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

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.