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"Would you get in a time machine? Go back and change things, if you could? Here, a letter to the little girl I used to be:\nDear Christine,\nYou&amp;#39;re still young enough to think you want to be an actress, a ballerina, a sidewalk painter. In grammar school you&amp;#39;ll get the lead in the play. You&amp;#39;ll sleep in your tutu for the better part of &amp;#39;84. The fridge is your gallery--there is always a new, brilliant mess of art tacked to its door. Your brothers will hang your baby dolls with shoe strings from the railing. They&amp;#39;re your best friends. They were then, you didn&amp;#39;t know it, and they continue to be.\nIn junior high you&amp;#39;ll start counting calories, obsessing over boys, wondering when your bra will start to fit. Deep breath, Christine. Your first kiss is going to be out of a movie. As day turns into night and the sky turns to a wild, chaotic palette of yellow and pink with neon streaks of glimmer everywhere, you&amp;#39;ll feel the innocence of his lips on yours. Just when you start to find each other&amp;#39;s grove the sky will open up, showering you with a quick spray of Spring rain. It&amp;#39;ll be a perfect kiss, none-the-less (Hello, first kiss, Anthony!)\nYou&amp;#39;ll start imagining stories in your head and in high school you&amp;#39;ll put those thoughts to paper. English will be an easy A. The prom is going to be rough. You get chicken pox the week before and the pock on your forehead won&amp;#39;t disappear even after a session at the M.A.C counter. Your prom date doesn&amp;#39;t care, he dances you around in your full-skirt, celery-green dress anyway (Thanks, Marco!)\nCollege is great, but the first couple of months are a little testing. You pack up your dorm on Columbus Day Weekend and call your parents to come get you. Your Dad gives you a pep talk. You graduate on The Dean&amp;#39;s List three years later and hook four amazing friends in the process (Hello Aunt Sherri, Kateri, Jaz and Tanika!)\nBy the time you are 26, you&amp;#39;ll have been in love once. Yes, have been...your heart pieces back together in time. You&amp;#39;ll have held the hand of a sick man and though at the time it seemed to break you, it really made you stronger--you&amp;#39;ll see. Witnessing someone (read my blog about my grandma) take their last breath will be terrifying, but life will seem much sweeter the days, months and years to come.\nLiving in New York City will be just how you imagined it. Your SOHO apartment is petite and your neighbors don&amp;#39;t know your name. Every morning you get a coffee and walk to the subway, the whole time feeling blessed that you made your dream of living in NYC a reality. Even though you and your girlfriends drink a lot of Cosmos and watch reruns of Sex in the City religiously you quickly realize despite the fact you all have jobs at magazines and fashion houses--no one can really afford Manolos and rent control apartments don&amp;#39;t exist. As for the &amp;quot;Sex&amp;quot; in the City--you mostly spend time talking with your girls about the sex you&amp;#39;re not having over eggs and mimosas at Jane (an NYC restaurant). Doc is the cute bartender at Slante (a bar in NYC) that really does know your name and drink.\nYou take an impromptu trip to Europe and eat crepes on the side of a cobblestone road in Paris. You also swear up and down you saw the queen peeking out a palace window. Back in America you find out Elizabeth Vargas wants to interview you on 20/20--it&amp;#39;s crazy, I know. Life takes a lot of turns for you, Christine. You come to look both ways before crossing, even on a one-way street.\nYou manage to meet someone in 2006 and he&amp;#39;s great. Movies, dinner, runs in the park...it really couldn&amp;#39;t get better. You wonder if God has finally thrown you a bone. Your relationship is intense and takes its course pretty damn fast. So fast, a couple months into it you miss your period. Deep breath.Early in 2007 you find out you&amp;#39;re pregnant--gasp. Pregnant and dating someone (at the time, quite exclusively). If movies, dinners and runs in the park were enough you&amp;#39;d probably be married by now. You guessed it. You and *him break up and decide how to raise the child (oh yeah, you kept the baby). Turns out *he wasn&amp;#39;t ready to be a dad. You&amp;#39;re mad at first and bitter as all hell, but you come to forgive him (if only in your mind and heart).\nThe first half of 2007 is pretty wild. Your body starts to swell with baby and although surrounded by too many family members and friends, you feel pretty alone and scared for most of your pregnancy. As always, you keep an optimistic outlook and even though it hurts to smile sometimes, you do. You fooled a lot of people into thinking you were &amp;quot;okay.&amp;quot;\nOn August 30, 2007 at 10:05am you give birth to a healthy, beautiful baby boy (check out the recap blog)--he goes by Jack Domenic and even though he scared the hell out of you for nine months, you are in love with him, poo and spit-up and all. You&amp;#39;re also really tired and frusturated by the last nine pounds of baby weight that won&amp;#39;t budge.\nOh yeah, did I mention you uproot yourself from NYC and move back to NJ? Your apartment is cute and cozy and just enough for the time being. There is a lot of green grass and trees everywhere, which you detest--you loved taking the subway, walking outside your door to grab a coffee, a bowl of rice pudding, a magazine...anything really, but you realize you&amp;#39;ll get a bigger bang for your buck if you stop whining and move to the Garden State. Don&amp;#39;t worry, while you&amp;#39;re there you&amp;#39;re constantly working and invoicing and saving for a bigger and better place, oh and you spend lots of afternoons in Central Park with Jack and he loves The Moma, too. It&amp;#39;s not so bad, you realize this more and more everyday.\nBy Fall 2007, your baby&amp;#39;s smile and baby bird noises are enough. The puzzle piece fits even though you thought it wouldn&amp;#39;t. You&amp;#39;ve got a book in the works and a really cool gig writing about yourself and Jack. It&amp;#39;s not the life you imagined as a wee one...but you come to love it. Really love it.\n\nSo do I want to take a ride in that time machine and do things different? Nah. But I would like to add a PS to that letter to my younger self.\nPS: Hold on for the ride...\nYour turn. Write a letter to your younger self."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.glamour.com/story/a-letter-to-a-much-younger-chr>