Sixteen years old

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

 

 

 

you’ll never carry a weight too heavy to bear

“Look,” she told me then. “A mother can fix a lot of things, but she cannot fix a broken heart. Not even I can do that. But I can tell you this, little one.  You’ll never carry a weight too heavy to bear. You’re too strong for that. Okay? The rest of it takes time.”

-All Happy Families – Jeanne McCulloch

Things I Love Lately

So, hey!  I updated my profile photo here!  Finally.  The old one was from October 2007.  So it was time.  This picture was taken last year.  Ten years older, no question about that, but it’s real.

She Roars – I love this piece by my friend and classmate, Allison Slater Tate, about what it meant to her to return to the campus of our alma mater for the recent conference celebrating female alumnae, She Roars.  Every word of her piece resonates with me, from her sense of being about to breathe “with both lungs” to her fear that the second half of life will be “highlighted by loss.”

For Fathers of Daughters – This post (which I personally think is a must-read for fathers of daughters and sons) made me cry.  Yes, yes, and yes.  There is so much good advice here, from the concrete and tangible to the large and abstract, as think about raising empowered, brave, and strong daughters.  This last one: talk about this stuff with boys and other men. YES.  It’s crucial to have these conversations, around our dinner tables and conference tables, with people we parent, people we love, people we work with, and people we have just met.

A Handbook for Grieving – This piece by Caroline Grant absolutely took my breath away.  While my experience of a parent’s death was different, this piece pulses with relatability, pain, and beauty.  I read it through tears.  Everyone needs to read this.

Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, John Carreyrou – I found this nonfiction story of Theranos’ rise and fall unputdownable.  Fascinating.  So much outright deception!  Wow.

What are you reading, thinking about, and loving lately?  Please tell me!

I write these Things I Love posts approximately monthly.  You can find them all here.

No, you must live it

“So you thought you wanted to observe life? Motherhood shakes her head, clenches her fist, and demands, No, you must live it.

-Sarah Ruhl, 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write

Inheritance

I love Dani Shapiro’s work.  That’s not a surprise.  I reviewed Devotion here, Still Writing here, and Hourglass here. I’m incredibly fortunate to have taken classes with Dani and to call her my first and most important teacher.  Her writing moves me and makes me think, as well as inspires me to be better, more aware, more thoughtful, more engaged.

I was lucky enough to read an advance copy of her new memoir, Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love and it took my breath away.  Run, don’t walk.  Order it now.  I’ll be giving to to many friends when it comes out early next year.  Inheritance tells the story of Dani’s discovery, in early 2016, that the father that she’d long adored, who died many years ago, was not her biological father (this is on the back of the book, so I’m not giving anything away).

The book starts with this revelation and unfolds as she learns more about her parents’ motivations and about her true biological background.  The story feels like a detective story, with a kind of breathless pacing that is for me new in Dani’s work.

The book centers around questions of identity.  Most saliently: what makes us who we are?  What combination of genetics, experience, loyalty, and love makes up our soul?  How do we wrestle with choices people made long ago that impact us deeply?  Particularly when the choosers are not here to talk to anymore?

Dani’s family – both the family she grew up with (though her parents are not living, there are other relatives who come into this story: cousins and half-siblings and an aunt) and the biological family she newly meets in midlife – mostly meet her revelations with candor and warmth, for which she is grateful.

Dani’s father was already a towering figure in her life, and he features in much of her writing before Inheritance.  As she says at the end of the book, “there has rare been an event of importance in my life when I have not searched for my father.”  His legacy of Orthodox Judaism forms is the through line of Devotion, and, arguably, of Dani’s life altogether.  This discovery about his role in her biological makeup is an earthquake for Dani, but, ultimately, it does not change the love they shared and the enormous influence he had on her.  Of course this is book hit me – another daughter hugely impacted by her father, in a moment of deep grief and awareness of that power – particularly right now.

The book unpacks complicated questions of agency and secrets, of what we share and why, as Dani thinks through who she is in the light of this new information.  Like in many of her books, I closed it with a deep sigh of relief and identification.  The thing I love most about Dani’s work is how beautifully, delicately, and honestly she describes what it’s like to live the questions, in Rilke’s words. She manages to take experience that is deeply, uniquely personal and use it to comment on universal themes of humanhood.  Dani’s done this in all of her books, in my opinion, and Inheritance is no different.

She lives the questions, without forcing an answer, and in that willingness inspires me profoundly.  There may not be perfect, clean answers – in the case of Inheritance, Dani will never truly know what her parents knew and why they chose this path – but that does not need to stand in the way of a rich, meaningful, and honest life.  The last lines of the book capture this beautifully as she stands before her biological family, thinking of the father of her childhood:

… I silently call to him, a Hebrew word – hineni.  Here I am.  Hineni, uttered only eight times in the entire Torah, is less a statement of personal geography than an expression of presence and pure attentiveness….I say it to my father, again and again.  Hineni.  I am here.  All of me.