July 21, 2002 - 11:09 p.m.
So, my 20th birthday is on Tuesday, right? And I went home Friday to celebrate with my family (who cooked me much delicious seafood) and the next day, I cleaned out our store room and found a bunch of pictures of my family in our younger years. They were just in cardboard boxes! Cardboard boxes, I tell you! Getting all wrinkled and yellow and stuff, and I was apalled! So I decided to put them all in albums, cronologically. It was a huge task, but I did it.
And now I'm feeling really sort of bummed out. I was looking at these pictures of this little girl me. It was really weird. Me as a newborn, me as a baby, me as a toddler, me with my baby sisters, (I call them baby sisters now, but in these photos, they really were babies) me with my parents, my grandparents, and I look so different. I mean, I'm recognizable as me, but I've got this look of new-born innocence and joy, even when I recognize pictures of myself as I was being molested by a caretaker, I look so happy. So joyful. Unadalterated by anything. They're cute pictures. I showed the album I started to my dad and he traced his finger around the picture of the newly born me, and said, "We were so glad to finally meet you." I was so unblemished. I look at those pictures and I wonder if the tiny baby I was born deserved to grow up into what I've become. This perfect little baby grew up into such a blemished package. So damaged with so much baggage. I can't help but think my parents see those pictures of the baby me and wonder where they went wrong, why their perfect baby grew up into me. I feel so imperfect, so not good. You know, when you're three, you do thinks that make your parents mad, but you're never bad. I feel like I'm wrong somehow, and I know it isn't my parents fault. They loved me, they wanted me, and they did their best, and still I grew into this.
No one had any idea, on July 23rd, 1982 at 6.17 am, that Margaret Shore Mills was going to deliver a perfect baby girl, and that at July 21st, 2001 at 11.09 pm, that baby girl, nearing her twenties, would be this indecisive, overweight, ugly, girl who trys too hard sometimes, and who's never had a real boyfriend, will never get married and never have babies. Margaret Mills dreamed great things for the daughter she gave birth to that July 23rd all those years ago. She's been nothing but a loving, compassionate mother to that baby girl. It crushes me to think that that baby girl, me, will never live up to the dreams my mother, just a few years older than I am now, had for me that early July morning.
And I'm feeling, for the first time, really, very old. I'm feeling like I'm behind somehow. When she was my age, my mom knew what she wanted to do, she knew she was going to marry my father, she knew her place in the world, and I'm feeling so insecure and alone. I feel like I'm never going to have a family, I'm never going to get married, I'm never going to have success in life. I feel like I'm destined to spend more birthdays like this -- alone, pouring my insecurities out to a computer, and I'm desperatly, terribly afraid of that.
Whoa. I'm sorry you had to see that. Actually, after crying a bit, I'm feeling much better. As a Cancer, I'm prone to periods of intense self doubt, and as a Leo, I'm fairly dramatic (cancha tell?!?). I'm better now.
Love,
Emily
