Going Back for Her

On being grateful and wanting more.

Maddie turned nineteen last month. Nineteen.

Nineteen is the age I was when I met Bri. The same age I was when, if I’m honest, my real life started. The start of decades-long friendships. A first taste of independence. A sense of self and confidence I’d never had before.

I keep doing the math and it keeps not feeling possible. It feels like yesterday and a hundred years ago at the same time.

And then, as the universe tends to work, on Mads birthday I came across this photo of me and Bri, taken not long after we met. I can’t remember the last time I saw it.

Look at us. So young, so naive, so much collagen.

But what really struck me was me. Looking at this picture takes me back to that fleeting moment when your whole life is still in front of you, with an optimism only youth gets to feel. I keep thinking about who she was and what she expected.

And whether the woman writing this now would have surprised her, or disappointed her, or both.

Now, I’m about to tell you something you’re going to judge me on, and that’s fine. But, when I was her age, all I wanted, more than anything in the world, was to fall in love.

I know how that sounds. I can’t imagine what my reaction would be if one of my girls said that to me now.

#%?$ Go travel! Get your own apartment! Buy pink glassware!

You have to understand, I came of age watching every great rom-com. I tucked myself into bed at night listening to Delilah on my Walkman. The Backstreet Boys are the soundtrack of my youth. I was trained, like an Olympian, to be a hopeless romantic. I thought if I could just fall in love, real, crazy, stupid, run-to-each-other-through-an-airport kind of love, everything else would work itself out.

That was the plan. That was the entire plan.

I wanted a career too, don’t get me wrong. I had a big, full life planned. I just wasn’t strategic about it. I didn’t know I had to be. You never see the epilogue of the next twenty years after Benjamin Barry catches up with Andie Anderson on the bridge. You assume it all works out. I figured you followed your path and got where you wanted, like the yellow brick road. I knew the road I wanted to be on, so I just kept moving, and it would work.

Lately (maybe this is just the existential crisis of being middle-aged) I’ve been thinking about those dreams. Those assumptions, really. And I’ve been asking myself: did I accomplish what I wanted? If that sweet girl in the photo could look into the future, what would delight her? Where would she wish I’d done better?

She’d be delighted she’s still married to Bri. She wouldn’t believe the life that followed.

But she’d have real questions about what happened to her career. To HER aspirations.

For starters, whatever it is I do now wasn’t even a thing in 1999. There was no such thing as a content creator. There was barely an internet. Half of us didn’t have cell phones. So I’d have to explain that part first, and honestly, she’d probably think it sounded fun.

The harder conversation is about the dreams we dropped along the way.

I don’t know how to explain those, because I’m not sure I understand them myself. Were they unrealistic? Some of them, probably. Did I compromise too soon? Maybe. Did I take bad advice from people who meant well? (I think so. I think I took some really bad advice.) Did I let go of things I shouldn’t have, because someone told me they weren’t practical, or weren’t for me, or weren’t going to work?

I don’t know. That’s the honest answer.

I don’t know which dreams I outgrew on purpose, which ones were smart to move on from, and which ones got talked out of me before I even got to try.

I’m not complaining. I want to be clear about that.

But so much of life, I’m realizing, is just looking up one day and discovering you didn’t end up where you are entirely on purpose. There’s not always one big thing that throws you off track. There’s a series of small decisions, good moves and mistakes that add up, curveballs you have no control over.

And honestly, can I even say I’m off track?

I do wonder, though, if we’ve been conditioned to let gratitude be the end of the conversation. I am grateful. Genuinely. Deeply. Sometimes I’m overwhelmed with it in the middle of a regular, tedious day.

And also, I think gratitude has quietly become the thing that keeps a lot of us from asking what else we wanted. Because to ask feels ungrateful. And ungrateful is the cardinal sin, isn’t it? Especially if you already have some of the good things.

How much more should I want?

So we say thank you, and we mean it, and we stop there. We don’t go back and check on the girl in the photo. We don’t ask her what she dreamed about that didn’t happen, or what we might still be able to salvage. Because what would be the point? We have so much. We’re so lucky. We should be happy.

And I am. But something still feels unfinished. Not tapped in. Left behind.

Is that regret? I don’t think so. I’m not regretful. I am curious. And I feel like I owe her something.

So here’s what I’m doing. I’m going back. I’m sitting down with the girl in this photo and asking her what she wanted, before the world told her what was practical, before motherhood and marriage and a business that was never the plan and twenty-five years of being other people’s person rearranged the furniture.

Not as a mom. Not as a wife. Not as anyone’s anything. As her. As me. As a sovereign person with dreams that didn’t need to be useful to anyone else to count.

I don’t know what I’ll find. The Sagittarius in me certainly needs more adventure, that I know for sure. Maybe some of those dreams really did age out and I’ll thank them and let them go. Maybe I’ll discover some are still there, sparkling, waiting to be picked back up. Maybe some are different shapes now and I won’t recognize them at first.

I'd like to think this is the age to do that. Maybe one of the gifts of midlife is the intersection of finally knowing ourselves well enough to have these conversations, and having the bandwidth to do something about them. To make some old dreams new. To let ourselves reexamine what got left behind that didn't have to be. To ask what the new version of our naive dreams might look like.

So I’m going to look. Because being grateful and wanting more aren’t in conflict. They were never supposed to be. And the girl in this photo is still in here somewhere, and I think she’s been waiting a long time for someone to come back and ask.

Maybe yours has too , whatever your version of this looks like.

❤️ If this one hit home, tap the heart — it helps more people find it.