A Life Already Blessed

Yesterday I was changing a picture frame, which is one of those ridiculously boring little projects that apparently comes with owning a new home because once you move into a new space, suddenly everything starts looking a little tired. You want things to feel fresh. You want new towels and new plants and new pillows and, apparently, new picture frames, because somehow the perfectly acceptable frame you’ve owned for years suddenly looks like it has no business coming into this next chapter with you.

And I’ve noticed that about myself since moving into this house. I keep wanting to freshen things up, change things around, decide what belongs here and what doesn’t, and sometimes that means bigger things and sometimes it means standing over a table on a random afternoon taking an old painting out of an old frame because I decided it needed a new one.

That was it.
That was the project.

Except when I took the painting out and turned it over, there was handwriting on the back.

I actually stared at it for a second because I had never seen it before, and this painting has been mine for years. I know this painting. I’ve looked at it a thousand times. I know exactly where it came from and who made it and why it belongs to me, and yet somehow there were several lines of handwriting on the back that I had apparently never noticed.

So now I’m standing there holding this thing in my hands, squinting at old cursive, and eventually I had to go grab my readers so I could actually make out what the hell it said. I started reading one word and then another, going back over the same sentence a couple of times because the handwriting is beautiful but not exactly easy to decipher fifty years later, and slowly I realized that what I was looking at wasn’t just somebody’s name or a date or some little note about the painting.

It was a message.
To me.
Written before I was born.

And that is where the whole fucking afternoon went sideways.

The painting was made for me by my uncle, my father’s twin brother, while my mother was pregnant with me. He’s an artist, and this was something he painted specifically for his unborn niece, which means I have technically owned this painting longer than I’ve owned anything else in my entire life because it was mine before I was even here to claim it.

My mother kept it for years and then eventually gave it to me, and of course she did because it was mine. It had always been mine. I’ve had it in my own homes for years now, hanging on my walls, moving with me from one place to another, and somehow through all of that I had never seen what was written on the back.

The inscription says:

“Un enlace entre la mano de la vida, el amor de tus padres y tú. Será la dicha con que vivirás. Y yo, tu tío, la dibujé para que siempre la tengas, aún más cuando ya yo no esté.”

Roughly translated, it means:

“A bond between the hand of life, the love of your parents, and you. May this be the blessing and joy by which you live your life. And I, your uncle, drew it so that you would always have it, especially when I am no longer here.”

And I just stood there.
Because what the fuck do you even do with that?

The line I kept coming back to was será la dicha con que vivirás, because dicha can mean happiness, joy, blessing, good fortune, grace, and somehow none of those words by themselves felt big enough once I understood what he was describing in the painting. The circle in the image represents the love that binds me to the hands of life, to my parents, and to myself, and the more I looked at it, the more I felt like what he was really saying was, this is what will hold you. This is what you will live by. This is the foundation beneath you.

And he wrote that before I had lived a single day.
That is the part I cannot get over.

Before I had opened my eyes. Before anyone knew what my voice sounded like. Before anybody knew if I would be funny or difficult or ambitious or sensitive or stubborn as hell. Before I had done anything lovable. Before I had made anyone proud or disappointed anyone or made a mistake or achieved anything. Before I had taken one breath outside of my mother’s body, I was already being loved.

And that realization cracked something open in me because isn’t that one of the oldest spiritual ideas we have? There’s that passage in Psalm 139 where it says that God saw us while we were still being formed and that all of our days were known before one of them came to be, and then there’s Jeremiah, before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and elsewhere this image that even the hairs on our heads are numbered.

I’ve heard those scriptures my whole life, but I’m not sure I’ve ever felt them in quite the same way because yesterday I was literally holding something in my hands that had been created for me while I was still inside my mother.

Suddenly, “before I knew you” wasn’t just scripture.
It was ink.
It was handwriting.
It was a fifty-year-old painting.

My uncle had imagined me before he met me. My mother was already protecting me before she had ever seen my face. My father was already my father before I ever called him Papi, and there was an entire world of love already organizing itself around me while I was completely unaware that any of them existed.

Anyone who has ever experienced pregnancy understands this in their bones because you begin loving this person before you meet them. Sometimes even before you’re pregnant. You start taking vitamins, watching what you eat, thinking differently about your body because your body might become someone else’s first home, and then the test turns positive and suddenly this tiny invisible person hasn’t done one damn thing and you are already rearranging your life around them.

Already protecting them.
Already imagining them.
Already loving them.

