May 5, 2012
Grace
Things I Want My 10 Year Old Daughter To Know
Grace is rounding the curve to ten. I am not sure how this is possible. In my second month of blogging here she turned four. Now she’s more than halfway to her tenth birthday. It’s irrefutable. I feel ever more aware of her girlhood and looming adolescence, and of all the things I want her to know, as if I could somehow instill values and beliefs into her, like pressing a penny into soft clay. I know I can’t; the best I can do is to keep saying them, keep writing them, keep living them.
Ten things I want my ten year old daughter to know:
1. It is not your job to keep the people you love happy. Not me, not Daddy, not your brother, not your friends. I promise, it’s not. The hard truth is that you can’t, anyway.
2. Don’t lose your physical fearlessness. Please continue using your body in the world: run, jump, climb, throw. I love watching you streaking down the soccer field, or swinging proudly along a row of monkey bars, or climbing into the high branches of a tree. There is both health and a sense of mastery in physical activity and challenges.
3. Don’t be afraid to share your passions. You are sometimes embarrassed that you still like to play with dolls, for example, and you worry that your friends will make fun of you. Anyone who teases you for what you love to do is not a true friend. This is hard to realize, but essential.
4. It is okay to disagree with me, and others. You are old enough to have a point of view, and I want to hear it. So do those who love you. Don’t pick fights for the sake of it, of course but when you really feel I’m wrong, please say so. You have heard me say that you are right, and you’ve heard me apologize for my behavior or point of view when I realize they were wrong. Your perspective is both valid and valuable. Don’t shy away from expressing it.
5. You are so very beautiful. Your face now holds the baby you were and the young woman you are rapidly becoming. My eyes and cleft chin and your father’s coloring combine into someone unique, someone purely you. I can see the clouds of society’s beauty myth hovering, manifest in your own growing self-consciousness. I beg of you not to lose sight with your own beauty, so much of which comes from the fact that your spirit runs so close to the surface.
6. Keep reading. Reading is the central leisure-time joy of my life, as you know. I am immensely proud and pleased to see that you seem to share it. That identification you feel with characters, that sense of slipping into another world, of getting lost there in the best possible way? Those never go away. Welcome.
7. You are not me. We are very alike, but you are your own person, entirely, completely, fully. I know this, I promise, even when I lose sight of it. I know that separation from me is one of the fundamental tasks of your adolescence, which I can see glinting over the horizon. I dread it like ice in my stomach, that space, that distance, that essential cleaving, but I want you to know I know how vital it is. I’m going to be here, no matter what, Grace. The red string that ties us together will stretch. I know it will. And once the transition is accomplished there will be a new, even better closeness. I know that too.
8. It is almost never about you. What I mean is when people act in a way that hurts or makes you feel insecure, it is almost certainly about something happening inside of them, and not about you. I struggle with this one mightily, and I have tried very, very hard never once to tell you you are being “too sensitive” or to “get over it” when you feel hurt. Believe me, I know how feelings can slice your heart, even if your head knows otherwise. But maybe, just maybe, it will help to remember that almost always other people are struggling with their own demons, even if they bump into you by accident.
9. There is no single person who can be your everything. Be very careful about bestowing this power on any one person. I suspect you are trying to fill a gnawing loneliness, and if you are you inherited it from me. That feeling, Woolf’s “emptiness about the heart of life,” is just part of the deal. Trying to fill that ache with other people (or with anything else, like food, alcohol, numbing behaviors of a zillion sorts you don’t even know of yet) is a lost cause, and nobody will be up to the task. You will feel let down, and, worse, that loneliness will be there no matter what. I’m learning to embrace it, to accept it as part of who I am. I hope to help you do the same.
10. I am trying my best. I know I’m not good enough and not the mother you deserve. I am impatient and fallible and I raise my voice. I am sorry. I love you and your brother more than I love anyone else in the entire world and I always wish I could be better for you. I’ll admit I don’t always love your behavior, and I’m quick to tell you that. But every single day, I love you with every fiber of my being. No matter what.
A word after a word is power
Just recently, Grace swapped out the pink duvet cover that’s been on her bed since she first slept in it for one covered in peace signs. Obsessed with peace signs, she is. As part of her “redecorate my room” campaign, she asked me to take down a framed poster that had hung on her wall for years. And, with a lump in my throat and tears in my eyes, I did. The poster had a picture of her at the age of 4 writing her name, and a copy of Margaret Atwood’s poem Spelling.
This is a poem I have loved for a long time. It was the epigraph to my college thesis. I thought of my choice, 16 years ago, to include this poem (with a photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe‘s naked breasts and hand) in my thesis, which was about the mother-daughter relationship. I thought of the ways in which I was then anticipating now, this very girl who grows in front of my eyes, this moment when I was the mother, and I had that dizzying experience where time collapses on itself.
Before I took it off the wall, I read the poem to Grace one last time. And more than once, I had to pause to regain my composure and to swallow back the tears. Reading this poem to my eager daughter while looking at pictures of her writing her very first word. Pictures of her first word, her name. Grace. grace. Dear, dear universe. Thank you. Words, poetry, pen on paper, names, spelling, grace.
