My name is also Katherine. I feel as if I’m just realizing this now after nearly 40 years. Katherine, my full name given at birth, always felt to me like a distant cousin I’d met once and didn’t much like. Katie was me first; she and I were childhood best friends. Kate and I met in sixth grade when the teacher forced the three Katie’s in class to go by a variation of our name for the year. I lost out on Katie but thankfully did not get stuck with Katherine. In my late twenties, I met Rose, my middle name. She was my alter ego for the year or two I traveled the world and met my soul for the first time. But Katherine, now? Who is she? Does she even go here?
For several years around age 11 (or at least that’s how long it felt), I was pen pals with an actual cousin I had never met in Ireland. Jennifer and I would exchange colorful, multi-page ink-scrawled letters with hearts dotting our i’s and envelopes decorated with stickers. It was a highlight of my childhood. At that tender, insecure age of 11, my correspondence with a foreign relative made me feel as sophisticated as a preteen in the 90s could feel. The delight and mystique I felt when one of those green envelopes bearing the Par Avion air mail stamp would arrive in the mailbox cannot be overstated. I was a woman of the world. It is not surprising that in a short decade, I would come to fall in love with and marry a man from another country.
Can we just pause and reflect that in the span of 10 years or less, we can go from decorating letters to a pen pal with hearts and stickers having nary kissed a boy to, at 20, falling in love with a man who barely spoke English, making the difficult decision to terminate our pregnancy and later that same year, elope? On one hand, it seems unbelievable to be hurtled from the innocence of childhood to the throes of adulthood with such velocity. On the other, I was still a child when I got that abortion and married that man. I had the freedom and responsibility of an adult, but I was cosplaying, blind, naive, reckless, deslumbrada – a word taught to me by my Brazilian husband that’s akin to our “starry eyed.” I had not just fallen in love with him, I also fell in love with his Brazilian culture, language, family, and the sophistication I felt it brought me. I still wanted to be a woman of the world, apparently. Katie was deslumbrada; Kate…well, also deslumbrada, but she had the strength to leave that unhappy marriage some 9 years later.
My Irish cousin pen pal, Jennifer, and I have still never met in person. I traveled to Ireland on business some years ago but our schedules did not align. Perhaps it’s better that way, for now. We’ll meet over tea in Dublin when we’re both fully gray and reconnect to the versions of ourselves from fifty years ago. In that meeting, we’ll be able to see our 11-year old selves again through the eyes and memories of one another. I’ll look back, deslumbrada, over the sea of years since those letters and think, “ah - she’s still in there, my Katie.” I think a sign of doing well in old age is how well we inhabit the many versions of ourselves we have been over the years.
It’s not quite time for that yet, for me. I’m just now meeting Katherine. My goodness, we humans are capable of opening the door to a whole new aspect of our identity when we have gray hairs just springing out from the left sides of our heads. Who is she, Katherine? Does she laugh more deeply? Walk taller? Develop a passion for collecting brass animals? How does she fall in love? Which words does she use when she is apologizing from the heart? Will she learn to waltz, speak French, and finally stop giving unsolicited advice?
Though separate, they all blend together: Katie shaped Kate who influences Katherine. The holy trinity of this ordinary human trying to do something beautiful in this life and messing up every day. With the wisdom of my age now and those couple of wiry grays poking out the left side of my head, I know the formation and coming into being of Katherine is a dance between mindful shaping and open surrender. I have a say in who Katherine becomes and which parts of Kate come along. But it’s not all molding and shaping. What fun is missed if we lose the elements of discovery and surprise.
Isn’t it strange how there are parts of ourselves we can only fully understand through the lens of another? Growth does not happen in a vacuum; it happens in relationships, encounters, mirrored reflections through another’s eyes, arguments, passionate lovemaking, public mistakes and handwritten letters with our emotions scrawled bare in black ink. We are but our communities: friends, lovers, exes, strangers, pen pals and the many versions of oneself. One thing I will make sure is that Katherine, like Katie and Kate, still writes a damn good handwritten letter.
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