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

Process

My son was five years old.  His two little brothers and I ran, breathless, to keep up with his endless quests for knowledge.  I provided endless strewing and modeling.  Anything I threw at him, he'd absorb.  He split light, built a telegraph, raised a butterfly, read chapter books silently, and memorized nature encyclopedias for pleasure.  At night, we'd lie in bed and read E.B. White's The Trumpet of the Swan.  This was his kindergarten year, though I never told him that.

Our homeschooling success hinged upon two things: a rich, authentic learning environment, and my silence.  He seemed born knowing how to drive his own education, and my early attempts to require any sort of script-following in the name of standards or learning outcomes were unnecessary at best and damaging at worst.  

I hadn’t planned on homeschooling, but the nearer he got to school age, the stronger and stronger became my instinct not to send him.  It was undeniable and slightly terrifying, and I had to dig deep to figure out why.  I had to define for myself what school and learning really were and examine their relationship.  (If you haven’t done this for yourself yet, I recommend you start now.)

The main reason I chose to homeschool him was to protect and nourish his holy curiosity.  I had to come to terms with the unsettling irony that sending him to school would sabotage his learning and his identity as a learner.  I do not think this is the case for all children, but it is unmistakably true for him.

Although my conviction of this was clear and solid, it took some time and some work before I would learn to release my self-imposed restrictions and root out the limiting public-school-absorbed beliefs I still held of what a school could look like.  And of course, I had to face my fears.

The times I am least effective as a parent and educator are when I react to the fear of being different or trying to please somebody else.  My mama-bear instincts and experience are strong enough to now to keep such fears in their cages.  But I was a new, fiercely dedicated homeschooler who was determined to get it right, and every time I hit a bump in the road, I came face to face with those fears.

When his progress wasn't steady in a particular area, or if we hit a wall, I worried I was doing it wrong.  Trying to push him up and over a hurtle did nothing but frustrate and distance us.  Even my offers to let him sit on my shoulders to get a better view were rebuffed.  I laugh now to think that steady progress and no obstacles should be either possible or desirable hallmarks of a quality education—homeschool or otherwise.  But at the time it felt like the goal, and while I may not have reached it, I had to at least outdo the public school system.

I know now that there must be walls to climb for growth to happen, and growth is the real education.  My son showed me time and time again that he had to climb over the walls himself.  I learned that my job was to provide him with the tools he’d need and get out of the way.  He’d build and climb the ladder.

We had been reading about animals and food chains, and I thought it would be fun to create a mural and hang it on the low wall in our foyer.  (Yes, we had a foyer where we lived.  That is a story for another time.)  I cut a long piece of paper from our easel and handed my son a roll of teal, patterned washi tape to secure it to the wall.  I envisioned the hanging of the paper to be a quick, efficient process, which would be followed by hours of enjoyable, collaborative mural-making.

My son had other ideas.

He was taking much too long.  Instead of just taping each corner of the paper as I had expected (but not instructed), he seemed to be intending to tape the entire perimeter of the ten-foot-long banner.  His face fell and the light in his eyes dimmed as I lectured him about wastefulness, took the roll of tape and walked away.

It took me maybe sixty seconds to come to my senses.  I was no poster child when it came to efficiency or thrift.  I radiated hypocrisy, and stung with shame.  I wondered how I had missed the mark with my vision of this learning project.  And then I realized it had been my project, not his.

I approached my crestfallen child, still kneeling on the ground beside the unfinished work I'd snatched from him.  I crouched down, looked him in the eyes, and said, "I'm sorry.  I shouldn't have done that.  Tape is meant to be used.  Use all you want."

He seemed to re-inflate the moment my respect for his work returned.  "Thank you, Mommy," he said, and resumed his process.

The mural hung there for months, with only a few sparse pencil sketches my son made at my request.  (I suppose if it had been that important to fill the paper with the colorful animals and habitats of my imagination, I would have drawn them myself.)  But they were surrounded by a vibrant, painstakingly-applied border—the real masterpiece.  My project had fizzled, but his was complete.  Authentic, hard-earned, and beautiful.

Weaned

Yesterday I got my toddler to sleep in her bed at naptime without nursing her.  This has never happened before. 

She’s a focused, peaceful, no-fuss kind of person.  As toddlers go, she asks for relatively little during the day.  She’s content to explore, forage, rejoice in her brothers’ good fortune, and create her own purposeful work.  She keeps me in her line of sight, and all is calm.  (With her, anyway.  My three boys are another story.)

But at night, she asks for all of me.  And I oblige, partly because I feel such gratitude for the flexibility she graces us with each day.  But mostly because she is wee, I am tired, and we have a rhythm. 

I’ve felt a gentle pull the last few months to change it.  Because co-sleeping is beautiful, but nighttime nursing is a little wearing.  And my husband is sleeping a room away, and I think it would be nice to be nearer.

But after all the nights my husband was gone during all the years he traveled for work, my little ones and I have perfected our bedtime routine and my husband and I have forgotten ours.

He’s home now.  The long-hoped-for local position at his company became available a few months ago, and after four and a half years of going the extra mile (quite literally), he earned it.  Sleeping a room instead of a state away feels like heaven.