They haven’t earned any of it. They simply are.

And I think that’s why this idea of being loved before we arrive is so mind-blowing to me. We understand it because we do it too. We love forward. We love someone into a future they haven’t lived yet.

And apparently someone did that for me.

Then, because apparently one existential thought is never enough for me, my brain went even further.

There is also this biological reality that has always fascinated me: when a baby girl is developing in her mother’s womb, she is already developing the immature egg cells she will carry into adulthood. Which means that when my grandmother was pregnant with my mother, my mother was already carrying the beginnings of the reproductive cells from which her future children could one day come.

No, I was not a fully formed tiny Sandy sitting inside my grandmother. Obviously half the genetic equation would come later. But still, think about the physical continuity of that.

My grandmother carried my mother.
My mother carried the biological possibility of me.
Then my mother carried me.
And eventually, I carried my sons.

For one tiny moment in time, generations are not separate chapters. They are physically nested inside one another.

And suddenly that circle in my uncle’s painting became even more interesting to me because he painted a circle about life, my parents, and me before I had even arrived, and here I am fifty years later thinking about how life itself moves through families and bodies and generations in circles that we barely stop long enough to notice.

That’s where the woo really starts for me.

Sometimes reality itself is so mystical when you actually stop and look at it.
We are so used to being alive that we forget how insane being alive actually is.

I existed first as possibility. Then biology. Then someone’s anticipation. Then someone’s daughter. Then myself.

And before I understood any of it, people were already making room for me.
Which made me wonder about something else.

We talk all the time about what gets imprinted on us. Trauma. Fear. Scarcity. Family dysfunction. The beliefs and patterns we inherit before we’re old enough to know we’re inheriting anything. God knows I’ve spent years thinking and writing about those kinds of inheritances.

But what if love leaves an imprint too?
What if prayers do?
What if intention does?
What if someone imagining something beautiful for your life becomes part of your inheritance whether you ever hear the words or not?
What if we inherit blessings too?

That thought stopped me.

Because suddenly I wasn’t just looking at something my uncle had written. I was looking at evidence that before I had done one single fucking thing, I was loved.

Before the résumé.
Before the accomplishments.
Before the mistakes.
Before the money.
Before the marriage and the divorce.
Before motherhood.
Before books and businesses and careers and all the things I would eventually use to describe myself.
Before I could earn anything at all.

There was love waiting for me.
And there was something else in that circle that I almost missed.

Me.

The circle wasn’t only the hand of life and the love of my parents.
It included me.

And that hit me in a completely different way because here I am at 49, at this bizarre and beautiful stage of my life where so much of what I’m learning is about finally belonging to myself.

I’m living alone for the first time in my life. I’m building a home around myself. I’m learning a different relationship with safety. I’m in love, deeply, and learning that loving someone doesn’t require disappearing inside of them. I’m thinking about money differently after spending almost my entire adult life working in banking and years teaching women about their relationship with it. I’m writing. I’m traveling. I’m grieving. I’m rebuilding. I’m becoming.

And somewhere before all of that happened, my uncle drew a circle and put me inside my own foundation.

Come the fuck on.
How do I not sit with that?
How do I not wonder whether some part of this message has been operating underneath my life all along, whether I knew the words were there or not?

And then there’s the timing of all of this, because that part is almost too much.

If you’ve been reading what I’ve been writing lately, then you know that my life has become one giant collection of full-circle moments.

I just wrote about looking at a photograph of myself from seventeen years ago, from one of the hardest periods of my life, and realizing that the woman in that photo had no idea where the road was going to take her.

I’ve been writing about Spain and Mija, vete a España and my mother telling me to go, and now I’m days away from actually getting on that plane.

I’ve been looking at photographs of my mother in Spain before I was born and realizing that I’m about to walk through some of the same places she walked more than fifty years ago.

I’ve been writing about being 49 and living alone for the first time, about this house, about what it means to finally occupy my own life in a way I’m not sure I ever completely understood before.

Everything lately seems to be folding back onto itself.
And then life apparently said, oh, you think we’re done?

Nope! We’re going even further back!
Not seventeen years.
Not to the divorce.
Not to motherhood.
Not to childhood.

Before you were born... are you freaking kidding me?

At some point, how many full-circle moments can happen at once before you stop and ask, what the hell is going on over here??

And I am asking!

I don’t want to rush past any of it because I finally have the capacity not to.

That may be one of the biggest gifts in all of this.

