Grace

Dear Grace,

Wow.  To say I’m speechless is an understatement.  Today you are eighteen.  It feels like yesterday that I wrote about 10 things I wanted you to know when you turned 10.  I recently followed up with 10 things I wanted you to take with you into your young adulthood.  When your childhood ended.  And today we stand on that threshold.

I know this is not the eighteenth birthday you had in mind.  This is not the senior year you had in mind.  There have been a great many things you’ve had to let go of: events and traditions you’d anticipated, expectations you had held.  I know.  There is a lot of loss there.  I know you are sick of my reminding you that it could be worse.

But unlike many people bemoaning the anxious and depressed children we are creating, I believe this experience will instead foster a generation of resilient young adults who are bonded in ways we don’t totally understand yet.  You know in a deep, profound way that we are not entirely in control of this world, and that what we do impacts others.  We belong to each other, and how we act has an effect that goes far beyond our immediate environment.  What vital lessons these are, even though learning them is not fun right now.

I am so proud of how you have responded to this year of challenge, Grace.  I am so proud of the young woman you have grown into.  You are not afraid of hard work and you know that the only way out is through, a refrain we repeat to each other regularly.  You have learned from experiences, some difficult, to be careful who you trust, but at the same time you have not lost your warmth and openness.  You know that actions mean far more than words.  You know how to see the silver lining, the bright side, the sunset out the window or the smile on the face of a teammate.  You aren’t immune to heartbreak and difficulty, but neither are you swamped by them.  Bravo, dear girl.

School is different academically this year, with only two classes per term (rather than five all year).  That means you take AP Calculus in 10 weeks, for example, but your good spirit and focus on learning and hard work hasn’t wavered.  School is different in other ways, too, and you suffered a big blow when your dearest friend did not come back.  Nevertheless, you settled into your room, made it your own, and have made the best of this unconventional, unexpected fall.

This is your fifth year of varsity cross-country, and your second year as captain.  There won’t be a triumphant New Englands to cap off your running career, but I’m nonetheless heartened to see how you have stepped into leadership of the younger runners, adjusting to this new world and a new coach too.

All of these experiences, all different than you expected, with the same lesson: commitment goes a long way.  I firmly believe that when things are difficult our true self comes out.  Your true self is occasionally daunted but willing to take a deep breath, to look at the horizon, and to do what’s necessary to get there.  I could not be prouder of what I’ve seen, Gracie, in this last rocky season and in the last 18 years, both.

In the last few days I have seen you fall truly head over heels in love with our newest family member, our puppy, Phoebe.  You’ve adored animals from the very start – for a long time you wanted to be a vet – and she is as passionately connected to you already as you are to her.

Next stop, college, and from there, the world.  I have said before, and it remains true, that watching you and Whit take flight is the single most important and joyful thing in my life.  It was a ridiculous, unexpected privilege to have you at home this past spring, a bonus term with you at home that I did not think we’d get.  You and I are a lot alike and sometimes we butt heads, but I hope you know deep in your marrow how profoundly you are loved.  You will always be my first baby, the person who made me a mother.  It will always be my pregnancy with you that was so smooth, at whose midpoint I heard the word “grace,” who was born when your terminally ill grandfather awaited his heart transplant, who arrived in a rainstorm and made us a family.  I’m grateful that you’ve taught me how to be a mother, and for the patience and tolerance and forgiveness you’ve shown me along the way.  I loved you when I met you, I love you now, and I’ll love you forever.

Happy eighteenth birthday, Grace,

Mum

 

Dear Grace,

Next Saturday you turn seventeen.  I know. Such a cliche, the disbelief I feel, and such a deep truth, too.  It feels like a month ago you were born (2002), and like a week ago I started writing this blog (2006), because I wanted to capture details about you and your brother.  All those years, collapsed into a slurry of bright colors and joyful memories, the difficult moments mostly faded, though I know they were there. Hundreds of days – thousands! – whose details have faded but whose sense memories remain: laughter, love, notice-things walks, long drives to and from games, errands, card games, reading together, trips to Crane’s Beach, and a million more things I can’t list.

