Your mother writes

I'm at home, childhood home, and everyone else is home too: siblings and parent.
Yesterday, Oldest and I were noticing that there were locks on the outside of our doors, apparently designed to lock us in our rooms. We found this somewhat alarming but found each of our childhood responses to it even more amusing. Eldest had actually removed the lock from her door (we could see the frame of where it had been). Middle had installed his own lock, on the inside, to keep everyone else out. And mine had remained untouched (I was always the compliant one, the "angel" as my babysitter liked to call me).
I wondered aloud when these had been installed and Oldest said that she remembered it happening, so it must have been after I was born. We went down to the kitchen, to inquire of the parent just when they had been installed and what prompted their installation.
"I can't remember," he answered. "Your mother must have had them put in."
"It was to keep you out!" answered Middle. "You were everywhere and you got into everything! I totally remember that," he explained. And then he went on to complain about my wet kisses.

The next day, Middle walked into my room and said he wanted to read something to me. It was a Christmas card he had found that my mother had sent to someone but that had been returned because of a wrong address. The card started out like your basic card- how are you, we miss you, haven't heard from you in a while. But then my mom began to update her friend on what she had been doing over the past year. I eagerly listened as he read aloud about her skiing in February, spending July in Indiana, taking a special trip to San Diego in September, and preparing to drive south to spend Christmas with my dad's family. And then she moved on to us.
Oldest, she said, was in second grade.
Middle, she said, was in preschool.
Youngest, she said, is into everything.
And I smiled when I heard this- to hear about myself, to imagine me running around, to imagine her trying to keep up with me.
"So I thought you should have this," Middle explained and smiled as he handed it to me.
And then I realized it was what he had been talking about just yesterday. And I thought that was funny- that here was proof of the justification for installment of the locks.
I thanked him and smiled as I took it from him; and then he walked back down to the kitchen.

I looked over the envelope to see what year it was, mostly to see how old I was. I noticed that it was sent in January of 1973, when I was just turning 2. "She hadn't been diagnosed yet," I thought to myself.
And then I looked at the card, wondered how she had chosen it, then noticed her handwriting, how her h's looked like n's because she didn't make their backs tall enough. I looked for similarities in our handwriting but found none and was surprised by what to me seemed somewhat rushed handwriting. But then I figured she had to write a lot of cards and maybe this person wasn't a close friend. And then I turned the card over, to the back of it, where she had written the last part, the update about the three of us. I reread that sentence:
M is in 2nd grade, JW in nursery school and S into everything.
"That's me!" I thought. "She writes like me."
I actually noticed in that phrase my writing style- the three statements, the simplicity of it, and the clever play on the repetition of the "in" that makes you think one thing is going to happen, but then surprises you with something else instead, something human and shared.
"She writes like me!" I thought, and I couldn't believe it.

See, I never saw my mom as a writer. I had heard that at one point in her life, she had written for the National Meat Board, but this always seemed like a job she had to do, not something she loved. And also, what do you write when you write for the National Meat Board? It just seemed weird.
And the one time my dad had talked about my mom as a writer, he said that she had always been frustrated with him for his ability to write something once, and have it be perfect. She had always had to write something over and over and over again until she got it right. In my experience as a writer, I often find that my first write is the clearest. I may go back and edit but still, my initial writing is usually what gets me to the essence of it. I hadn't found myself needing to write something over and over again until I got it "right" the way my dad described her doing it.
The other thing is that I had never seen myself as a writer. I had always loved writing when I was growing up and usually did well in it in school. But when I mentioned to an adult that I wanted to be a writer, they said that my writing wasn't popular enough to make a living off of, and that I should pursue another career instead- leave writing to be a hobby, something to do in the summer. And because writing seemed so effortless to me, because I enjoyed it and it flowed so easily from me, I thought my writing was just normal, nothing special, basic and simple.
But recently I have been doing a lot of writing. And I find that I enjoy it and am often compelled by it. And this has brought up in me the notion that I might actually be a writer- that writing makes me happy and that I need to respond to the part of me that actually wants to write.
So I was really surprised to see, when I read that last statement, that my mom may have been a writer too- and that she had my same style- that this was something that we shared too.
I was a little sad at first, that I hadn't seen this until now, that I had been missing this aspect of her. And part of me was sad too that I hadn't seen this part of me.
But now, in writing this post, I'm actually feeling kind of nice- it's kind of cool that we have the same style, that we could have been writers together, that she wrote, like me.