Happy Fifth Birthday (a little late)

 Dear Gracie,

            Today you are 5 and almost 3 weeks old. I should apologize for the lateness of your birthday letter but I’m guessing you know me well enough that a missed deadline doesn’t surprise you. This past year has been (among many things) a lesson in not underestimating you. 

                You recently started playing tee ball. It’s been a hilariously unorganized endeavor, with you being so engrossed in standing in a “baseball stance “ that you forget to catch the ball as it flies past you, using your glove as a hat. But it’s allowed me to spend a lot of time watching you. 

                When you were younger, so much of my time was spent doing.  Holding you, making sure you were fed and burped and slept.  And then there was the waiting. Waiting for you to walk, to talk…counting off months and checking off the appropriate achievements.  Now instead of chasing milestones, I find myself anticipating them nervously. You have gone from a needy newborn, to an uncertain toddler, to this gorgeous, fearless and independent little being. Now I spend a large chunk of my time holding my breath and wondering whether I should reach for your hand or stand behind you, giving you a gentle push of encouragement.  I don’t always get it right, but I’m learning. I know you’ll be patient with me.

                You requested a surprise 5^th birthday party, which filled me with equal parts anxiety at the logistics and complete joy at your belief that anything is possible. While we waited for you to arrive at your party, I took a moment to look around. There were over forty guests, crammed into Mimi and Grampa’s living room buzzing with anticipation and eager to make your dream come true.  This is a marvel to me.  Grace, I have to admit something to you that I’m not very proud of. Being around you makes me feel almost invincible and sometimes, I don’t want to share how wonderful you are with anyone else.  But seeing all these people in once place who love you for the incredible little person you are, separate from me, made me realize I need to be more willing to share so you can spread that joy around.

  You're forever teaching me things that I don't always want to learn.

 Just this weekend, I made a face that startled someone who knows me very well into exclaiming “Woah. That was a total Grace face”. Being compared to you is one of the greatest compliments I can receive and filled me with immediate warmth. And we are alike in many ways, in our empathy and our unwillingness to disappoint other people. I can see things ahead for you and part of me wants to shield you, shape you in a way that you are less vulnerable to be hurt in the same ways I have been. But I can’t imagine changing a single hair on your head. You are stronger than I give you credit for and even in the midst of the most horrific tantrum, when you are being your most unreasonable, I know you will eventually see your way through to making it right. 

                I know this because you are smart. And not smart just because you know a lot of things, which by the way, you do. You know the difference between an exclamation point and a question mark, you can count to forty and you recently learned the world chlorophyll while questioning why the leaves were green. But you are also smart in a way that is more difficult to measure, in a way that it takes lots of people a very long time to grasp. You have a way of knowing exactly when someone needs a long hug and give them out freely. You were recently the target of a classroom “bully”, being pushed repeatedly.  This little boy has a lot of challenges in his life which are probably at the root of this aggression and as if understanding this, you refused to push him back (although I know how satisfying that would have been).  You have a wisdom and wit, an understanding of the world that has always seemed much older that your age.

                People often compliment me on the wonderful young lady you are becoming and I find myself wondering if it has much to do with me at all. Because with all this watching, it is the moments that you don’t even know that I am there that I am often proudest of you.  I love stumbling upon you and finding you quietly reading, or catching snippets of your imaginative and outlandish conversations with your friends. I love listening to you singing in your bed when you’re supposed to be sleeping. I find your drawings of people with belly buttons and eyelashes astounding and adore seeing things your have written in your uneven preschool scrawl.  If I had known when you were born what kind of girl you would become, I would have spent a lot less time worrying. 

      This world might be in a rush to change you. To impress its opinions on you, to try to mold you into the person that “they” insist that you are supposed to be. Don’t let it. Build upon who you are, expand your exhaustively curious mind and keep operating on the premise that kindness and love simply multiplies. Because G... every inch of you is completely amazing.

                        

   And you will always be the very best thing to happen to your Mama.

                                                                 

I love you to the moon and back, 

                                                                            Mama.

A Slow Leak

Yesterday, I made my first meal in the crockpot that belonged to my grandfather. It felt innocuous enough at first, but I quickly found myself wiping away quiet tears as I added each quartered potato into the pot. Grace ran up behind me, grasping on to my leg and asking for a glass of water so I pulled my face together and turned to answer her with a bright smile, swallowing the sadness that I was so obviously feeling.

This is what grief has been like for me.

I sat by my dying grandfather's bedside for days. I held his hand, I grimaced when he called out or reached for me in quick moments of clarity. I made increasingly frantic and angst-ridden calls to my parents in Mexico, trying to soften the sourest of information.  People would gently remark to me that they didn’t know how I was doing it, how I was holding it together. This statement, while it was meant to be complimentary, prickled at me.  Was I cheapening the anguish that I felt by continuing to move forward? They couldn’t know that I was making private deals with myself. Make it through one more hour. Make it until lunch. Swallow the food that’s placed in front of you, even if it feels like sandpaper, grating against the roof of your mouth, so the people around you won't worry. Make it until you can go home to shower, and then you can fall apart.