This is your third year at boarding school.  We miss you when you are gone and love when you are home, but we know you are in the right place.  It’s a joy to watch you flourish.  You were the one who wanted to explore boarding schools and who chose to go, and it’s been an unequivocal win.  You grow every year in maturity and independence.  Junior year is no joke.  This is a stressful season, there’s no question about it . But you are handling things with your characteristic organization and willingness to work hard.  That ability to understand what needs to happen and to grind to get it done will stand you in good stead in the world.  I know it will.

My sincere hope is that among all the AP classes and varsity sports and SAT prep and other commitments you can find pockets of time to simply be a teenager.  Your natural inclination towards hard work and prioritizing effort and accomplishment can sometimes occlude opportunities for delight.  Believe me, I relate to this tendency, to both its advantages and its downsides.

This is your fourth year running varsity cross-country, and your first as a captain.  I know it’s felt like a lot, and that you are frustrated by how hard it feels this year (physically and psychologically), but I applaud your good nature and willingness to keep at it even when there are so many competing demands on your time.  You are a leader on the team and we watch that with tremendous pride.  Keep at it.  Your team is different this year, I know, but it’s full of strong runners and there’s something to be gained from every experience.  You demonstrate real grit in the way you accept the ways things are different and continue focusing ahead.  This is one of many ways you inspire me.

There are many difficult-to-describe attributes that contribute to a happy life, but I think at the top of the list is likely who we choose as friends and companions.  This is an area where you shine.  I am impressed by the people you have chosen to be close to.  Dad and I have enjoyed meeting their parents who are, like their children, wonderful.  In both middle and high school you’ve navigated challenging social waters with self-knowledge and grace.  I know it’s not always easy, but I am so proud of the way you have chosen solid, trustworthy, dedicated, interesting people to be close to you.  By the way you haven’t let the sometimes overwhelming, sometimes confusing social currents overwhelm you.  I don’t think this – the selection of who we hold dear – is a trait that people note much but I think it’s vital to the future and I think you make excellent choices.

You’re on your way already, I know that.  You are a young woman, with a driver’s license and your own ideas about what you want and what matters to you.  It is the honor of my life to be yours and Whit’s mother, and as much as I miss your younger days, I love the young adult you’ve become and watch with anticipation as you step into your glittering future.  I’m always going to be here, watching from the wings, rooting for you even when I can’t see you (the cross-country metaphor, which extends now to the fact that you live outside of our home).  I know how hard you are working.  I want you to know that you are already enough.  You are already incredible.  Dad and I are watching you fly, speechless with pride and love.

To the girl who made me a mother, to my dream-come-true daughter, I love you, now and always.

Mum

Previous birthday letters to Grace are here: sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six.

Over the course of the last three weeks, Grace and I made three separate trips to visit a total of 13 colleges.  As we planned these trips (with precision, I might add!) several people told me how important these experiences had been to them.  These were from all perspectives: people reflecting on college trips they had taken with their parents, parents remembering special visits with their teenagers, and people just slightly older than me who’ve recently done this.

And all three trips – Philadelphia, Connecticut, and Virginia/DC – were absolutely marvelous.  Chock-full of memories and laughter and the occasional bickering too.  Just because we are regular people.  We visited a couple of dear friends but largely kept that to a minimum so that we could just be the two of us.

We danced with the past, the present, and the future these last few weeks, in different, complicated, and lovely ways.

More than once I had the kaleidoscopic, dizzying feeling of time contracting and of my own teenage self walking alongside my adult self and my teenage daughter.  My father in particular was so viscerally present while we toured my alma mater and his that I positively ached for him.

We were quite adamantly present.  I did some work in the afternoons and evenings, yes, and we stayed with two of Grace and Whit’s three godmothers, but mostly we spent a lot of time alone.  We went for runs in spectacular nature preserves, explored unfamiliar towns, tried new restaurants, passed many hours driving, got a little bit lost, experienced two major rain squalls, and took a lot of selfies.

