A letter to myself

Dear Emily,

It’s September 2009. You’ve just moved to a new state with a new baby. I cannot tell you how long you will live here, or how many children you’ll end up with. I’m writing to you from September 2019, so I know the answer to both of those burning questions. I know you won’t believe me, but I’ll say it anyway: you shouldn’t know the answers yet. It truly is better this way.

You won’t believe me because you’re hurting right now. It feels like you have a giant hole in your stomach, all the time. You keep wondering when your well of tears will dry up, but it seems there is a limitless supply. You have been ripped open in so many ways. You are pulsing with pain.

You’re begging me to tell you how long it will feel like this. When—or even if—you’ll get relief. If you only knew, you tell yourself, then you could manage.

The trouble with that is that then you would not grow.

So I cannot tell you how long, how hard, how much, how soon, how painful, how low. You have to discover that.

What I can tell you is that you will live through it. And you will become a far more beautiful person for having done so.

You want to challenge me on that too? I understand. Because ugliness is coming out of that gaping wound of yours. And you’re confused and frightened by it.

It’s supposed to be this way.

I know, because it’s how you get to where you’re going.

The “how” is what everyone thinks they need to know in order to get “there.” But the “how” can only be revealed one step at a time in the present, and only understood by looking back on it afterward. So the wisest thing you can do is to stop asking how, and start saying yes.

Yes to pain.

Yes to doubt.

Yes to fear.

Yes to loneliness.

Yes to the callousness and betrayal and abandonment you feel from what you thought you could count on.

Yes to what has been stolen from you.

Yes to the pain you cause yourself and the pain you cause the people you love.

Yes to the fighting and the denial and all the screaming, so much screaming, in your head.

Until you learn to love this mess, you can never clean it up.

But how? you ask again. How can you love what has gone so terribly wrong?

By believing that God can make something even more beautiful from all these ashes.

By believing that you’re strong enough even when you feel more weak and tired and defeated than you’ve ever been.

By trusting that it’s supposed to go wrong. Which, in reality, means it’s not wrong at all.

That feels like a cosmic practical joke, I know. Like God couldn’t possibly exist, or even worse, that He doesn’t care.

But nothing couldn’t be further from the truth.

I will give you just one glimpse into the future to show you what I mean. I don’t think He’ll mind.

In a few months, you will be sitting at your computer while your baby is napping. You will write a beautiful piece, born from pain, about your pain. You will feel desolate. And writing will be the only place you will know where to put it.

Ten years later, you will be sitting at your computer while a baby is napping. You will write a beautiful piece, born from pain, about your pain. You will feel whole. And writing will be the only place you will know where to put it.

The piece will be this letter. And you will know that while you wish so badly you could ease the pain your past self is feeling, you wish even more that she will experience it. Deeply, fully, as painfully as possible. And you will feel so so sorry. And also so completely sure that it is the right course.

Because you will have learned by then that the right course is the one that is.

The “how” is not your business to know now.

It’s yours to know then.

When you are feeling joy every bit as exquisite as your pain.

You will not believe now, or then, how lucky you are.

How incredibly blessed your life is.

How much love you have.

You will not believe it.

But it will be so.

And writing will be the only place you will know where to put it.

So weep now, and write your words, and nurse your baby, and feel your pain. Feel it intensely. Completely.

All is well, both now, and to come.

It’s on purpose.

Even—and especially—the not knowing.

Love,

Yourself

Heavenly Peace

The late morning light filters through the blinds, halfway open, like my eyelids.

My potted string-of-pearls bends toward the sound of chirping birds in the yard.

There’s the tick of a clock, an airplane passing overhead, a neighbor child riding a big wheel outside.

And one more sound.

Always new and oh so ancient,

and, for me,

on account of my extremely good fortune,

familiar.

It’s a rustle of blanket,

a sigh,

a gentle smacking of lips, and then—

light, steady breathing.

She’s eight days old, asleep at my left breast.  As she dreams, her smile and fluttering eyelids make no sound at all.

My heart bursts from wholeness.

As soon as I realize this, a cloud of anticipatory loneliness washes over me.  Is she the last one?  The last unborrowed newborn I’ll hold close?

My eyes well with tears.

I remember someone else’s words about someone else’s future loss, that fit mine just as well:

The pain then is part of the happiness now.  That’s the deal.

How can she be in my arms, yet grown and gone?

The math of love and time is senseless.

All I know is

I will soak in your smiles,

love you, love you, love you,

and hold you close

as you go.

On Guard

At night I put on my armor.

Eyes open. Ears sharp. Muscles taught.

Awake that you may sleep.

I’ve been alert all day, protecting you

from demons

of

a different sort.

My loyalty

is fierce enough

to bat away the sleep

that yawns at me.

But deprivation

takes its toll

on the body and the mind.

The spirit

is not

untouched

by fleshy need

and mortal care.

The outside battle mirrors

the one within.

Can I relieve myself

of duty?

Never.

Can I find a way

to care for myself

and you

at the same time?

I try and fail,

by my own standard, anyway.

