I am totally stealing a great idea from Stie’s blog that I’ve been eyeing for awhile now.  The idea is simple…write a letter to you during a time in the past telling yourself all the things you wish you would have known back then. 

Dear Me in June of 1992,

You are about to graduate from high school.  And even though you think you will be friends with these people forever, you won’t be.  You should try and do a better job of keeping in touch with these kids who have known you since you were a fifth grader.  You will miss them.

Right now, you are terrified.  Everything is changing.  And even though you couldn’t wait for high school to end, now that it is, you are not ready. 

You have had your heart broken, your feelings hurt, and been embarrassed beyond what you thought one human could possibly live through.  You have cut your fair share of PE classes, and really, you should have cut that crap out.  Because even though you thought you looked horrible in that swimsuit during PE class, and I still understand that 1st period swimming sucked, you did not look that bad.  In fact, you were skinny, you just didn’t know it.  And every other girl in that class was feeling just as self-conscious as you were, and the boys were too, you just couldn’t see it. 

And you will never grow up and marry that basketball player.  I’m sorry.  Even though you are the cheerleader and he is the handsome point guard, real life doesn’t really work that way.  And you will get it over, I promise you will.  You will still get your fairytale, just not the one you thought.

You have, for the most part, done a good job through your high school career to balance your good-girl grade school friends, with the Friday night crowd the cheerleaders let you in on.  But when the ‘cool kids’; the cheerleaders and the football players and the basketball players are partying on a Friday night after the game, and someone offers you a cigarette, you don’t have to take it.  No one will notice.  And you look absolutely ridiculous holding that thing anyway.   And good job, pouring out the beer in the bushes…smart move.  You will still think it’s gross 16 years from now.

And 16 years from now, you will be in awe of yourself and your ‘getting ready’ preparedness.  You were crazy for getting up so early every day to do the hair and the curling iron and the makeup.  You will learn that sleep is priceless, when you have interrupted sleep every night.  You will, believe it or not, not even own a curling iron one day.  And it will be fine.  You will even go out without makeup on, a scary thought to you now, but pretty much standard operating procedure when you are trying to get four kids out the door in the morning.

That’s right.  Four kids.  You’ll have ’em.  You will go to college and you will get engaged to the man who is the one person in this whole wide world who is right for you.  He will love you unconditionally, and you will be 100% honest with him about what has hurt you. 

You will goof off, and stay up too late…you will go to parties and order pizza way to many times.  As a matter of fact, once you are finished with college you will not be able to eat Papa John’s ever again, because you will have had your lifetime fill of it.  In college you will skip class too often, and contrary to what you think, Weather is not a ‘blow-off’ class.  You will not have any kind of future in meteorology.   And you will watch way, way too many episodes of Designing Woman. Way too many.

When those student credit card offers start rolling in, throw them away.  They are going to get you in trouble.  Young college students don’t need to shop at Von Maur.

You will move South.  You will travel.  You and your husband will live the life of happy Florida beach bums.  You will be poor.  You will flit from one low-paying job to another, not really caring about a job, or responsibility, money, or the future.  Instead, you will care about walking on the beach, going to the bookstore, taking walks in the park with your husband and your dog, and you will be happy.  You will have less than you have ever had before in your life, and yet you will have so much.  And you will know it.  It is going to be a great way to start off a life together with the man you love.  Wait and see.

During this time though, you should make as much time as you can to visit your Gramma.  I know how much you love her.  I know the depth of your feelings for this great woman, the person that raised you.  And she loves you too.  She just won’t always be around for you to go running to every time you fall down.  There will come a time, when you will have to stand on your own two feet.  And though your hurt will never go away, I promise, I promise you, that it will get easier.  You will honor your Gramma in so many ways.  You will carry on her traditions and her recipes.  You will talk to her every single day.  And even though you will never keep a house or cook or clean or iron or bake as well as she, you will try, and that is all you need to do.