Most of all, though, these three weeks made me aware in a new way of the future.  All of a sudden I can see and sense the years that lie ahead for Grace – the years that were some of the most cherished and formative in my own life – and they are dazzlingly bright.  I feel excited about the experiences that lie just over the threshold for her.  She has two more years of high school, and this future isn’t here yet, but she – and I – feel suddenly aware of it in a new and tangible way.  Like all transitions, this one is bittersweet (holding within it as it does her departure from our home – though, in many ways, that’s already happened), but the truth is it’s far more sweet than bitter.  I’m just plain old excited for her.  It didn’t escape me that the two women we stayed with – two of my very dearest friends – are people I met when I was in boarding school and college.  She’s building relationships and laying down memories now that she’ll have for the rest of her life, and that fact makes me happy.

I shared many photos of our tour on Instagram, and for the next month I’ll only be there.  Happy end of summer, all.

Dear Grace,

On Friday you turn sixteen.  Sixteen.  To say I’m speechless is an understatement.  It feels like moments ago you arrived, at the end of a long, difficult labor.  Your shock of black hair and cleft chin and girl-ness was simultaneously a shock and, somehow, who I always knew you’d be.  You’ll forever be the person who made me a mother, and together we’ve been figuring it out ever since.

I’ve chosen openness with you at every step, so you know how hard the first few months of our life together were for me.  I firmly believe both that experience and our communication since then has only brought us closer.  I hope I’m right.

Last year you went away to school, and your departure kicked off an autumn of changes and losses that none of us could have predicted.  Because of all that came after, I don’t know that I have given proper credence to what a transition your leaving for school was.  And it was.  The biggest since your arrival.  You won’t live at home again. Something – a time of my life that I dearly loved – has ended now.  And I mourned that preemptively last summer and into the fall.

But what I can see now is that that loss has given way to a beautiful new view.  Hasn’t it?  I don’t feel any less in touch with you – in some ways I feel even closer.  I watch you blooming in the place you find yourself, surrounded by new friends, challenges, and adventures, with surpassing pride.  I’ve always said that brave is one of the traits I want most in my children, and you are that. I was impressed with your desire and decision to go, and I’m impressed watching you spread your wings.

Smart and brave.  Compassionate and sensitive.  Loving and mature. You are all of these things and so much more.

I want to capture you right now, on the cusp of sixteen:

You are taller than I am.  You can run much faster than I can.  You have done driver’s ed and will get your permit when you next come home.  You are kind and thoughtful – and yes, sometimes irritable – towards your brother.  You are warm and loving towards your grandmothers. You miss your grandfathers and are profoundly aware of what a gift it is to have had the relationships you had with both. You inspire me every single day.  While it seems like your childhood went by a blink, I also feel like you’ve been this version of you forever. All the other Graces you have been exist inside the one you are now, and I love you more than I ever have. I can see your adult life spreading before you now, glinting in the sunlight.  I can’t wait to watch you walk it.

This is your third year of running varsity cross-country.  You push yourself hard, enjoy training and being a part of a team, and don’t love the stress of racing.  That’s because you’re competitive and you take it seriously, which is, in the end, a good thing, I think. Cross country is replete with metaphors about both parenting and living, and we talk a lot about running your own race. You are, and I hope you continue to do so.

You work hard in school.  You are organized and diligent, and the color-coded crayons of age five you have given way to your incredibly neat room at school.  Your sweaters are folded and arrayed by color.  I helped you move in and as you said goodbye you said, slightly chagrined, “I hope it’s okay if I re-fold my sweaters now.” And for the record: I am neat!

I recognize this behavior and relate keenly to it. It goes hand in hand with a deep desire to please which can be a burden as much as it can be a lovely quality.  I hope it doesn’t get in your way.  That’s a pitfall I know intimately and one I hope to help you avoid.  Wanting to be kind to others and wanting to make them happy is a generous impulse that comes from a good place, but the truth is we can’t actually make another person happy.  Only we can make ourselves happy.  I wrote about that when you turned ten, and I still believe it.

Literally as I wrote this, I got a text from you, in which you mentioned something hard at school, and then wrote, nevertheless she persisted.  Yes, yes, and yes.  I have tears of pride in my eyes.  Life is about persisting, we both know that now, in a way we didn’t last year.  And I’m so proud of you, watching you from near and far.  May you stay strong and brave, smart and curious, thoughtful and sensitive.  Thank you for making me a mother, all those years ago, and for bearing with me as I figure it out alongside you.  I could never have imagined how technicolor and glorious this adventure would be.  Being your mother, and Whit’s, is the greatest honor and joy of my life.