But I am bonding with someone all night, and he is not.  Hence the pull. 

But this means more work for me.  To create two new nighttime rhythms. 

The one with my husband feels elusive.  His frozen shoulder pain dictates his sleeping position.  He likes a fan blowing on him at night, and I don’t.  And the farther out of earshot my children are, the harder it is for me to relax.  When I hear them breathe, I rest easier.  So when I am in the master bedroom with my husband, I lie awake long after he’s fallen asleep.  And when I’ve finally calmed my mind, relaxed my body, and given myself permission to turn down the volume on my internal baby monitor, a child cries out my name, and I know I would have gotten more sleep if I’d stayed in her room to begin with.

Are nights for rest or relationships?  With my toddler I can do both simultaneously, automatically.  But when I sneak away from my child’s room and lie near my husband, I can do neither.  Because he’s already sleeping without me.

I want to jostle him awake, and let him know I’m there.

He claims I have no time for him.  I might just as easily claim he has no time for me.  But where is the purpose in playing that game?  So night after night, I fight the urge to fall asleep with my child, even though that’s what works.  I rouse myself if I’ve drifted off, disentangle my body from hers with my fingers crossed that she won’t wake.

I have time for him!  I’ll prove it!  I walk in the master bedroom and lie down next to him, hoping he’ll sense me and roll over to acknowledge me.  But his breathing is heavy and slow.  He’s in another world.  And I think of how hard he works and how tired he must be, how selfish of me it would be to put my arms around him now.  I cannot steal a moment of his sleep.

In my child’s room, guilt robs me of sleep.   In my husband’s room, loneliness does.  I don’t know why a person can be so close and feel so far.  Like the date night that comes after weeks of fighting for time to talk, only to find ourselves alone together with nothing to say.

Now what?

So I sit in the hallway, bedless in a house full of beds, and write.  I hear the rustle of blankets or the gentle bonk of a knee against a wall as my boys shift in their sleep.  I don’t have to look to intuitively sense and mirror the steady rise and fall of my toddler’s chest in the next room.  But when I listen for something—anything—coming from the master bedroom, I hear nothing.

Travel and babies and more babies and more travel have weaned us off of each other.  Can we learn to synch again?   I know we can, and know we will.  But not tonight.

There’s been a brief window with each of my children that opens when I’ve weaned one a few months after getting pregnant with the next one.  They slowly learn to sleep on their own.  My husband and I find ourselves in bed together at the same time more and more frequently, and after a while, a new rhythm is forged.  Our rhythm.  And it’s nice and I sleep and we connect.

Then the baby is born, my husband says goodbye since there’s no sense in both of us being sleep deprived, and I’m up in the nursery all night every night again.

See you in two years.

Then it’s time for the toddler rhythm.

I’m not pregnant this time.  It feels...unfamiliar.

When my daughter learns something, she learns quickly and well.  Getting her to sleep last night without nursing was not difficult.  She had only one nighttime waking and let me cuddle her back to sleep instead of nursing.  This seamless transition was almost two years in the making, of course, but that’s why it was seamless.  To disassociate nursing from sleep, I knew I needed to wait for her development until she could see there are other ways of being close besides nursing.  I won’t make milk forever, you know.  And she’ll need more than that.

And now I feel double loneliness.

I watched a film once of midwives reflecting on the births of their own children.  One woman said, “You can cut the umbilical cord physically, but emotionally you never really do.”

It’s funny, this attachment to our babies.  So strong, so instinctive, so imperative to their survival.  But the ultimate goal as a parent is for your child to leave, to learn to do without you.

A marriage, on the other hand, is born with no instinct, no shared DNA.  But its ultimate goal is unity.  Some people think it’s impossible.  It can often feel that way.

I write and think and work a lot on growing things.  Growing plants and growing children and growing learning and growing courage.  Child-raising is gardening.  I’m steeped in that world, and getting wiser with experience.

Marriage is welding.  I don’t know much about that trade.  The potential damage of that much heat scares me, and the precision required is not in my skill set.  The vision it takes to forge something new and solid out of two strong, separate things?  I don’t think that big.

But as I write this, I realize that God does.

One

The space between how I imagine I do things and how I actually do them is a wide one.  Since I shifted my focus from organization to time management, it narrowed a little.  When I returned to daily spiritual nourishment, it narrowed a lot.  My expectations slowly began to morph from frothy and untouchable to grounded and solid.

Like rocks, they've each had their journey, yet seem to have been here all along.  It's only a few steps from the path to the riverbed.  I am drawn toward it, feeling a distinct rightness at being there.  More stones than I could count, but it doesn’t occur to me to count them at all.  In the midst of endless supply, the only number that matters is one.  

It calls.  That smoothest, darkest one.  I answer, pick it up.  It’s cool against my skin, flat and plain and lovely.  I choose a direction, spend the energy, and let it fly.  It will be what it will be.  For a novice like me, I don’t expect it to skip.  But a plunk and a clean splash are satisfying enough that I pick up another.  Another.  No deadline, no metrics, no impositions.  I’ve stepped out of that world to live here, in the green and brown and velvet moss, where the air cleans my lungs and pumps my blood.  I can work in this space, happily, all my days.