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Hindsight is Pretty Much Useless to Me

But maybe it will light a fire under you.

Susan Poole
5 min readOct 28, 2021
Photo by Lydia Winters on Unsplash

My 23-year-old daughter called me in the middle of the workday yesterday and asked if I could send her a picture of herself as a young kid dressed up for Halloween. She needed it for a Zoom call with her coworkers scheduled for late in the afternoon.

What?

Are you kidding?

Do you know how long it will take to dig out those old photographs?

That’s how I could have responded.

Instead, I eagerly dropped what I was doing (thank goodness for remote work) and started rummaging through hundreds of printed pictures. Some were organized in scrapbooks, with colorful borders, bright stickers and catchy captions. Others were filed away in photo boxes, separated by year and sometimes according to a specific event. The rest remained in their Costco envelopes, waiting to be reopened.

It didn’t take as long as anticipated to put my fingers on a few classics from Halloweens past. She was a pumpkin at three months old. A bumble bee, a princess and a witch before enrolling in school. After that, she went through a phase and dressed up like a pop star for four consecutive years. I hadn’t realized it then, but those four costumes foreshadowed who she would become as an adult…

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Susan Poole
Susan Poole

Written by Susan Poole

Mother, lawyer, nonprofit executive, breast cancer survivor, and women's fiction author. https://susanpooleauthor.com

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