I love you, sweet girl.

xo

Mum

 

 

 

after playing doubles on Sunday

Dear Grace,

On Thursday you turn fifteen.  Fifteen! You seem so, so, so much older than you did when you turned fourteen.  Part of that is that you’ve gone away to school, and the slight distance this has provided has let me see the long shadows you cast more clearly.  The fact that I’m standing just a bit further away allows me to notice things I did not see before.

The outlines of the young adult you are fully visible to me now, and I could not be prouder of the person you’re becoming.  You are mature and thoughtful, disciplined and sensitive, hard-working and caring.  You have grit and determination and a deep seam of joy in your spirit.  You made the transition to school quite seamlessly – and that was a big transition – but it is what came in the first weeks at school showed me who you really are.

When Grandpa died unexpectedly, you responded with a mix of heartache and wisdom, of self-knowledge and strength that quite frankly blew me away.  You miss him a lot, and there are some tears.  But you are also aware of his continuing presence in your life in a visceral way and thankful for the years he had on earth post-transplant in a way that I suspect will stand you in good stead as an adult.  One thing we say to each other a lot is “don’t be afraid to catch feels” (quoting that great poet of modern life, Calvin Harris) and you have shown me in this last month that you aren’t.  You are sensitive and you have strong feelings (I have no idea where you got these traits) and one of the things I most fiercely wish for you (and have for years) is the ability to acknowledge those truths about yourself without letting them swamp you.  I think  – and tell you – all the time of the Jon Kabat-Zinn quote, “you can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.”

And you are learning to surf.  It was a wavy first couple of months of fall, there’s no question about that.  You’ve demonstrated what I consider to be remarkable poise as you get to know a new school.  For a while I’d ask who your friends were, and you always answered to me that you were “friends with everyone – there are so many great people here.”  I finally stopped asking.  You have a firm view that it makes sense for now to keep an open mind and to let close friendships develop organically rather than rushing to find your clique.  I think this is a great way to approach a new community.

About the second week of school I remember a conversation where you said you had been so focused on the transition to boarding that you sort of forgot that you were also going to be going to school. You were saying this ruefully, acknowledging that there was a lot of work to do.  But with characteristic elan and organization you have shown that you are capable of wrestling these new challenges to the ground.

You’re running a lot, and your first weeks at school you had your first-ever shin splints. This was a frustration that slowed you down in the first few races and likely stemmed from not having trained enough this summer.  Lesson learned.  Metaphor acknowledged. I am certain you will do better next year!  One result of the injury was your running in a JV race one day and winning the whole thing, out of a substantial, multi-school field. It may be the one race you outright win in high school, and it was a big thrill.  I am sorry I did not see it, but am glad my cousin, aunt, and uncle were there!

You’re in the woods, in so many ways.  But your step is sure and you are running your own race, and I’m standing cheering, even when I can’t see you.

You are growing in confidence every year, testing out your voice and learning to stand up for yourself.  I was proud of you for choosing your own school, not mine, when you made the big decision of where to go for high school. It was your choice, and I hope that fact always makes you feel proud, as it does me.  But you selected your own path, and I don’t think that was an accident.  You told me once this school would always be yours. That brought tears to my eyes.  It’s yours now and it always will be.

Teenage girls get such a bad rap in our culture, and I have to say, so far you’ve made this very easy on me.  You are a delight to be around, and I feel our relationship has never been closer.  Sure, we butt heads now and then, but the truth is it isn’t very often.  I think you know how wildly, enormously proud I am of you, and how that pride grows every day.  It feels like two seconds ago you arrived after a very long, very painful labor, in a torrential downpour, but it also feels like a lifetime ago.  I can’t imagine my life without you in it, that’s for sure.  You will always be the person who made me a mother, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am that it’s you who the universe decided would be my first child.  We’re learning together, and have been every step of the way.

I love you, Gracie Girl, Gracie big pants, my first born, my only daughter, my beloved soulmate, the girl I love more than any other in the entire world.  Happy fifteenth birthday.

Love,

Mum

For many years I’ve written to Grace on her birthday. Previous letters are here: fourteen, thirteen, twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight, seven, six.