A letter to my (slightly) younger self

Gold between the cracks

There's a trend on social media right now: people sending messages to their younger selves. What would I say if I could go back in time?

Could 8-year-old me imagine where I am right now? Probably. I doubt, though, that she is the past version of me most surprised by who I am today.

The me I think would be the most shocked at who I am now would have had a much more mature perspective - 5 years ago me.

At 34, I had a 5-month-old baby in a typical suburban house with my husband, a labrador, and a wallaby. My Dad was alive and well. I was consumed but frustrated with a political career and wasn't sure what else I could do or be. I took myself pretty seriously.

Once I hit my mid-30s, I figured that was kind of it. I was who I was. Right?

So, this is my letter to a recent me who was still fully and completely an adult. She's the me who stopped thinking the world was full of every possibility because she was a woman with a husband, a house, and a baby. That me thought the die was cast. Sure, adults can change on the margins, but not that much. Right?

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Hi Kelly -

So, I have good news and bad news. Actually, I have the best news and the worst news.

First, the worst: You have no idea, yet, how horrific life can be. You think you've been through hard things, but you cannot contemplate what will come.

In 8 months, the night before you and Mark close on a small urban farm, just a few miles north in that dream neighborhood you like to drive through on the way to Costco (OMG WHAT?!?!), you will find Dad. He dies, Kelly.

It will be sudden (a pulmonary embolism), and none of you know it's coming. It will be the worst moment of your life.

You'll crumple onto that scratchy institutional carpet in the hallway in front of his apartment and wonder if you'll ever get up again. Although you will physically, part of you is still there - prone in that hallway - in front of apartment 208.

Then your family and friends will lift you up, sometimes literally. The following day, in a fog that will not lift for months, you'll somehow manage to take the baby downtown in the rain, sign the paperwork, and still get the house. I still have no idea how you did that.

People will show up for you in ways you didn't even know you needed. Especially your husband. You married the right guy for a crisis.

The following months and years will always be plagued with "what ifs." What if Dad made that doctor's appointment? What if you'd been less focused on yourself, the new house, and the baby? What if you'd checked on him a day earlier? You'll probably wonder about this for the rest of your life.

The torture, though, is distilling, and it clarifies you.

You love animals, gardening, and food, especially cheese.

So, here comes the amazing news: somehow, despite being already in your mid-30s, you manage to change more in the next five years than at any other time besides childhood. You're all the things you were before, a wife, Mom, politico - BUT ALSO you're more, a writer, a cheesemaker, a chicken, goat, duck, guinea, quail farmer.

You'll have another baby (WHAT?!?!), and then at the end of that, at Guy’s wedding (Yes! He marries Adam!) Emily will dare you to live off your little farm for a year, and you'll DO IT.

You'll lose and gain literally multiple hundreds of pounds between growing another baby, having a baby, a farm challenge, and then finishing the farm challenge. It's kind of bananas.

You've never worked so hard in your life. You'll throw hay bales around. Lots of them. You'll carry 50-pound bags of grain. You'll stay up late and get up early. You'll learn to milk a goat using mostly YouTube and trial and error.

The exhaustion will be unreal. You have no words yet, to describe the tiredness you will feel all the way to your marrow.

You'll hatch eggs and watch the babies emerge. Some won't hatch. You'll birth baby goats. Some won't make it. For all of your 34 years, you will see more birth and death in the next five than everything you've ever seen combined.

Slowly, the pieces of your shattered heart will reassemble. The breaks will still be there. They'll never go away, just change.

There's a Japanese technique of repairing broken pottery using gold called "Kintsugi." The shimming veins snake through a reassembled piece, highlighting the breaks. Often, the fixed pottery is more beautiful than the original.

Photo by Motoki Tonn on Unsplash

Each step you take as an urban farmer will be a little more gold between the pieces of your heart. Both the successes and the failures will pull you back together, and the work will ground you back to the real world. Writing about it will make you reflect.

You will never be the same. You'll be less, and you'll be more. Like shattered pottery glued back together, you'll always be broken - but you can still be beautiful.

Go get it, Girl. Face it all. Do the hard and beautiful things. Try it all. Fail. Succeed. Try it again the next day.

I love you,

Future Kelly