Be yourself. You’re awesome!

Dear Mr A, Ms G and Mr M,

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!!! Most important things first, don’t forget I love you! With all my heart, to the moon and back, forever and a day, I love you more.

It’s been an auspicious year. In 2023 we’ve finished school forever, moved overseas, started and finished and started new jobs, become a household of adults, got a driver’s licence, planned some travel, renovated a van, completed more than 50 hikes. 

Personally, I’m loving this new phase of life where we get to navigate a next phase of the Watsworths. We get to be family AND friends. I don’t know about you but I hadn’t anticipated this being an amazing year. I mean, we had some milestone birthdays (50, 21 and 18) so perhaps it actually was written in the stars.

Obviously, there’s a tricky side to all this change. Not one of you has followed the expected pathway set out before all of you in the current school system and that’s been a hurdle larger to leap than I certainly anticipated. As your mum I’ve had to check myself more often in this last year than ever in the decades before. So many assumptions I didn’t even know I held! Educational ones, interpersonal biases, expectations about how you’d make you living, what your friends would be like, whether you’d move our of home, how I’d navigate the transition from being ‘responsible’ for you to just being around… There have been a lot of things just for me to learn! How about you? Feeling like a lot has happened?

Be Yourself. One of my favourite books is The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. Without making you listen to the entire outline of the book, know that this is a brilliant journey through a year of trying different ways known to increase happiness, one per month. (Spoiler alert, each one absolutely made a noticeable difference to Gretchen’s happiness and every single one of them is worth trying for yourself.) One of the rules of the project (month #1, start here!) was Be Gretchen. It seems so obvious when you say it but it wasn’t for Gretchen when she started the project and certainly wasn’t for me until I was, umm… 50 years old. Be Yourself. Somehow, despite my example to the contrary, you three have stepped out as your real selves from the get go. Bravo!

How did you work it out? Actually, I don’t mind how it happened. You guys, you’re just so awesome! Your dad and I have to stand back and keep our noses out of your business because, firstly, we don’t quite get it and are likely to derail your trajectory and, secondly, you seem to know far better than we do how to go about it. I always thought I was a pretty self-aware woman. I was tough about keeping my own name, choosing my own jobs, breaking ground as the first to leave home, these things seemed the pinnacle of independence to my naive self. Looking back now from this place my efforts to make my way through the world seem pale in comparison to the steps you’re taking. 

You’ve made me reflect on and reset my perspective on academic achievement and the importance of it when building a life. You’ve forced me to accept language changing through the generations (ugh). Thanks to you I learned the incredible reward of opening the doors at Ardley and meeting people who moved in, became friends, joined the family. You people know who you are. You’re overdue for dinner, I’ve got a Mexican feast waiting for you!

I was once privileged to hold the trust of a small group of clients who came to me for assistance with modifying their speech patterns to help them present more confidently and convincingly as the women they were. As we worked together we talked about incredibly personal things and I learned about so many different, beautiful ways to express your identity. I gave a woman feedback about the pitch of her voice and she shared with me the subtlety of a relationship with a wife who chose to stay through their transition to forge a differently shaped marriage with the love of her life. When I worked on volume and articulation a woman with exquisite makeup and an expensive wardrobe talked to me about the heartbreak of rejection by children who couldn’t accept their father as her true self.

We worked on vocabulary and pitch and tone and how to look after your voice. Voice therapy is an intimate process. When you are working with voice you are dealing with the expression of your self, your personality, the essence of who you are. Those women drilled it into me. Never, ever, let anyone convince you to be anyone other than yourself.

Identity and authenticity. They taught me so much about it. They taught me so much I thought I knew the meaning of those words until you guys taught me the proper lesson. 

I guess this is a round-about way of trying to tell you how impressed I am with you all. It’s possible you’ve taught me more between you than I’ve ever had the opportunity to share with you, the most important of which is that being yourself is the only thing that matters in the scheme of things. I’m so grateful to you for this.