Friday

Past, present, future.

Sebastian walking our laundry to the laundromat in Brooklyn, 2011.

I had a very flip-floppy day on Friday.

My morning started with a clarity-seeking conversation with a dear friend (who is excellent at reframing, energizing, and inspiring) about shifting away from constant dialogue with my past self towards a curiosity-driven relationship with my future self.

I don’t know anyone better than I know past-me. I know her hurts, her whys, her efforts to survive under really challenging circumstances.

Future-me is more fuzzy. I have a sense of how she feels (secure, engaged, more fully alive) and can see, in broad sweeps, that she is part of some bigger conversation, listening and contributing in a meaningful way. But the details are unclear, and the unknown is uncomfortable.

Right-now me had coffee later that afternoon with someone I knew a little in undergrad and hadn’t seen since then. She’s just moved to Portland, and we caught up on the spread of almost two decades that have passed since we last connected.

What I felt during that conversation, as right-now me, was such a sense of pride in being able to share how good things are. How my kids are healthy and kind and thriving — how they’re teenagers, but we still like spending time together, and what a gift that is.

What a gift it is to know past-me so thoroughly and everything she went through and worked through to be here: in a good place in my career, with greater financial security than I’ve ever known, with a marriage that has taken so many shapes in 15 years to exist now with true earned trust and depth.

In that hour over coffee, I could see the whole arc, laid out quickly and frankly, and it was a moment of showing myself the truth of the goodness of now.

And then that evening, as I was trying to close some of the browser tabs I had open, I read a piece written by a friend that I’d been meaning to read all week. Almost every newsletter I subscribe to has been recommending it since it was published. It’s a first person piece, tracking through a long stretch of time, and there, close to the end of it, was a paragraph that described my family.

The moment was 12 years ago, when the boys were two and three and I was halfway through my first year of grad school in New York City. The moment was a January weekend — Orion’s birthday weekend — when our electricity (and heat) went out on a Friday evening and we couldn’t reach our landlord to access the breaker until the following Monday because he was an observant Orthodox Jewish man who didn’t use a phone over Shabbos and hadn’t set up a back-up contact.

When the electricity went it, Sebastian had just started a shift at a bar in the Meatpacking District and wouldn’t be home until the early hours of Saturday. When it went out, I was alone with two toddlers in an apartment where you could see directly outside through the seam where the bathroom window met the wall. It was below freezing.

I had no money, no family in town. A friend from my grad program offered to let us stay at her place until the heat got turned back on, and she drove over to pick us up.

Over that weekend, we decided we had to move, as soon as possible. Another friend from the grad program offered to watch the boys one afternoon so we could look at apartments in Harlem. She also loaned us $100, so we had train fare and food while we scrambled together a deposit, first month, last month for a new place.

Memory is weird and so deeply personal. My friend who we stayed with, who wrote about this moment in my family’s life — a moment that I’m still teaching myself not to believe as an absolute truth, that the rug will be pulled at any moment and you’ve failed if you’re not ready for it — was really writing about a moment in her own life.

But the way she wrote about it made me feel so much shame, and also so small.

Shame that I’d created the circumstance where a thing like that could happen to my family. Shame that I didn’t have the money for real child care or special outings to kid places. Shame that I had to rely on someone else’s generosity rather than a self-made safety net.

Shame, also, that I never paid my other friend back that $100, even though I think of it often and last year, when I was given $100 cash for Christmas, had planned to mail it to her with a note of my gratitude — but then never did.

One of the things I shared with my friend over coffee on Friday was that, even though we lived below the poverty line for the first ten years of their lives and I struggled often to provide basics like food and shelter, I’ve also raised my kids exactly how I wanted to.

All of the important things were there: real, communicated, felt love. Acceptance of who they are, coupled with encouragement to always learn and grow. An insistence on kindness and engaging with the world with curiosity.

If I had to do it all over again, I told her, even with more resources, I would have done it just the same.

I often felt scared and worried about the future — even one as close as the next day. I still do. But my kids are secure and confident. They are adaptable and capable. Their growing up didn’t always look how we think it should look, but I can’t imagine a better outcome.

I’m sure our reality then was scary and uncomfortable for many people who witnessed it. Especially when it felt like too close of a possibility, there but for the grace of god.

I get to watch my friends meet early parenthood now — hopefully this friend that just moved to Portland, as well. I get to tell them that it won’t always be so hard (or at least not in the same ways), that they’ll sleep uninterrupted again. And I can watch without flinching, without fear.

My past self has proven to now-me that it can be hard but it can be done, and done well, with time and intention. Future-me will know that too, and will hopefully have a different story to tell about different true things.

That feels like a gift.