Dear Orphan Annie Emily,
a letter to my younger self
Hello Friends,
Last year one of my favorite Substacks ran a series where people wrote letters to their younger selves. This one is particularly tender. So I wrote one of my own.
Dear Orphan Annie Emily,
It’s the first day of kindergarten, sometime in late August. You enter an enormous classroom, with a bank of red lockers on one side and a wall of windows that seem to touch the sky on the other. You hang your backpack on a hook and find a seat on the huge rainbow in the center of the room…
I keep going, describing my first year in elementary school, new friends, childhood crushes, and my love for my teacher. I’m lost in nostalgia, and I long to hug that shy little girl.
The previous fall, just a few days after I turned four, my father went missing. He was an Air Force pilot, and his plane went down off the Central Coast of California. They searched for weeks but never found anything.
I can tell in my ramblings to my younger self that I craved attention. My first day of kindergarten was just a few weeks away from the year anniversary of my father’s death. If there ever were any rituals around marking the date, I don’t remember them. I don’t remember acknowledging it at all, not in kindergarten and not in any year that followed.
I was 35 years old when I accepted the enormous effect my father’s death had on my life. In a very ’90s, very “bootstraps”, personal responsibility, anti-victim kind of way, I told my friends I never wanted to use my father’s death as an excuse to fail. But it was this very mentality that kept me from growth and healing.
Through therapy, I learned it wasn’t just the trauma of my father’s sudden loss but that I was raised by a traumatized mother. I can only imagine how hard those first years must have been at a time when being a single mother was less accepted. I was provided for, loved, and safe; we laughed and took vacations, but we didn’t talk about my dad much, and that was a particular kind of loneliness.
I knew that when Aiden died, I would do things differently. We have pictures of him all over the house. We mark his birthday and the anniversary of his death. We talk about him all the time, especially as we compare him to Tatum and how they both have the same shit-eating grin.
I tell the kids that each generation is smarter than the last. You pick and choose what worked and what didn’t. My mom did the very best she could with the tools she had, and so am I.
This is where I am today. Thank you for listening.
xoxo,
Emily
Your Journal Prompt for Today
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Links to Ponder
A book club vacation Yes, please! (Cup of Jo)
A note from a stranger (New York Times, Tiny Love Stories)
A delicious no-recipe recipe… I love anything with an egg on top (Dinner, A Love Story). Also in this post is a link to the Biggest Food Trends of the Last 45 Years. Think avocado toast, fancy mac & cheese, and kale.
There is no such thing as a green thumb (Washington Post)
My writing teacher, Andrea Azkowitz, tells us to show, not tell love (Washington Post)
Non-dieting (Oldster)
The laundry apocalypse: “Achieving control is not the same as achieving happiness.” (culture Study) I also wrote about laundry once upon a time.
The art of reading and feeding a newborn (Lit Hub)
If you only have time for one thing… Cheerios and grief for breakfast (River Teeth)
Any time you hit reply to a newsletter, it goes straight into my Inbox. I might not reply right away, but I’ll definitely get back to you!
I love your posts. This was so poignant. I’ve never considered what I would tell my younger self; how I handled trauma, how my father handled it…I was 15 when my mother passed away from cancer. We never talked about it, any of us. No discussion of feelings, coping/not coping, it was as if all evidence of her vanished, as if she had never been there at all. And that is profoundly sad. I love that you celebrate Aiden and that he is very much present in your hearts all of the time. Your posts always stimulate thought. Thank you.