Finding the message is one gift.

Being able to receive it is another.

I don’t think every version of me could have held this moment the way I can now. There were years when I was surviving, moving fast, raising kids, solving problems, working, paying bills, recovering from whatever had just happened. Maybe I would have found the inscription beautiful. Maybe I would have cried. Maybe I would have put it back in the frame and gone to Publix because life was waiting.

But healing creates space.

Not some perfect spiritual state where nothing bothers you anymore. Please. I can still lose all my shit like just everybody else does.

But space space to sit with something…
To turn it over in your hands…
To ask another question, and then another.
To notice symbolism instead of dismissing it.
To entertain mystery.
To let something be sacred because it feels sacred.

And maybe that is one of the most profound gifts of this entire seventeen-year journey. I have enough capacity now to witness my own life while I’m living it.

So much of life is understood in hindsight. We look back and say, ohhhh, that’s what that was!
But every once in a while, you get the gift of recognizing the moment while you’re standing inside of it.

And yesterday, I knew.
I knew I was holding one of those moments.

Maybe that’s why all of these full circles feel like they’re arriving at once.

Or maybe they’ve always been arriving and I can finally see them now.
That possibility might be even more powerful.

Maybe life isn’t suddenly more magical.
Maybe I’m finally paying attention.
Maybe healing didn’t create the synchronicity.
Maybe healing created the eyes capable of recognizing it.

And then, of course, there’s my mother.
There is always her.

She kept this painting for years and eventually gave it to me because it belonged to me, and now I can’t stop thinking about the fact that she watched me become the person my uncle had written those words to.

She watched me grow up, become a mother, build a career, get married, get divorced, start over, build again, become this woman.

And I wish I could call her now.

"Mami, did you remember this was back here? Did you ever read it again? Did you think about what he wrote while you watched my life unfold? Did it mean something different to you once you knew who I became?"

Grief is so strange because the questions don’t stop when someone dies. Sometimes you actually have more questions afterward.

You find a photograph and you remember the story differently.
You open a drawer.
You turn over a fifty-year-old painting.

And your first instinct is still, I need to call Mom.
And then you remember…

Fuck.
I can’t.

But she kept it.
And now I’m the one holding it.

My uncle wrote, para que siempre la tengas, aún más cuando ya yo no esté.
So that you will always have it, especially when I am no longer here.

And those words don’t belong only to him anymore.
They belong to the people whose hands held this painting before mine.
They belong to my mother.

Maybe that’s what legacy really is.
Not always some giant thing we leave behind.

Sometimes it’s a painting.
Sometimes it’s a few handwritten lines on the back.
Sometimes it’s a blessing somebody speaks over you before you’re born and you spend almost fifty years carrying it before you even know it’s there.

Then there’s the part that makes me laugh because it is almost offensively metaphorical.
 

Remember how I found all of this?
I was changing the frame.
The damn frame.

I took something almost fifty years old out of the structure that had been surrounding it, and when I did, I found another layer underneath.

What have I been doing for the last seventeen years if not changing the frame?

The facts of my life haven’t changed. My marriage ended. My children grew up. My mother died. I built a career. I lost a job. I bought a house. I fell in love. I’m 49.
Those are facts.

But the frame around them keeps changing because the woman looking at them keeps changing.

And every time I change the frame, I seem to discover something underneath that I couldn’t see before.

The painting didn’t change yesterday.
My uncle’s words didn’t change.

They have been there longer than I have.
I just finally arrived at them and I think that’s different.

I keep picturing my mother pregnant with me.
My uncle painting.
My father somewhere nearby.

None of them knowing what was coming.
None of them knowing there would be two grandsons, heartbreak, reinvention, banking, books, Spain, grief, love, this house, all of it.

They couldn’t have known.
But they loved me anyway-before they knew me.

And my uncle wrote a blessing over a life I hadn’t lived yet.

Maybe the gift is that after everything it took to become this version of me, I am finally here enough to understand what I’m holding.

To sit with it.
To question it.
To let it keep unfolding.
To understand that some things don’t need to be solved, because they are revealed in time and are meant to be witnessed.

And then one ordinary afternoon, you’re standing in your new house, living in an answered prayer, changing an old picture frame, and you turn something over.
And there is a message waiting for you.

Words written before you had lived a single day.
And suddenly almost fifty years of your life are rearrange themselves in front of you.

I thought I was having full-circle moments…
Apparently the circle of my life was drawn before I got here.