Dear Me,

Since I wasn’t provided an address, I’m not sure which version of myself I’m writing to: the Montgomery version, growing up awkwardly and insecurely and pretending to be what you thought people wanted; the Birmingham version, losing the sense of self you had created and watching the debris of that identity litter your path; or the New York version, beginning to get a hold on what life could really be, what grace really is, and who you really are.

Regardless, you are all about to get a huge wake-up call.

At various points in your life, you’ve thought you were done in by The Hardest Thing Anyone Has Ever Experienced: not getting asked to the dance, graduating with a degree but not a fiancé, leaving the only home you’ve ever known, receiving your first tax statement from the city and state of New York. You didn’t know it at the time because you were too busy trying to correct these events, naming them aberrations and frantically pulling out a red pen, but being broken was not, is not, the worst that can happen. In fact, I can promise you there’s beauty in it beyond what you can imagine–because in that brokenness lies a becoming.

But there’s nothing that will make you what you’re meant to be quite like what lies ahead.

You will marry on a beach after a rainy day clears and rainbows fill the sky, and better yet–you’ll marry the man you were meant to, the one you were made for. And it will all feel like a dream, especially when the test turns positive and you find out you’re going to become parents.

That’s when things get a little rough.

You will expect the difficulty to lie in getting pregnant, like so many you know are experiencing. Once you clear that hurdle (the first time around, at least), you’ll expect more beaches and rainbows. But grace will arrive in more challenging ways: 3 am cries, bouts of seeming insanity, temper tantrums that shock and scare you (and are mostly yours), tense discussions and a fear that you’re not cut out for this. That you suck at it, actually, and what a mistake to make–a gamble with lives. You will be afraid. You’ll be overcome with a love so powerful it threatens to undo you, and in fact does: it will undo your carefully-laid plans and predictable schedule (when will you ever finish learning that lesson?!), will undo any sense of poise or control you’ve based in your own having-it-togetherness. It will be a river with a current beyond what you’ve ever known, and as it rushes before you, the urge to jump in will compete with the urge to run away.

Spoiler alert: you jump in.

Good move.

You will spend nights, as a family, in a hospital room. You will spend days in waiting rooms. You will search for answers that are not forthcoming and, when they are, are either wrong or just not enough. You will be called to a level of faith deeper even than New York subways–a level you never would have chosen or known had you not jumped in. You will communicate with a tiny version of yourself that doesn’t speak back yet tells you exactly what he wants–and it’s usually different from what you want, in any given moment. You, the former professional student, will watch as your child refuses to sit still and, instead, engages in a level of exploration that, relatively speaking, took you twenty-eight years to risk. You will battle your desire for him to blend into the crowd even as you remember that such a talent kept you in your own version of silence, of prison, for nearly three decades. You will find that freedom, which you used to know in walking a city street by yourself, can also mean being pulled by a tiny hand against your own will as a mountain of laundry awaits your attention.

You will find that the coexistence of freedom and love is a trickier feat than any other mystery, but it is one worth living.

You’ll find that what makes parenthood, and motherhood, so hard is also what makes it beautiful: the fact that none of it makes sense until, like beads of water coalescing on a window, one day all the different pieces will start to come together and you’ll see that there is a narrative here, a story taking place that is bigger than you yet impossible without you. Grace. You will turn from a lifelong pursuit of perfection and begin to distrust and even disdain it–and this will be a gift. Grace. You will realize how little you really know–much less than you think you do now–and will be the better for it, because you will have to rely on something, someone more than yourself. Grace. You will feel a hand on your back in that hospital bed and turn to see the face with a smile beyond what you ever asked for or deserved. Grace. You will look down in the gym on Sunday and see the spot of paint on his shorts, the “stain” that happened when he was painting the nursery, and it won’t be a stain–it will be a work of art rivaling anything you ever saw in the Met. And you’ll hold his hand, feel his arm around you. Grace. 

You will feel the kick of tiny feet from within that took a year to bring to life, and remember how that life came in the middle of a dark season that you all emerged from together. That kick will fill you with excitement and not a little bit of fear: fear that you will repeat past mistakes, that you will be not enough again. And you will remember that you never were, and that’s the point. Because everything you’ve ever been afraid of, intimidated because of, broken by–they have brought you where you are. They have brought you home. And that’s where you live now.

See you when you get here.