Gracie, my grace.
Spelling (Margaret Atwood)
My daughter plays on the floor
with plastic letters,
read, blue, & hard yellow.
learning how to spell,
spelling,
how to make spells.
*
and I wonder how many women
denied themselves daughters,
closed themselves in rooms,
drew the curtains
so they could mainline words.
*
A child is not a poem,
A poem is not a child.
There is no either/or.
However.
*
I return to the story
of a woman caught in the war
& in labor, her thighs tied
together by the enemy
so she could not give birth.
Ancestress: the burning witch,
her mouth covered by leather
to strangle words.
A word after a word
after a word is power.
*
At the point where language falls away
from the hot bones, at the point
where the rock breaks open and darkness
flows out of it like blood, at
the melting point of granite
when the bones know
they are hollow & the word
splits & doubles & speaks
the truth & the body
itself becomes a mouth.
This is a metaphor.
*
How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky, & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word.
Perfect
This past weekend was difficult. Tensions ran high, nerves were frayed, voices were raised. I was reminded, for the umpteenth time, that Matt and I are Grace and Whit’s weather, and though they exhibit it differently they are both keenly aware of our moods. It’s a big responsibility, being someone else’s sky: when I’m stormy, that has a huge impact on them. Still, still, I had my camera out, and I was able to unearth a few gems from a weekend otherwise filled with a slurry of sorrow and frustration.
Grace let me braid her hair. This reminded me of my own childhood, spent often in two uneven braids. This was the result of several tries; I’m not a good hair-doer. Still, the braids were perfect.
Matt got home late on Friday night so I took Grace and Whit to our local pizzeria for slices for dinner. As we waited I turned to shush them and saw that they were (loudly) dancing around the empty room. My voice, raised to tell them to be quiet (oh, irony, I know) stilled in my throat and tears sprang to my eyes. It was perfect.
Saturday night Whit would not go to sleep. He was wired and tired, bouncing off the walls with a frantic energy. Everything was a chore: trying to get him to brush his teeth, clean up his room, put on his pajamas. My defenses were (and remain) paper-thin: the mere sight of his big top teeth coming in, where so recently there was a gaping gap, made me cry. And still, amid all of that, I couldn’t stop laughing when I saw this in the mirror. It was perfect.
Late on Sunday afternoon Whit and I dropped Grace off at a friend’s house and, needing an escape from the house, drove to the cemetery nearby. We arrived at our tower to discover that they had just closed it. Crestfallen, we got in the car, and then Whit asked me to pull over so we could climb down to a pond at the bottom of a ravine. I did, and followed him as he skipped ahead of me down the narrow path. The end of the day grew dusky, and I waved away mosquitoes as I watched Whit watching a pair of ducks and a small, silent turtle at the edge of the pond. Moments of calm descended on me, but I also felt aggravated, and impatient, and aware of an internal thunder whose rumbling I could not quiet.
Finally we turned to head back to the car and made our way back up the path. Whit trailed me, carrying his “walking stick.” “Mummy?” I heard him say behind me. I turned. “Yes?” “I really like when we spend time just you and me.” It was perfect.
One year and one day ago I wrote these words:
I need to trust that as surely as my frustrations and irritations, my guilt and paralyzing panic about missing it rise up, they will ebb away. These emotions are clouds sliding across the sky of my life, that is all. This is what I am realizing: it is up to me whether I let these feelings, these moments when I am not the mother I want to be, mar the perfection of this life. And I won’t let them. I can’t change, I don’t think, the spikes of agitation and restlessness that sometimes overtake me so fast my head spins. But I can change how I let them impact my overall sense of my days, of my life.
This life, this moment: it’s all so perfect it breaks my heart. Every day.
And my emotional sky remains full of clouds, and it’s all still perfect.
Lucky enough to come between
For decades my role model was my mother. Now it’s my daughter. I’m just the woman who was lucky enough to come between the two.
– Anna Quindlen
I looked through my photographs and was surprised at how few I actually have of Grace and my mother together. They have always had a special bond, from day one, when Mum and Hilary waited outside the delivery room while Grace was born and then met her immediately. I didn’t know whether my baby was a boy or a girl, and I admit a very large part of me suspected the universe had an all-boy family in store for me, mostly because of how desperately I wanted to have a girl. Well, 39 hours of brutal labor later, the first but not last time her will and mine went to war, Grace was born.
And minutes later, my mother was there. My mother, who patiently withstood my senior year deconstruction of the mother-daughter bond, both in overarching generalities and in painful specifics. My mother, whose red hair landed precisely and permanently on my head. My mother, whose confidence and competence together make her a force of nature. My mother, my role model.
My mother, my daughter, and I all have the same middle name. We share an intuition about the world and an empath’s ability to read the emotions of others. There are a million differences between us, of course, but the same blood – that which came from Marion, and Priscilla after her – beats in all of our veins.
And once in a while, I am overwhelmed with awareness of how fortunate I am. Of the lucky, lucky woman I am.