Chaos File 005: Seventeen

Her handwriting. My voice. Our story.

I pulled this journal entry from a box of my mom’s things I’ve been sorting through while writing. Most of it is a jumble—photos, scribbled notes, receipts, half-thoughts that trail off—but I randomly opened to this page from 1998 today, and reading it felt like flipping to a page in my own notebook (if my handwriting were better and my thoughts a little clearer). I would never say “run like the wind” and have no interest in bungee jumping, but it seems we had similar aspirations in our 40s.

I always knew we shared some things—our love of words, our capacity for big feelings, our inability to control our facial expressions—but going through this box, I’m realizing we shared even more than I thought We were, and are, deeply similar.

When I’m in the passenger seat rifling through my bag for a pen, it’s a whole production. Zippers, wrappers, the clatter of rogue ibuprofen in a side pocket. A fork I forgot about. Surprise candy with questionable wrapper integrity. That bag is my Cotopaxi mobile office, but it may as well be a tribute to my mother’s purse. Always chaotic, probably had what you needed (eventually), and always pretty reflective of the mind of the woman carrying it.

I am her. That truth has always been semi-alarming. But now, it’s also deeply comforting.

This page—dated March 29, 1998—was written when I was seventeen. That age feels like a lifetime ago, and also somehow just beneath my skin. I can’t stop thinking about the timing. It’s like a sign from the universe that I’m on the right path.

I hang out with teenagers for a living, and I have a couple of degrees in education. I can say with absolute certainy that 17 years olds are children. No one is equipped to make informed decisions and deal with the consequences of those choices. Their prefrontal cortexes are still under construction and executive function is on its way but stuck in traffic. My mother got married at 17, and I was 17 when everything shifted for me. The year the systems that were supposed to protect me—school, family—didn’t. I’ve spent my entire adult life repairing the damage of that traumatic year (which felt nothing like trauma at that time) because I was a child that was failed by the people who were responsible for me. That’s not blame. That’s just the truth.

I’ve lived what feels like a hundred different lives since then, and I’m a few years older than my mom was when she wrote it. I’ve learned a lot in the time since (from many years in both public education and therapy). Here’s the thing—what others do with the truth is none of my business. My therapist (a literal goddess) helped me understand that telling the truth is not the same as assigning blame. I’m not responsible for the feelings or reactions of others.

In 1998, We were two women, at very different ends of the same bridge. She was learning how to live again, and I was trying to figure out how to start.

My mom died when I was 29, just as we were beginning to find each other—not the roles we were given and expected to play, but in the people we were becoming. We'd only just started building a relationship grounded in truth and joy, instead of guilt and expectations.
I was barely old enough to see that we’d both been surviving in silence.
We missed each other.
But now, all these years later, I’m finally catching up.
And I’m proud of the life I am living and I know she would be proud too.

xoarl