Can I trust

you can stand

alone

long enough

for me to breathe

and remember the hedgerows

at their peak

in the green summertime

so far from here?

That’s a lie.

A story someone else has told.

I’ve never seen them,

so there is no memory

to dust off

and recall.

But I own a few

seeds that I pocketed

long ago,

before you were a whisper

on the wind.

The Daffodils in

that soaking April…

the gnarled old tree

I claimed,

I sat in,

longing for home

and discovering it

all at once.

My two minutes of solitude,

head ducked against the rain,

feet treading on tired cobblestone

as strong as it ever was.

It was a taste

that awoke

a lifetime of hunger.

I yearned most of all

for you, my love.

I must remember that.

Why do I forget the most

when I look at you?

What threat was I imagining

I spotted on the horizon

when you lost the roundness

of your cheeks?

Dragon Slaying

As I sit down to write, my mind settles on the muscles in my back and shoulders I don’t have names for. They’re pinched, tight, acidic. These are the muscles that allow my arms to wrap around my toddler in the night as we co-sleep. To wrangle my four-year-old against his cinderblock will into a diaper change I’m convinced is best for him, no matter what he has to say about it. And lately, to grip the shaking shoulders of my six-year-old who runs throughout the house in the middle of the night in a mind-world I cannot enter, terrorized by demons I cannot see.

Stop! I command. With my mind, I banish them. I bring him to bed with me, and squeeze his muscles with mine for as long as it takes to both lull him out of his night terror and into sleep. It could be ten minutes, it could be an hour. But my muscles won’t relax until his do. I apply relentless comfort to reassure his existence and kill his phantoms’—a quest that brings new meaning to the old phrase, “bedtime battles.”

Our bedroom is equal parts bloody Colosseum and mother hen haven. But it is my aching muscles that make this room anything at all. Don’t worry, child. I take this pain gladly. I will slay your dragons with my last breath.

And during daylight hours, I will train you with chores and fortify you with fairy tales and grow you with a garden, because someday, before I am ready, you must be. And I will be forced to watch you outside these eyes, hold you without these arms, and whisper, voiceless—screaming for you through the halls of heaven.

A body is a vessel. No more. And no, no less.

Mothers on the wall

I have three limited edition Caitlin Connolly art prints on the wall in my guest room.  They are entitled: “Mother Earth,” “Mother of All Living,” and “Mother Protecting.”   On early mornings like this one, I steal downstairs, turn down the covers, make myself at home in this room meant for others, and gaze at these mothers.

The common thread between them is the depiction of strong women doing the hard, vital work of life-giving.

They look at once raw and refined, centered and vulnerable.  Desperate and sure.

They’re all taking risks and making tough calls.

If that doesn’t define motherhood, I don’t know what does. 

When my first baby was little more than a year old, he stood up in the bathtub (against my warning) and slipped.  As he fell, his chin struck the side of the porcelain tub and split.

Without hesitation, I lifted him from the tub, wet a clean washcloth and tried to apply pressure to the wound.  He pushed me away, blood dripping onto the tile floor.  I put him to my breast, hoping the pressure from his face against me as I nursed him would be enough to stop the bleeding.

It was a swift, instinctive solution, and it worked.  After a couple of minutes the bleeding subsided, and he fell asleep.  But I didn’t like the look of the flap of skin and flesh I saw.   I knew he’d never let me bandage it.  Would it start bleeding again any moment?  How much blood is too much blood?

It was borderline. 

I wiped his blood from my chest and called my mom.  “How do you know if your baby needs stitches?” I asked. 

“I don’t know,” she replied, “but I can tell you what my experience was taking your sister to get stitches when she was little.” 

She concluded, “If it’s under his chin, people won't notice the scar.”

She couldn’t, and didn’t, tell me what I should do.  Hearing her story both frightened and reassured me, and I suppose it did influence my decision somewhat.  But the call was mine, not hers.  I was the mother now.

The irony here is that as a daughter, I still believe mothers always know what to do.  But as a mother it rarely feels that way.

I’ve often reflected on that early parenting moment and the room it made inside me for instinct and doubt to coexist.  As steward over four children now, many decisions fall to me that affect both the present moment and the future.  Their future.  But the choice is mine.  And there’s no perfect answer.  

So I do it anyway.  And I do it afraid. 

Mothering is one tough call after another.  In all the time spent second-guessing (and I’ve spent a lot  of time second-guessing over my decade of parenthood), my instincts have always been right.

Or at least right enough.

So, like the mothers on the wall, I will set my intention, trust my instinct, and jump.

The cloak of motherhood

My mother once wrote me a letter.  She told me, “You have donned the cloak of motherhood with ease and grace.” 

Those were not words I would forget. 

At the time, I wept with humility.  The words gave me strength to feign confidence I did not feel.

They were with me when I stepped on a plane with my newborn son to begin a chapter of life that would slice me open.

They were with me when I cradled my five-year-old's limp body as his eyes rolled back and his face gushed blood.

They were with me night after night after night with no daddy-came-home! reprieve.