Except I never truly did. It took him four days to die. On that Monday morning, I went home and waited. I waited to feel. I waited for the hurt to spread across my body, to engulf me. I had time now. I could give myself over to the sadness I’d been stifling. It was over.

Except it wasn’t. It’s been exactly one month now and I feel like my grief is trickling out of me, deflating like a balloon with a small pinprick hole.

I forget that he’s not here anymore. I reach for my phone to call him when I’m driving home and the pain rushes in, momentarily crippling me until my brain can negotiate with my heart and catapult me back into the present.  Moments like this interrupt me daily, setting off something inside of me that is totally involuntary. I try to remind myself that this is an undeniable testimony to the presence of love. That it was a gift to have cared about someone so much that their absence is felt as keenly as a presence.

Grace and I stopped at the bank for some checks earlier this week. We happened to go to a different branch location than we normally do. As we walked into the lobby, Grace cheerfully announced that this was “Papa’s bank” as she had been there with him many times.  Last night I cooked dinner in “Papa’s crockpot”. I am working to get to a place where I am unashamed to temporarily define my life in this way. Part of me thinks I should be “over it”. That I should no longer feel myself bowled over by flashes of sadness. That there shouldn’t be mornings when getting out of bed feels like a task too giant to handle, when hiding away from the world seems preferable.

I sometimes forget briefly what happened, how it happened. I just recognize that I’ve never felt quite so alone. I remember him randomly and find myself so angry at time, because there is never enough of it. Angry at myself that I wished days away for selfish reasons. We forget while we wish for time to pass that it progresses not only in our own lives, but ages all parties.

It hurts to be so angry at myself, but at least it means that I'm not hollow. 

Those last few days may be the hardest I’ve experienced yet in my life. But they were also a gift. I have memories of Papa teasing me while we were in the emergency room and asking Grace what the weather was like in Mexico over FaceTime. I spoke with doctors, helped my mother to make impossible decisions, and rallied around and against my family simulatenously. I made phone calls to extended family members to share terrible news when sometimes making phone calls to order take-out makes me feel anxious.

I have lost him, but not the strength he gave to me in those final moments.

He left the world on a whisper, in a quiet peaceful way. None of us even noticed at first and I honestly believe that I too stopped breathing while I waited for a nurse to come confirm what my heart knew to be true. It didn’t seem right to me that the man who could strike up a conversation with a total stranger snuck out in a way that was so noiseless.

But as I let myself define my world with memories of him, as I forgive myself for the way grief is lingering in every corner of my life…I realize he is not really gone.

When our life story is punctuated by loss, all we can do is write new beginnings interwoven with threads of memory. And that’s ok.

Lessons

While grocery shopping with Grace last weekend, a well-meaning older gentleman stopped me and jovially mentioned “Ma’am, I hope your husband has a shot gun”. As I prepared to answer with a quick “He’ll probably need one” (I’ve learned it is simpler for everyone to allow people of a certain generation to believe that I’m married), Grace proudly announced, “My Mama doesn’t need a husband”.

A response that, if I’m being completely honest, shocked both of us.

My initial reaction was pride. I was impressed that my girl realized that we were doing just fine “on our own”. I was pleased that, despite loving princesses and fairy tales and babies, Grace understood that these things were not the ultimate fulfillment. That her life should be a kaleidoscope of imperfect parts and that no one element could truly anchor all the others.

As proud as I was, I couldn’t shake a nagging feeling of worry. Worry that my own life experiences were bleeding cynicism into Grace’s life.  Love is messy and fairy tales don’t always have the happy ending we expected. But the idea of her not wanting love, not seeking a partner to support her, to take out her garbage and rub her back because she “didn’t need one” or worse, because she was afraid of being let down…it tugged at my heart in an unexpected way.

I’d never want my girl to be afraid to get out there and “play the game” (why are relationships always described in sporting analogies?) I want her to get her heart broken 100 times, if it means she is putting herself out there.

This is the constant battle when raising a daughter. Wanting her to be tough, yet soft, strong but delicate.

I’m a far better person for all the love I have given and the mistakes I have made. I’ve had my heart broken enough times to recognize the symptoms but the physical pain of it never fails to take my breath away. But there is some truth in the belief you can’t recognize the beauty in your life without a little bit of the ugly.

You don’t need someone by your side to make your life an amazing journey. But there is no shame or weakness in yearning for the comfort of a shadow next to yours.

The guy who was never going to love me back reminded me what a selfless and illogical act love is. The guy who I desperately wanted to save showed me that letting go isn’t the same as giving up. There have been men who have unearthed parts of me I buried long ago, with small acts of kindness.  Sometimes there is a lesson in the wanting.

