stay and never intends to go away.
Three years and then a toddler and a new baby who live with us and we call ours.
So much laughter. So little sleep. So many questions and trial-and-error. What ever possessed me to think I could parent?
Summer days and harvest days and school days and growing-older-days. Frustrations and celebrations. Seeking and stewarding.
Life was simpler then, I muse as I meet my eyes in the mirror.
Walking away and walking toward.
Leaving legalism. Navigation of relationships and learning about boundaries. Deep hurts dealt by some and deep compassion held out by others. Forging friendships, finding connections, treasuring these few.
Getting ignored. Misunderstood. Called names. Accused of playing games.
Being seen. Heard. Held. Embraced and championed by those with a steadier foundation and a wisdom grown from experience. I learn to pay attention to red flags and quit trying to let kindness talk me out of them.
Maggie Smith writes “How I picture it: we are all nesting dolls carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves- all of ourselves- wherever we go. Inside forty-something me is the woman I was in my thirties, the woman I was in my twenties, the teenager I was, the child I was…. I still carry those versions of myself. It’s a kind of reincarnation without death: all these different lives we get to live in this one body, as ourselves.”
I stare. She stares back.
My reflection. My now.
But inside are all those earlier iterations of myself.
Who I was then. So much to learn.
I gaze at her with compassion.
“I’m so sorry.” I say. “I only knew what I knew.”
“I’m so grateful,” I say. “For good memories, for growth, for getting out of bed even when life ground us down.”
She doesn’t say much. She simply smiles.
I touch the glass. She nods understanding.
“Here’s to opening the next doll.” I say.
“Who will we find inside?”
