LETTER 007

The Girl Who Had to Grow Up a Little Too Early

Dear you,

I don’t really know how to tell the story of my childhood without making it sound a little bit like the beginning of a movie. A thirteen-year-old girl, a fifteen-year-old boy, and a baby. Somehow, that baby was me.

My mom was only thirteen when she had me, and my dad was fifteen. When I think about those ages now, I genuinely cannot wrap my head around it. Thirteen is such a strange age to imagine as an adult, let alone as someone’s mother. At thirteen, I was probably more concerned with fictional characters, music, and whatever tiny problem felt like the end of the world that week. My mom, meanwhile, was raising an actual human being. She was basically a child raising another child, and somehow, she did it.

Then, when I was five, my sweet dad died in a motorcycle accident. My mom was eighteen.

Eighteen.

I sometimes think about that number and what it actually means. At eighteen, most people are only just beginning to figure out who they are. My mom was suddenly a single mother, raising me and trying to figure out how to keep moving forward without the person she had built her young life around.

From what I remember, she worked constantly. She had two jobs and somehow still managed to give me everything she could, and usually a little bit more. She was young, exhausted, and trying to figure life out while raising me at the same time. I obviously didn’t understand any of that when I was little. To me, she was simply my mom. She was the person who was there, the person who took care of me, bought me things, worked, worried, laughed with me, argued with me, and somehow kept going no matter what life put in front of her.

She was also the person I fought with the most.

And honestly, that probably makes sense when I think about it now.

Growing up with such a young mother created a relationship that was difficult to put into one category. Sometimes she felt like my mother, sometimes she felt like an older sister, and sometimes we probably behaved more like two sisters who had been forced to share a house and neither of us was particularly happy about it.

We fought. A lot.

There were difficult years, things that hurt, things neither of us knew how to handle, and moments between us that I wish had happened differently. Our childhood together wasn’t exactly peaceful, and there were things that shaped both of us in ways I don’t think we understood at the time.

But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve started looking back at my mom with a little more understanding. She was growing up while I was growing up. She was learning how to be a woman while learning how to be a mother, and she was carrying experiences no eighteen-year-old should have had to carry.

Then, when she was twenty-four, she made another huge decision that would change both of our lives.

We moved to Norway.

Just me and her.

Alone.

And here is the embarrassing part: I didn’t even know Norway was a country.

I know.

I know.

But in my defense, I was eleven, and nobody had exactly sat me down and given me a comprehensive geography lesson before we moved across the world. So suddenly, there I was, in a country I knew almost nothing about, surrounded by a language I couldn’t speak and people I couldn’t communicate with.

I didn’t know anyone. I didn’t have my friends. I didn’t have my family. I didn’t understand what people were saying around me, and I had no idea how I was supposed to make friends when I couldn’t even have a proper conversation with them.

And I was angry.

So, so angry.

At the time, I didn’t see the move as my mom trying to give us a different life. I saw it as her taking me away from everything I loved. From my family. From my friends. From the places I knew. From the life that made sense to me.

I was depressed. I was lonely. And I missed Brazil constantly.

I missed my family. I missed my friends. I missed the feeling of being somewhere where I didn’t have to think about how to communicate or whether I belonged. I missed the familiarity of everything. Even the smallest things felt enormous when they were suddenly gone.

But eventually, slowly, things began to change.

It took me around six months to learn enough Norwegian that I could actually communicate with people. Six months of listening to a language I barely understood, trying to figure out what everyone was saying, attempting to answer back, and probably embarrassing myself more times than I would ever like to admit.

But I learned.

And once I could speak, I could make friends.

That changed everything.

Well… it helped.

I was still homesick. I still missed Brazil. I still missed my family and the friends I’d left behind. But suddenly, I wasn’t completely alone anymore. I started building a life here, even if a part of me was still somewhere else.

For years, we stayed in that same place. I went to school, made friends, grew up, and slowly began to feel like Norway wasn’t quite as foreign anymore. It became familiar. I knew the streets. I knew people. I had memories there. I had a little world of my own.

And then, after we had already lived there for years, we moved again.

This time, we weren’t moving to another country. It was only a little over an hour away within Norway, which probably doesn’t sound like much to an adult. But if you’ve ever been a teenager who has spent years building a life somewhere, an hour can feel like another universe.

To me, it felt like starting over all over again.

I had already spent years making friends and creating a life where we were, and suddenly I had to leave that behind too. New place, new people, new school, new routines, new everything. And honestly, I hated it in the beginning.

I missed the friends I’d made. I missed the familiar places. I missed knowing exactly where I belonged. I had already done the whole “new country, new language, new friends” thing once. I wasn’t particularly excited about doing a smaller Norwegian sequel.

But eventually, I did what I’d learned to do before.

I talked.

A lot.

I made friends. Lots of them.

And looking back now, I think all of those moves had something to do with the person I’ve become.

I’m a pretty easy person to make friends with because I talk. A lot. Like… a lot. Give me five minutes and I’ll probably tell you my entire life story, and if you give me ten, I’ll probably ask about yours too.

My friends now always joke that I somehow know someone everywhere we go. We’ll be somewhere completely random, I’ll recognize somebody, say hello, and immediately get the inevitable question:

“How do you know them?”

And honestly?

I don’t know.

I just do.

Somehow, I always know someone.

Maybe that’s what moving so much did to me. It made me adaptable. It made me comfortable talking to strangers. It made me learn how to walk into unfamiliar places and find a way to connect with people. Every time I had to start over, I learned how to find people, make friends, and slowly turn somewhere unfamiliar into somewhere that felt a little more like home.

