Letters 9 & 10: "...down some emotional roads..."

Dearest Agnes,

It’s been a while since I’ve put pen to paper and sent you a few of my thoughts. How are you? How is your family? Are you finishing the winter season well or are you already anxious for the New Life that spring has to offer? Oh, how I hope that you are able to find contentment and joy in each day!

I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching the past few weeks, Agnes. It has led me down some emotional roads and I’m pretty sure I still have more questions than answers. I thought I’d throw one of my bigger questions your way. In your opinion, how do we know what is “The Best” for our children?

As you know, I am living overseas. At times, I feel that I am enriching my daughter’s life with a unique experience that will define her early years permanently. I mean, Baby Girl will be bilingual with no effort in a matter of months and her passport had its first stamps before she was 6 weeks old. In the first two months of her life, she traveled further than I did in the first 25 years of mine!

Other times (most of the time, I should say), I think that I am depriving her of a joyful life surrounded by the love of her grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Are we wrong for exposing her to a more difficult life than she would have had if we had stayed in the US? Is giving her a ‘safe’ and ‘easy’ life in America the best for her? Or is teaching her from the very first weeks of her life that helping others is worth it, even at the expense of your own comfort? I grew up believing that everyone deserves ‘The Best’, but how can we possibly know what ‘The Best’ is? Perhaps I’m just distracted by the extremes of these two options and completely ignoring some healthy balance in the middle, but so few aspects of my life are ‘in the middle’ these days that I find it an easy option to ignore!

Now, I hope you don’t misunderstand me in this. I know that life in America isn’t always easy nor is it safe. I am fully aware of the way I can romanticize life in the US, but the life she would have had in our little hometown in Michigan is absolutely safer and easier than the life we have here. It just is.

So what do we do with our children, Agnes? How do we know what is The Best? Is it wrong to want to give my daughter a life that the children she is going to befriend these next few years here will never and could never have? Is it possible to give our children lives of advantage, health, safety, comfort without making those things idols in their lives? How do we know what’s The Best for them?

I don’t suspect you will have answers, Agnes, but oh how I would love to hear your thoughts on the subject! Momma to Momma, what is your perspective on this?

Affectionately,
Sybil

Sybil,

I've been thinking about your question for a day because my response to you formed so immediately that I had to ponder it to be sure that it felt right. Here it is, for you, friend: there is no The Best. I believe this in my heart. There are, though, many different Bests.

The first Best is that your daughter is excessively loved by her parents, loved so much that love drips from her like morning nectar. You do that. It is not a factor of geography, but of your heart. She feels safe and nurtured and happy.

An additional Best is the confidence of your decisions. Baby Girl will follow your lead. Are you making your home where you are with conviction? She will be happy there if you're happy there. It's not easy, and it's not the same as not feeling homesick. You can feel homesick. You can wonder about what life would be like surrounded by family. But family needn't only be defined by blood relations. Foster yourself a new family, another Best. Love is love is love, whether it comes from new friends in far lands or forever-family across a Skype screen.

I think everyone I know (and tell me if you can repeat this from your own observations) who had a common childhood sometimes wished for more adventure, and everyone who had loads of adventure sometimes wished for a steadier foundation. Is this only about Baby Girl, sweet Sybil, or is this as much about you? You're in such a tender spot. New Motherhood is a rubbed raw feeling some days without leaving your own neighborhood, let alone crossing borders and languages and time zones. You're facing adjustments of more than the cultural or geographical sort.

I'm thinking of you in the ocean tides, Sybil. My family spends a week on the edge of the Atlantic every summer (and if this cold day is what spring is supposed to be, let's just think about summer instead, shall we?). My favorite thing to do is to take each of my kids, one by one, to the edge of the ocean. I stand my child in front of me and we walk forward, inching. I have them face the ocean, the back of their heads each in turn bumping softly against my belly as I walk immediately behind them. We face the same rising sun. I hold their hands in mine and I walk, walk, walk, to the depth for each of them where the highest tide will tickle their chins. I hold each one there and I say, "shhh. Feel yourself against sand and wind and water. Feel how solid you are. Feel how light you are. Feel all the world go by."

At that depth, a wave could carry them away if I wasn't anchoring them to the sand. They feel their strength and their fragility, too, their weight and their weightlessness, the forces that push against them and the way they can bear down to stay still, the way they can let everything go by.

Feel yourself and your strength, Sybil. It's you, too. You have all the currents of "is this" and "should we" and "what if" and "but only" pushing against you and to some degree they've always been there, pushing ceaselessly on the wind and waves, but before this season you were just you, and you were carefree, and you didn't mind a little of life's grit on your face. Now you're not just you, you're Mama-you, and nothing, not even a speck of sand, is going to bother Baby Girl if you can stop it. You've always been a rod of strength but now you're a bolster of someone else's, too. It happens to all of us, the realization of the size of all our decisions and their attenuating effects on our responsibilities. It causes each of us to question everything. You're not alone. Ask every mama you know.

