Either/Or

As children, we are taught in absolutes.

Good or bad.

True or false.

Left or right.

One or the other.

There’s a date on the calendar when summer vacation ends and school begins. There’s a number of right or wrong answers on a multiple choice test. A grownup tells me how many bites I have to eat to get dessert.

The lines are drawn, pointed out, and enforced by others. Learning to walk presupposes that the ground is solid. Once you’re sure of it, you’re willing to take a step.

Experience over time, of course, inevitably yields an unraveling of the dichotomous worldview that had been so carefully administered. We become aware of exceptions, gray areas, ambiguities, biases and discrepancies. We fall and skin our knees. We study natural disasters in fifth grade. And suddenly we realize that, at any time, an earthquake could crack open what had once seemed settled. And then we watch the news and hear that it’s happening somewhere in the world right now.

There is a lot of fear in this place. Vulnerability. Disillusionment, confusion, cries of “That’s not fair!” and “Wait a minute,” and “Why me?” The sting of the bandaid being ripped off. Sometimes by accident, sometimes by a bully, and sometimes by the person you most trusted. Turn inward and face despair. Outward, betrayal.

And then the earthquake happens to you. Crisis. There is no luxury with which to utter accusations anymore. There is only survival.

Thankfully there is an open door—the next level of awareness, and one that I’m slowly awakening to. Familiarity. Acceptance. A growing ability to tolerate discomfort. A wisening and softening to the understanding that the earthquake is part of the plan. And somehow, so are we.

Yes, things first look like “either/or.” And it’s a human thing to wish they still did.

But the power—the peace—lies in the “and.”

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.

Feel

I’ve thought about writing this for months.  I hit a wall almost instantly, every time.  I banish it from my mind, but it keeps coming back.

I need to put words to this. 

What’s stopping me? 

Perhaps it’s not knowing which parts of this story are mine to tell, and which ought to be left to my son to tell someday, in the manner of his choosing. 

There are some loaded words swirling around us, and I don’t know how much power to give them.  They’re words I’ve been afraid to say out loud.  Words that jar me to see in print. 

Labels. 

Labels applied to other people and their children—never to me and mine. 

What does a label do?  How long will it stick?  And who has the right to apply it?  

It feels like drawing a box around my child—something I’ve never wanted to do.  Will it protect him or imprison him?  Will he feel freed or cornered?  The water is murky here.

Experts have flung some words our way.  They’ve changed the way I see my son.  If I tell them to others, they’ll see him differently too. 

But they already do.  So maybe it will help more than hurt.  But I expect there will be some of both.

The chalk is in my hand.  What will I draw for him?  A box?  A word?  A dream?  A path? 

He’s little now.  He cannot read.  But he has ears and eyes.  One little hashtag could connect me with other women who find themselves in this strange land.  I want to help them the only way I know how, which is to say, “I know.  Me too.”   We women are a fountain of strength for each other.  But my little boy...how will seeing that hashtag coupled with his image make him feel five, ten, twenty years from now?

I never knew a mother could feel so helpless until I was that mother.  A mother who wondered how she didn’t know what her child was saying, what he needed, who he was underneath his screams and fists and slamming doors and hurling rocks.

Where are you?

Trapped, your whole life inside your very own skin—skin you cannot feel unless you scratch until there’s blood.

We mothers want our babies’ blood to stay inside, where it belongs. 

But we all need some way to feel.  You need edges how I need softness.  You walk the line I stay away from.  You need impact the way I need solitude.

You seem safest on a rocky cliff.

You need touch like I need words. 

It’s how we know we’re alive. 

So I will fight for you, my son.  Until my last breath.  I will help you to be free, to feel right, to feel home.  I don’t care where it is or what it’s called.  We will find that place together.