I am 26 years old. It is Friday morning. I am rinsing my breakfast dishes and putting them into the dishwasher so I can have the pleasure of coming home to a tidy kitchen this afternoon, and I am doing it one-handed because my other arm is occupied with securing my baby on my hip. It looks like an extremely ordinary moment. 

“Please notice that this is extremely strange,” says the little voice in my head. 

What is?

“You, Jenny, are doing dishes while holding your actual begotten child who you couldn’t even imagine two years ago, and if I wasn’t here to point it out to you, you might feel like it’s entirely normal.” 

I stop and set up my phone to take a little video of us while I keep going with the work. 

Because my little voice is right. 

It is extremely strange. 

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I am 4 years old. I stand on a stage in a little town church to recite a short poem about how I didn’t want to wait until I was bigger to do this – appropriate, since this is a school program and I am not yet in school. The world is large because I am small, but I am not afraid of it. I have a cheerful childish belief that many of these tall people are in fact my special friends. 

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I am 8 years old, and I am running through the scrub juniper along the deer trails that cross and tangle over the sides of the canyon behind our house, a pink plastic revolver in one hand. Inside my head I am a wild child in the wild west – one of the thousand lives I live in my imagination. At school, I write out lists of the characters in the fictional school I am attending in my mind. When I must do housework, I am secretly a princess in exile and I do my work with a graceful touch as a princess should do, even if no one knows she is one. Sometimes with my cousins and sometimes alone, I page through clothing catalogs and pick out the outfits that the imaginary women in my head would wear on dates and to work and to parties. 

It’s not until some years later that I start writing down the stories that live in my head. 

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I am 11 years old. It is Sunday evening, and my family is guests in another home. I am in a bedroom with a small group of the ‘cool kids’. They are casual, relaxed. They accept me well enough and I want to be happy to be there, but I am not. I am dressed too formally. I am unsure of what might be expected of me. I don’t accept me well enough, and because of that I am miserably awkward and uncomfortable. When I am invited to join in more, I find a reason to leave. 

In my efforts to keep myself safe, I have usually been the cruelest person in my life. 

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I am 13 years old and the world is dark. I’m sitting on a blue moon chair next to the old window of my upstairs bedroom, listening to music that is illegal by the standards of both church and state – church because it’s recorded and it’s not gospel acapella, and state because I saved it onto my laptop off of my older sister’s boyfriend’s CDS. My tiny social world has handed me abandonment and betrayal, and worse, I regularly abandon and betray myself. I cut myself up with loneliness and find some comfort in the bleeding. I write a good deal and escape into stories I read, stories I write, stories I watch, stories I listen to. I argue with my mother about how much time I spend in my room. I am afraid that I am going to hell, not because I think I’m a sinner, but because I’ve graduated from school and when my older sister graduated from school and didn’t do the accepted thing and join the church, I understood from the general reaction that she was now headed for the fiery pit. Why should I be any different?

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I am 16 years old, driving a large yellow mower across large green lawns. My body lives in Colorado and does things like mow in my daddy’s lawn care business and help my mama with the housework and go with my parents to a new church (shock and awe, didn’t see that coming). But my mind lives in my phone, which connects me to my boyfriend and my best friend and 99% of my social life, all a thousand miles away, and in my laptop, where I still create and devour stories like they’re oxygen for my soul. 

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I am 19 years old. My husband and I are sitting on the edge of our concrete carport, listening to Khalid’s “Young, Dumb, & Broke” and drinking coke and whiskey. He probably has a cigar. It is summer, hot, humid, too-green Arkansas summer, but it is evening and there’s ice in our cups. My marriage is less than a year old and I am both delighted with the whole idea and grappling with the fact that being a wife doesn’t preclude the need to be a person. I have my first job in the world of accounting and I am falling in love.

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I am 23 years old. I am driving over a very familiar overpass in Burleson, Texas, and I am thinking. To be or not to be, that is the question. Mennonite, that is. It’s a question my husband and I have been contending with for months, and also for years.

“The only thing that would really change now is how you dress,” says the little voice in my head. “And you don’t even like how you dress.”

Oh.

Okay.

Not to be. 

I am breaking a belief that was hammered into me ever since I was a small, small child: if I am not some version of Mennonite, I will go to hell.

I am shocked, and unsurprised. I spent the first 20 years of my life not believing that could be an option for me, but I also knew when I married this particular man that his feet might not follow a Mennonite path. 

I am terrified, and relieved. 

I am free. 

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I am 24 years old, and it is early morning, and there is too much blood. I walk very softly out to the living room where my husband is lying on the couch and I say to him, “I’m pretty sure I lost the baby.” He holds me, and I wish I could cry but like so many other stupid moments in my life, I am dry and aching. 

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I am 25 years old, and it is early morning, and there is too much blood. So my midwife gives me a shot of pitocin. Later, I’ve forgotten about that entirely until my husband reminds me. All I remember is the warm-skinned little person I was holding in my arms for the first time, and the absolute euphoria that was replacing the scraped-out exhaustion of my entire being. My baby. I will never be the same. 

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The thing is, I remember being behind the eyes of all those versions of Jenny, and many more besides. And sometimes it breaks my brain a little bit to know that they are all me, and I am me. I am the teenager who covers myself in the cold safety of darkness even as I am the woman who breaks out into the brilliant perils of freedom. I am the little girl who collects coins from my older brother’s friend even as I am the woman who collects moments from my daughter’s babyhood.

And it is extremely strange.