There's one more Best I want to offer you, and it's the realization that nothing needs be permanent. If you had a five-year-plan or an eight-year-plan, why don't you think of it as a plan-to-be-carefully-reconsidered-every-six-months kind of plan? You don't have to figure out everything at once. Tell yourself that this is today's status quo and set a date on the calendar to examine if the status quo needs revision. Decisions, like most Best growth, can be accomplished in stages. So very little of this world is really black and white.

And speaking of gray: it is gloomy and disgusting here today but I am wearing neon purple shoes because it will be spring on my feet even if Mother Nature is still enjoying a little last hibernation. I hope I see many sunny days soon, and I hope you do, too. I hope you feel the warmth both on your face and in your heart, because you deserve to feel radiant.

Much love,
Agnes

Letters 7 & 8: "... coming back... never felt like starting over."

Dear Elle,

After a long visit back home in the States, it's been fascinating readjusting to life overseas.  I was worried that I'd dissolve into annoyance; I certainly hadn't held back from spoiling myself with all the things unavailable here-- Starbucks, Target, and Panera, oh my!  So far, though, I've been safe from such a slump. I wake in the morning and feel gratified to hear the older children already running about in the hallways, chattering animatedly to one another and to Albert as he prepares for work.  I roll over in the pale light of our bedroom and snuggle the baby, kissing his cheeks until he giggles and swapping his diaper out for a new one before we head downstairs.  I make sure Armand has his things ready for school, reminding him to brush his teeth and balancing the baby on my hip while I run a wet comb over his cowlicks.  Moments later I watch the bus disappear down the alley with him aboard, and I can just imagine him strapped into his seat, kicking his feet in the air the way he does when he's excited.

This is how I've felt since we've been back: kicking the air with anticipation for all that awaits us.

I know that sounds simple and contrived a little, maybe naive... but we've had years where it seemed everything was just a hike--an uphill hike--and this does not feel like it will be one of those, at least not just yet. 

Or perhaps it's just my mindset that's different.  Last year was our first one here, and it was all lessons.  I had to learn how to drive in a country without road etiquette, how to connect with a culture vastly different from my own, how to raise a family in a place that feels like a gray fairytale sometimes with its constant surprises.  Certainly after only a year (some of which was spent, as I said, back home) we are not beyond the reach of acclimation.  But the settling is coming easier this time around, and I feel affection for those around me without having to work at it, and these two truths are a great comfort to me.

Last week I was idling at a red light, eying my sideview mirrors for over-eager drivers squeezing between lanes to gain a few car-lengths of position.  The sky was overcast and the pedestrians moving past on the sidewalks held their collars against their necks, heads down into the wind.  My inner music box began playing the song I've adopted since I crossed oceans and borders to come here with my family: the melody of stories, countless stories swirling around me.  I want to know them all, as impossible as that is.  I'll search them out and hear some, and I think that will be enough to change me... continue changing me, in the best way. 

What about you?  You've all been back in the States for awhile now: Do you long to return overseas?  How is it being back "home" after the years being "out"? 

Here's to a good year, Elle.

-Victoria

Dear Victoria,

I’m sitting at the window, trying to collect my thoughts. Outside, the clouds are low and thick. The wind is pushing empty swings. Daffodils grow in bunches in my garden. The ground is soft; the grass is tinged with a fresh, new green. It seems right that you should write to me of new beginnings when here we are, edging closer and closer to spring.

I lived in Japan two years ago when the earthquake happened, when the tsunami happened, and if I let myself I can still get lost in that slow, unfolding, nuclear disaster. We were so frightened. When my husband was called in to help, I had to evacuate myself and our two, small children. For months, our family was divided. Afterward, I didn’t know what to expect. I waited until the risk seemed small and then I brought my children home to Japan, to a place that both was and wasn’t home for me, and still without my husband. I remember it all so well: the nervousness, the anticipation, the eagerness to plunge back into adventure and the fear of starting over. What I didn’t expect, though, was that coming back to Japan never felt like starting over. I picked up a life I’d already begun, with friends I’d already made, in a culture I already knew and respected. I felt at ease there, and eager, and so unexpectedly peaceful.

Making a home is never easy. Whether you’re in a country you know or a country that’s entirely unfamiliar, there’s always loneliness at first. There’s always adjustment. I’ve felt it everywhere we’ve ever lived, and I feel it now. But those moments you described, those baby snuggles in the morning light, that wet comb over a stubborn cowlick, are homemaking at work. I’m so glad you see it. Keep feeling hopeful. Kick your feet in the air, let the stories swirl around you, relish in how far you’ve come, and enjoy the sweetness!

Elle