I may have donned the cloak of motherhood with ease and grace, but there was little easy or graceful about motherhood.  So I gripped those words, squeezed them for one last ounce of strength, day in and day out.  They never ran dry, though I often did.

Her words come back to me now, nine years after their writing, with a new layer of meaning.  I wonder at her use of the word “cloak.”

She used to advise me: “Once you have kids, you always have kids."  "Wait as long as you can before you have kids."  "Once you have kids, you don’t exist anymore.”

Her words look harsh and jaded on the page, but they weren’t delivered that way.  She truly meant them as nothing but a service to me. 

As a new mother, I was determined to prove them false.  As a mother of two I thought I had.  When I hit rock bottom as a mother of four, I slumped my shoulders and admitted defeat. 

She is almost always right, after all.

I didn’t exist anymore.

And yet, employing this cloak imagery, she contradicted herself.  Because a cloak is something you can put on and take off at will.

Surely that couldn’t be the case with motherhood.  Could it? 

When I became a mother, I well understood and expected the sacrifice it would demand, and I paid it willingly.  What I was not the least bit prepared for, however, was how it would change my awareness of my identity. 

When a child is born, so is a mother.  Like a child, she follows her instincts, graceful and stumbling.  Like a child, she may cover her ears, but she’s always listening.

Like a child, she cries. 

Like a child, she grows hour by hour, as some unknown hand distils her life-grappling into fuel.

Like a child, she is beautiful without knowing.  And she came into this world with a self that belongs to her and her alone.

With each child I bear, I shed a skin of selfishness.  What’s underneath is new and pink and raw.  It will toughen over time.  But into what?

Am I my skin?  Or my raw, pink underside?

Or something deeper down than that?  

I am my core, unchangeable.  A girl who finds God in the rustle of leaves.  A girl who sees the one.  A girl who is lifted by lifting, who doesn’t know when to quit.

That’s always been me.  That will always exist.

Everything else is just skin.

Words from my mother

I write this with my left thumb, iPhone screen backlight as low as it can go.  My 20-month-old nurses on my left breast on the floor of her dark, white-noise-steeped room.

This week she started saying “mom” in that “But, Mom” tone of older children, who usually follow up the phrase with something like, “Why does he get more screen time when I don’t?”

And the mom says something tiresome and true like, “Because he’s littler than you and has different rules.”  Or even worse, something like, “Because I said so.”

I’m not sure when I became the “Because I said so” mom I never thought I’d be.  Somewhere around the third or fourth child, I think.  I wonder what the mother-of-one I used to be would think of me now.

One Child Me was awesome.  I didn’t feel awesome at the time, but looking back, I see that I was.

My son was weeks old, my pareneum still too swollen to look at, and I was sitting in a chair at the airport near the gate that would take me to a plane that would take me to my husband who was waiting for me in Arizona.  Moving one state away was not in my plans.  But it had been in his.  So it was in ours. 

A few minutes earlier I waved goodbye to my dad, who had waited at the security checkpoint and watched to make sure I got the car seat and stroller through the x-ray machine.  Did his heart break a little at only walking with me so far before he was forced to stop and watch me struggle on my own?  One Child Me me didn’t wonder.  Four Children Me suspects it did, and that after parenting seven children he was familiar with the feeling.

I found my gate and plopped into an unforgiving chair.  I had a few minutes before boarding, and remembered the letter from my mom tucked in the designer diaper bag my sister had gifted me at my baby shower.  My dad had given me the letter when he’d picked me up to take me to the airport.  It was more of a goodbye than I had expected from my mom.  She doesn’t do goodbyes.

I had no idea what it would say. 

I first took in the lovely, neat curves of the penmanship I’d always admired.  As a child snooping in old storage boxes under the house, I’d come across a stack of spiral bound notebooks littered with words in this handwriting.  They were words I knew but could make no sense of.  Poetry, maybe?  Notes from a college class I didn’t know she’d taken?  She was mom, that was all.  Except for this box of evidence to the contrary.  This box, wedged in between other boxes labeled “Susie, size 6,” “Susie, size 8,” “Susie, size 10,” alluded to a chapter in her life without me in it.  I never looked inside again; its existence has captivated, reassured, and haunted me to this day.

But there in the airport was her tidy script, this time on a page meant for me: “You have donned the cloak of motherhood with ease and grace.”

Spaces deep within me filled and emptied all at once.  At the thought that my mother approved of me—a vulnerable novice struggling to learn the ropes of a job she had done for so, so long.

I’m not sure who weeps more: a new baby or a new mother. 

Or an experienced mother. 

What made me get on the plane?  Was it my father’s blessing?  My mother’s confidence?  My commitment to my marriage, its most challenging test just beginning?

No.  What made me put one foot in front of the other toward a place I’d never choose were the big, anxious blue eyes of my newborn son.

I would walk through fire for them.   And I have.

I am guessing that if you are reading this, you have a child with eyes wide open too.  And something in that gaze has pierced you with conviction.  You have stewardship over another soul.  This truth is unmistakeable.  And you know it will lead you to places you never would have chosen.  That’s why you’re here.

And that’s why I’m here too.