Maybe that’s also why I can talk to almost anyone now.

If you put me in a room full of strangers, I’ll probably leave knowing at least three of them.

And yet, ironically, for someone who knows so many people, I can still feel completely alone sometimes.

I’ve jokingly called myself a “popular loner.”

Which sounds incredibly tacky when I say it out loud.

Like, oh, look at me, I’m so popular.

That’s not really what I mean.

I can know a lot of people. I can have friends everywhere. I can walk into a room and recognize five different faces. I can have conversations with people I’ve known for years and people I’ve only just met.

And still, sometimes, there is a little part of me that feels like it’s standing somewhere alone.

Maybe that’s because I’ve spent so much of my life saying goodbye.

Goodbye to people.

Goodbye to places.

Goodbye to versions of myself.

Every time you leave somewhere, you don’t just leave the place. You leave behind a version of yourself that existed there. The person you were with those friends, in that school, in that neighborhood, doesn’t completely disappear, but you can’t exactly go back and become her again either.

And some goodbyes never really stop hurting.

I miss my family every day.

And I still miss my dad.

I was only five when he died, so there are parts of him that I remember more through feelings than actual memories. Sometimes I wish I could remember more. I wish I could remember his voice better, his mannerisms, the little things he did that I might have forgotten simply because I was so young.

Sometimes I wonder what he would think of me now.

Who I would be if he had lived.

What our relationship would have been like.

What he would say if he could see my life now.

Would he be proud of me? Would we get along? Would he understand the person I’ve become?

Those are questions I’ll probably never have answers to, and I think that’s one of the strange things about losing someone when you’re so young. You don’t just grieve the person you lost. You sometimes grieve all the moments you never got to have with them.

I’ve also had some really difficult years growing up. Difficult relationships, difficult periods of my life, and years where I didn’t really understand myself or why I felt the way I did.

Eventually, in 2019, after years of not understanding what was happening with me, I was diagnosed with bipolar I disorder.

There had been manic episodes, depressive episodes, and a lot of confusion in between. For years, I wondered what was wrong with me. Why couldn’t I always understand my own emotions? Why did things sometimes feel so intense? Why did I sometimes feel like I was watching myself from the outside, trying to understand what was happening?

Getting an answer didn’t magically fix everything.

But it gave me somewhere to start.

With the right treatment and medication, things became easier to manage. I began to understand myself in ways I hadn’t been able to before, and I think there’s something important in that.

Sometimes you’re not broken.

Sometimes you just haven’t been given the right explanation for what you’re experiencing yet.

My childhood wasn’t easy, and my teenage years weren’t easy either. But when I look at the person I’ve become, I can also see where some of my strengths came from.

The girl who had to start over learned how to talk to anyone.

The girl who didn’t speak the language learned quickly.

The girl who was lonely learned how to make friends.

The girl who kept saying goodbye learned how to carry people with her.

And the girl who grew up watching her mother survive learned what strength could look like.

Because if there is one person I admire more than almost anyone, it is my mom.

Our relationship has always been complicated. We’ve hurt each other. We’ve fought like sisters. We’ve had moments where living together was incredibly difficult, and there are parts of our childhood that I wish had been different.

But I wouldn’t be here without her.

Literally.

And figuratively.

She worked two jobs. She raised me alone. She moved countries. She built a life from almost nothing, all while she was still incredibly young herself.

She’s one of the hardest-working women I’ve ever known.

And today, she’s an author. She’s writing her second book, which makes me incredibly proud of her.

It also feels strangely fitting when I think about my own relationship with writing, because maybe this blog didn’t really begin with me.

Maybe it began with her.

I grew up watching my mom write. She had hundreds of diaries. Hundreds. She was always writing something down, and she would buy me my own diaries too.

So I started writing.

Then came Tumblr.

Then more diaries.

Then notes on my phone.

And now this.

Letters After Midnight.

Maybe I’ve been writing my whole life because I grew up watching a woman use words to understand hers.

Maybe that’s something I inherited from her.

Not her handwriting. Not her stories.

But the need to put feelings somewhere outside of yourself when they’re too loud to keep inside.

And maybe that’s what this blog is for.

A place to put the things I don’t always know how to say out loud.

When I think about my childhood now, I don’t want to pretend it was perfect.

It wasn’t.

There were painful things. There were things I didn’t understand at the time. There were things I wish had happened differently, and there are memories I would probably handle differently if I could go back and look at them with the understanding I have now.

But there were beautiful things too.

There was my mom.

There were friends.

There were animals.

There were books and music and movies and all the little things that made me feel like myself.

There was Brazil.

There was Norway.

There were countless beginnings.

And countless versions of me.

I think that’s what growing up has taught me most: you can miss the life you had without wanting to become that version of yourself again. You can love where you came from and still be grateful for where you ended up. You can carry your past with you without allowing it to decide where you’re going next.

I’m proud of the girl who survived all of it.

I’m proud of the eleven-year-old girl who arrived in a country she didn’t even know existed and somehow learned a whole new language.

I’m proud of the teenager who had to start over again and still found a way to make friends.

I’m proud of the girl who lost her dad too young and somehow kept growing.

And I’m proud of the woman my mom became.

Maybe because, in a strange way, we really did grow up together.

She was a thirteen-year-old girl who became my mother, and I was the little girl who had to learn how to grow up beside her.

Neither of us knew exactly what we were doing.

We probably still don’t.

But somehow, we made it here.

And when I look at everything we’ve been through, everything we’ve lost, everything we’ve had to leave behind, and everything we’ve managed to build anyway, I think that’s pretty damn incredible.

Love,
C.