“You've Got Mail” Hit Different This Time Around

I was a huge Meg Ryan fan back in the day. Huge. I mean I got my hair cut like hers. Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met Sally, all of it! I watched them on repeat, and You've Got Mail was the one I probably rewatched the most. The bookstore, the little rolling ladder, the hand-written shelf tags, her typing to a total stranger like her laptop was a diary that finally talked back. I wanted an inbox that said "you've got mail" and meant it. Somebody, finally, on the other end, waiting to hear from just me.

I'm watching these movies again now, as a mom, and they hit completely differently than they used to. I'm not watching for Joe Fox anymore. I'm watching Kathleen. Not who she ends up with, what she has to lose before she can stand on her own.

Because I know that one.

My ex and I were together from 1998 to 2018. We went through two deployments before we ever had kids. I left a career and moved states just to stay together. Two children under six by the time it ended, and a marriage that had already been through its own hard seasons long before that, the kind that send you into therapy trying to hold something back together. When we finally split, I walked away from his retirement, from a new build home I'd helped dream up and design, from twenty years of stability we'd built piece by piece. And I moved into an apartment that had never existed before us. Not a house with history behind it. Just a place that was finally, only mine.

I did not do this because it was smart on paper. There was nothing smart about it on paper. There was a version of me that could've stayed inside twenty years of built-up security and let someone else's plan keep being the plan.

But watching Kathleen lose the shop, her mother's shop, the identity she'd been standing inside of instead of building, I recognized the exact shape of it. She wasn't losing herself. She was finally getting the chance to find out who she was without it.

Same for me. Twenty years of stability wasn't safety, not really. It was just familiar. And familiar isn't the same thing as mine.

That's Kathleen's whole movie, when you stop watching for Joe. She has to let go of the shop, and a relationship she'd simply outgrown, the whole comfortable, curated version of her life, before anything that's actually hers can start.

Mine was an apartment with two kids under six and no name on the lease other than mine. Hers was a bookstore she finally let close so something else could open.

Same move, honestly.

From Top to Bottom, Everyday Sillybrations: National Dewey Decimal Day, 12.10.2020; National Be A Dork Day, 07.15.2021; National Book Lovers Day, 08.09.2020; National Read A Book Day, 09.06.2020