Photo by Helen Montoya Henrichs.
We’re sitting in my living room, all our bellies full, and the twins are down for their naps while the oldest boys and the newest one are still up, hanging out with their Nonny and Poppy.
My mom holds the littlest one. My stepdad plays with the others.
And somewhere in the middle of our conversation my mom says, “I sure never expected you to have six boys.”
I laugh. “Yeah. Me neither,” I say.
“If your high school friends could see you now,” my mom says.
If they could, I thought. They would not recognize this me I have become.
I am not who I once was. Not even close.
And I am so very glad.
///
When I was 12 years old, I had just lost my dad to divorce. My mom was close to depressed. I lost my center.
I was never exactly popular, but I did have a handful of friends.
And there was a best friend. We were inseparable. We stayed over at each other’s houses—mostly hers, because I was ashamed of my poor. I knew her sister and mother and father, and she knew my brother and sister and mother.
And then there came a day when jealousy flashed its ugly grin and I fell in its web. I don’t know why, exactly. I just know that I was a fatherless child who was lost and alone and sad. Maybe that explains why it happened. Maybe it doesn’t at all.
There isn’t really a good excuse for being a mean girl.
It’s just that I hurt so badly inside that the only way I felt like I could deal with my hurt was to hurt someone else. So she could feel what I was feeling. Except I was too young to understand that when you hurt someone else, you don’t feel any less alone. You don’t feel any better.
We were watching the eighth graders play a volleyball game. Our seventh grade team had just finished. For some reason I was sitting up high in the bleachers, and she was down at the bottom. Probably I had already said something mean, because she was never one who did that.
More mean was on its way.
A mutual friend moved between us. “Why don’t you want to be her friend anymore?” she said when she reached the top of the stands.
“Because,” I said, with my poker face on. “I just don’t like her anymore.”
Our friend walked back down the bleachers and relayed my message, because we were immature little girls using a mediator, and I watched my best friend’s face crumble, her heart breaking that I could just decide one day I didn’t like her anymore.
And why not? A daddy could decide he didn’t like a little girl anymore and up and leave.
I spent five more years in the same school as my former best friend. Our friendship was never the same.
I could not ever quite bear to look her in the eyes.
///
It’s hard to say what changes us.
Love. Children. Years.
Life.
All of those, rubbing at our edges and softening up the rough parts and uncovering the diamond of who we really are.
We are born into the world pure and whole and beautiful, and then we start counting birthdays, and between those first days of life and now, the diamond of our identity starts disappearing little by little, covered by ego and pain and anxiety and fit in and popular and ridicule and normal, whatever that means.
Someone tells us we need to lose a little weight, and we forget that skinny does not equal beautiful. Someone tells us we need a thicker skin and we forget how big emotions can be a great gift. Someone tells us we aren’t any good at something and we forget that opinions are just opinions and we don’t have to be bound by them.
We forget that we are in charge of who we are and who we become, not “them.” Not our circumstances. Not all the hell that has happened to us.
We can spend a whole lifetime trying to uncover that diamond again.
I look back at the girl I used to be, the girl who could hurt a best friend with such irreverent, ugly words, and I am so glad I am no longer her but have become someone much more careful with words and the glass hearts of those I love.
I look at the teenager who lashed out and tore down and felt diminished by another’s success, and I am so glad I am no longer her.
I look at the young woman who never wanted kids because she didn’t want the changed body that came with them, and I am so glad I am no longer her.
I am not who I once was.
///
I would do more over the years. I would hurt other friends. I would say things I didn’t mean. I would try to make them feel what it felt like to live in my skin—rejected, ugly, unworthy.
And then I would find myself on my knees in the middle of a concert hall, moved so deeply by the music that I could not even hold my heaped-with-guilt head up anymore. I could not look into the eyes of the ones there with me. I could only sob.
And I would go back to my dorm and scratch out all my letters and dig through an address list of my old high school classmates, searching for the ones I needed. I would mail those letters off.
I would wait.
And the responses would come, one after another, telling of how touched they were that I had written and apologized, as if I could do anything else, and I would feel some small piece of healing bloom in my heart.
And then, not long after that healing set in, the same thing would happen to me.
A best friend would lash out. She would accuse and hurt and rip me clean apart.
And, God, it would hurt. But those places of forgiveness that others had extended to me would turn into places where I could forgive her, years later.
Because, even then, I was not who I once was.
///
There is a wisdom that comes with love and children and years and life, but we can miss it.
We can miss it because we are bent beneath the weight of guilt for all those things we did before. We can miss it because we are listening to who “they” say we should be. We can miss it because we are walking broken and we are walking breaking, like wrecking balls crumbling anything they touch.
The years twist some of us into smaller versions of ourselves, because they march on hard and violent and unfair.
But the good news is, we get to stamp The End to that victim story. We get to choose to become someone better.
We can heap more dirt on top of that diamond or we can uncover more of its brilliance.
It’s entirely up to us.
It’s not ever easy leaning into our transformation, and it’s not ever comfortable getting scraped and rounding off our edges and cutting out the pieces that no longer belong, but where we end up will be worth all that pain.
Because we will be someone greater, someone truer to ourselves, someone who knows what it’s like to be on the wounded side and the wounding side and has lived to tell about it.
The world can’t help but be changed by our changing.
We are not who we once were. We will never be again.
Thank God for that.
