It was my birthday a couple of weeks ago.
I wrote this letter to my 4 year old self as a birthday love note.
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Hey lil Leonie, it’s big Leonie.
It’s our birthday today.
How good is that? We love our birthday.
Especially the cake. Always the cake.
I just wanted you to know that we did it, girl.
All those things you started dreaming of… They are flowering in our life now. We made them happen. We are doing the thing we were born to do.
It’s been a lot of hard work, but we are used to hard work, aren’t we? At your age, we had already learned to ride a horse and started mustering cattle with our brothers and Dad and Grandad and the rest of the men.
Plus, this work is even more fun than being on horseback, if that is possible to believe!
I still miss the smell of horses though. I wish they would bottle it and turn it into Eau De Horse. I would cover myself in it each morning.
We live in a place now where we never thought would be our forever town, but it is.
We are so very happy here. Our garden is magical, and we are surrounded by our tribe who love us and get us and love that particular constellation of cells called Leonie.
There’s been some hard times to get here though. Hard, awful and horrific. You will lose your brother in 10 years. You will be broken by post natal depression in 23 years. That same year you will witness the implosion of your family of origin, an event you would scarcely believe possible.
In 27 years, you will spend nine months rocking in bed, fighting to keep enough water and food down to keep you and the baby inside you alive.
Each of these things will break you, and will also break you open.
We will become wiser, deeper and lovelier from them. Hard to believe I know, but it is true.
I promise you, we will get through them. I promise we will be okay.
I will be right by your side every step of the way.
And one day, eventually, we will look back and see how perfect everything was and is. Because it really is.
I love you to the moon and back. You are perfect exactly the way you are.
Shine on, my little diamond. This world needs all of you.
Happy birthday my love.
All my love,
33 year old Leonie.
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