You don’t know it yet, but you will lose Jim too.  His life will end way before his time, the illness that was his lifelong struggle will win.  He will die too young, and he will waste away at the end.  And K will need you.  He will hurt so much, and so will you.  You will hurt like you lost your own brother,  so even though there are times when you laugh at him and make fun of his quirks and his ways about him, you should enjoy him.  Enjoy the fireworks he loves to shoot off every Fourth of July, enjoy the Labor Day Weekend because it marks his birthday like his own personal holiday weekend.  Because even though you know how much he would’ve loved your kids, they will never know their Uncle Jim.  Shoot off a bunch of fireworks on the Fourth of July every year.  It will be the best way to remember him.

You will have your dream of a big family.  You and K will eventually get your beach bum selves back up North and get your acts together.  You will live in the city, you will buy a house and pour your blood, sweat and tears into it.  You will have to leave it eventually, but there will always be something special about your first home.  Things like paychecks, and 401k’s and mortgage payments will become important to you.  You will still be happy, just not in that care free, toes in the sand, quit the job if you’d rather go to the beach, kind of way.

Being a mom to four children will be the hardest job you will ever have.  You will doubt yourself every single day.  But you will do the very best you can and that is all you can do.  You have not known love yet, like you will know it once you hold your newborn in your arms.  You will make mistakes, but you will also do a lot of things right.  I said you will make mistakes, okay?  No parent is perfect, no matter what you think just by looking at them. 

Your mama bear instinct will be strong, but when it comes to your kids and what is best for them, remember to take a step back, and look at the big picture.  You will never be able to right every wrong for them. 

You will probably never love your body, but you will feel a lot better about yourself if you could just accept yourself for who you are.  This will take you a very long time, and even as I write this, you are not there yet.  You need to develop your own sense of comfort and style and learn to feel good in your own skin. 

You will finally stop frying your hair.  Praise the Lord.  You will forgo the Sun-In and the round curling irons, the blow dryer with the diffuser and the spiral curling iron.  And the world will continue to spin just fine. 

And just so you know, popping the zits and then covering them with all that concealer looks really bad, so try not to do that for your Graduation day.  And don’t wear that blue mascara, either.  It is tacky.  So are the hose.

So even though your big day is near, and you are about to start out on this journey called your life, you have no idea what is in store for you.  It will be good, and it will be awful.  But it is all yours, and you won’t be able to go back and do anything differently.  I know right now, you cannot see past the summer.  And that’s how it should be.  Don’t be scared, it gets better.

Someday, you will be living in the suburbs, driving an SUV, shuttling kids around and planning meals.  And you will enjoy doing it, most of the time.  Some days you will hate it, and wonder why your life has amounted to this.  You will wonder what happened to all of your big plans.  And then a pair of little arms will need you and hug you.  You will hug back, tightly, and you will smell your child’s hair and forget all about your plans.  Because they will matter more.

You will learn how to use this thing called email and the Internet, and yes, it will be there to stay.  So lose the typewriter.   And the bag phone.  You look like a dork.

There are a lot of great things ahead for you, and some not so great things too.  But enjoy yourself, and take care of yourself.  Appreciate your life, the people, and the things around you.  Appreciate who you are, high school is over now and you  can stop trying to pretend to be someone that you are not.  You will be sorry that you have wasted so much time doing that.

You may be scared, and thinking that life as you know it is over, and it is, but in a good way.  These are not the best years of your life, you just don’t know it yet.

Love,

You in 2008

PS  In 1993 you are going to get a spiral perm on a Saturday, and then go back and get another one the very next Saturday.  Because the first one was not curly enough.  And even though you think it looks good, you will look like an electrocuted poodle.  You should maybe rethink that.

Well there you have it, things I would have told myself before my big graduation day.  I was so nervous and so scared by change, I wish I would have known that everything would be okay.

If you decide to write a letter to you, let me know.  I’d love to come by and read it.