A friend recently said to me that she wasn’t sure what the opposite of feeling things deeply was but that it was something close to apathy and that it “just wasn’t her”.   She wasn’t talking about romantic feelings, but that sentiment has stuck with me over the last few days.  Whenever I have made mistakes when my heart is involved, it has been in situations where I’ve tried to remain unfeeling or ignored my own thoughts, negating my emotions as being “crazy”.  I’ve spent so long trying not to feel things deeply that now when I do, it scares me.

I want better for my daughter.

Grace knows that people can have babies without being married. She knows that boys can get married to other boys and girls can marry girls and that it doesn’t really matter who you marry, as long as there is love and kindness there. But what I’m afraid I’ve forgotten to teach her is that love is always worth the risk.

Nothing lasts forever and there are certain to be moments in her life where someone unexpected will hurt her. But even in those moments of pain (which will be worse for me, I’m sure), she is growing. She will come out on the other side changed, but infinitely better.

I didn’t expect to be teaching my daughter about love when I was still trying to figure it out for myself.

Grace is beautiful, but more importantly she is smart, funny and kind. I am confident that she will grow up being certain of all these things.  I hope I am patient enough to foster her fierce independence. I hope she is so certain of how awesome she is that she will believe that everyone else must see it too.

One day, I hope she meets someone who is even more certain of these things. Who will remind her when she falters.  When that day comes, I hope she has no fear in sharing her life with them.  Not needing to. But wanting to. 

Embracing Innocence (Happy Fourth Birthday)

Dearest Gracie,

Something very bad happened in the world today.  In a city that I love very much, close to our home, someone committed a senseless, violent act. Lots of people were hurt and many more were frightened. They will spend the foreseeable future glancing over their shoulders, feeling uncertain of their place in the world, unsure of their safety.

I’m sorry to have to bring this up in your birthday letter. A letter that before this afternoon was filled with sweetness and pride, all things I still very much feel.  I wish that I could bottle your innocence, tuck you away from the world.

But I can’t protect you forever.

You are like me in many ways. When tragedies happen, you will want to make sense of it. You will want to dissect it. But that’s the thing about tragedy, my love. There are no answers. There is only the gnawing insistence that you hold on a little bit tighter to those who matter, that you pause for a deep breath of appreciation and marvel for a few minutes longer as sun warms your skin.  Your grandpa often reminds me not to try and apply logic to illogical situations. It’s a lesson I am still working on learning; maybe we can learn it together.

I want you to know that for every “bad” person in the world, there are hundreds, maybe even thousands of genuine people, people who dedicate their lives to rushing in and helping where instinct says to run in the opposite direction. There is lightness to be found everywhere and hope in the darkest situations.

You can be a part of that hope. You can create more lightness.  I have found, in my limited experience, that we are often strongest when the world seems harsh and insurmountable. Give the world the best you’ve got and you might just surprise yourself.

You cannot control what happens in your life or what goes on in the world around you. But you can face it with the same courage, the same open and kind heart that you already approach everything else.

This weekend we celebrated every single piece of you.  And when this horrible thing happened, I couldn’t wait to rush home and celebrate you all over again, to bury my head in your curls and eat a cupcake and laugh until our bellies ached.

When I was pregnant, I spent hours imagining who you might become. I wondered if you would love reading as much as I did, hoped you wouldn’t be as clumsy.

Then, in the midst of this imagining, amid the business of every day life you did something rather shocking. You grew up.  Without even asking my opinion or feelings on the matter.

You transformed from my baby, my tiny little munchkin into a very real and very independent person. With so many thoughts and imaginings of your very own.

You are intuitive and bright. You challenge me with your questions, asking me how my car was built and what happens to our bones when we die.  You’ve perfected your father’s comedic timing and share our love for being outdoors. Strangers frequently compliment you on your politeness and empathy.

By your very existence, you shook me from wanting to doing, from dreaming to living.

Anything that I am proud of in my life, I owe to you.

The past few nights, I’ve been letting you sleep in bed with me.  I know it’s not a great habit to be getting into, but when you asked last night if you could sleep with me, I answered “yes” a little quicker than I normally do.  I needed to feel the stirring of your lanky limbs beside me and feel comforted by your steady breathing in and out.  You laid down and placed your hand on my arm. When I asked what you were doing you said, “I just want to hold on to you, Mama”. And just like that, you knew what I needed most in that moment. 

I promise to do my very best to always give you what you need. I also promise to fiercely protect and embrace your innocence for as long as I can, but I'm starting to believe that I won't be able to keep the world out for very much longer. 

I may not always have the right answers. Sometimes, probably a lot of times, I am going to be scared too. And sad, the kind of sadness that sneaks into your bones and makes putting one foot in front of the other heavy work. 

But you have proven to me, in the last year of your life, that together, kid- you and I can do anything. 

Happy Birthday to my sweet, strong, smart girl. 

Four is going to be even better than either of us can imagine, I just know it. 

Love you to the moon and back, 

Mama