“Thank you for agreeing to meet me for coffee,” I said in greeting to my twenty year old self.
“You’re welcome. But coffee? I don’t drink coffee. I’ll probably order tea,” she replied.
“Oh, we love coffee now. Let me introduce you to hazelnut flavored coffee. I’ll order for you. My treat,” I returned.
We sat facing each other, and as she inhaled her hazelnut latte, she sighed, “Mmm. This smells delicious. Thank you.”
“I hope this isn’t too early in the morning for you.”
“Don’t you remember? We always register for 8:00 AM classes. Are you a night owl now, or something?” she asked.
“Oh, no, we’re still early birds.”
“So why did you want to meet me?” she asked. “I have my life all planned out. I’ll finish college, go to dental school, marry Richard, then make a life balancing my dental career and raising a family. Are you here to confirm all that? By the way, when did you cut our hair?”
“Oh, sister! There’s so much to tell you. But you asked about our hair. In the eighties, we permed our long hair, but after that era, we go short, and stay there, with the addition of highlights and dye eventually.”
“What?!” she exclaimed. “You dye our hair? You don’t let it go grey naturally?”
“We probably should have, the chemicals and all, but don’t you like it? It’s lighter than yours now, but it matches our daughters’ hair color.”
“Our daughters’? We have daughters?”
“The best daughters. Two of them, and they are married to the best guys. And here’s the best news. We have a granddaughter and a grandson,” I chirped.
“Stop,” she squealed, “I’m just halfway through college and you’re talking about our grandchildren?”
“I can’t help myself. They are just so stinking cute.”
She shifted in her chair a little and timidly asked, “Let’s start over, please. How well do I do in dental school? I was top of the class, right? Like always?”
“Well, that. Actually we decided that it would be a lot more interesting to study the whole human body rather than just the mouth, and we decided to go to medical school instead. We would have done amazingly in dental school, sure, but we do pretty well in med school, and I think we were a pretty good physician, a family physician,” I reassured her.
She looked shocked, and replied, “But. But. Were we top of the class in medical school? Dental school seems like a safer bet. And family physician sounds pretty lame. It’s not surgery or oncology or something noble like that.”
“Ooh, you have a lot to learn, sister,” I answered. “All those straight A’s never got us happiness or fulfillment. It felt good at the time, sure, but we eventually did learn to follow our true calling and not chase after achievement. We learned that we are loved for who we are, not what we achieved. All those gold stars that are propping up our twenty year old ego right now are just protecting that tender soul inside of us.”
“But I would have been the best dentist,” she protested.
“No doubt,” I replied. “But we pursued medical school, maybe partly for the achievement factor at first, but in the end, our career as a family physician was very rewarding.”
“Was? We’re not still practicing?” she asked.
“No, we retired five years ago,” I told her.
“Why did we retire so early? You’re still young.”
“We were fifty-nine when we retired. Yes, that’s young, but we were tired, we could make it work financially, and it just felt right. We haven’t regretted it.”
“Sounds good, but I still don’t get it. Why were we so tired?”
“Oh, sis, this is the part that is hardest for me to tell you. We didn’t marry Richard. He wasn’t right for us. We fell in love with someone else from college, but I’m not telling you who.”
I took a deep breath and continued, “A year before we retired, our husband died. He had been sick for eight years, and you and I had to run the clinic and raise those two daughters all by ourselves. It was hard, but we are strong. And we never regretted marrying him. We had a wonderful life sharing the responsibilities of the office and of parenting before he got sick.”
This was a lot for her to take in, but eventually she whispered, “But I’m not strong. I haven’t even lived. How can anything bad happen to me?”
“When you think that you are invincible, brokenness is unimaginable.”
“I don’t want to be broken, and I don’t want to have to be strong,” she cried.
“We all break at some point in our lives. Our strength helps to heal our broken places. And unlike you now, we do eventually learn that we cannot do it all by ourselves. Community saves us, heals us. But our life, mine and yours, isn’t all hardship and brokenness.”
“What do you mean? You mentioned the daughters and the grandchildren. Is that it?”
“It’s way more than that. Listen carefully. That little kid we used to be is still inside of you—the one who was fascinated with insects and flowers and rocks and trees. The one who danced and sang and played. Well, we eventually learn how to move again with that kind of joy in the world, with delight and love and wonder. We dance, and sing, and play again.”
“Wow!”
“Yeah, wow! You’re so serious and studious right now, but the girl-child still lives inside us.”
“Thank you for telling me all this. I thought my life might be all about chasing the next reward. But I’m getting awfully sleepy. I should go home and take a nap. I thought coffee was supposed to be stimulating.”
“Well, I might have slipped a little something in your latte so that you wouldn’t remember this meeting. Sweet dreams, sister. I’ll walk you back home. And remember, the Universe loves you.” I hugged her close and added, “And so do I.”