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 3 & 4: "I was a woman at slight remove from my ordinary identity"

Oh, Sybil,

I went out Saturday night. Leaving behind all the kids, who stood at the door and asked why I had to go, and my sweet husband, who patiently nudged them back inside away from February's bite, I left them. As always, it was exhilarating and felt a little daring: who is this single woman, lipstick and a purse so small it couldn't possibly hold crayons and matchbox cars and sandwich bags of cereal?

I came home to them, of course, but for four or five hours I was a woman at slight remove from my ordinary identity. 

I am shy in person. I always have been and can't imagine what it would be like to be freed of that cloak but, baby, I was born this way. The party I attended was a group of women I know online. A funny thing, the way we now build communities. Like you and me. What is this invisible world? And the truth is, I thrive in it. I can be gregarious at a keyboard. 

So these ladies and I, we all collaborate on a common website. We communicate with each other online every day. We have a Google Groups and a Facebook group. We're all Facebook friends. In one sense, I know each of them very well. But it cannot be avoided that even though I've been with the group for more than three years, I'm one of the newest members. Many of them go back six or more years, and in the early days, they had many in-person gatherings. It's my shyness cloak distorting truth, maybe, but in their presence I always feel inhibited, the newbie, the one they don't know as well as they all know each other. 

I confess, Sybil, as much as I knew it would be a great evening, I also dreaded it. It's so hard for me to walk into a room like that. My heart beats fast and my senses heighten and I question every word out of my mouth just as it escapes in a potential burst of embarrassment. But I went. And should "going out for a ladies' night with friends" be considered an accomplishment? Well, yes, I think it should. 

Sunday morning found me exhausted. It's a toll, being sociable through my shy cloak, and with the last smudges of mascara scraping my cheeks I found myself bone-heavy tired. I didn't want to get up. But one child, two children, three soon found themselves in our bed, climbing on me, saying all at once "did you have fun?" and "what did you do?" and "where were you?" and "I'm HUG-REEN!" (that's how George says 'hungry;' he's almost three, my sweet baby with the endless appetite). 

And I was home in my element, being clambered over as if they were puppies and not children, and I felt comforted and lonely. This is my family and I was back with them, I in their arms and they entwined in mine. But at the same time, I was acutely aware that my Gal About Town status was as faded as my makeup. I was worn out by the challenge of socializing with women I admire so much that they intimidate me, but I was also exhilarated by the afterglow of my accomplishment. 

Is it a big deal or a little thing to have a fun night out? It's everything and nothing, a personal challenge I happened this time to manage well, a memory of a fun evening. It's life as me, life as mom, life as a woman who made the puzzle pieces click together without glue or force or luck. 

My children yammered on and around me and my sweet husband, downstairs, must have been brewing coffee. I smelled its restorative aroma rise up to me and I thought about this family, that night, this blended existence between personhood and parenthood. 

Not every conclusion ends in the emotion of accomplishment but this one was good. I lay there in bed, imagining corking that exact feeling to savor again at future moments of need. This feeling should come with a merit badge, I thought. And a nap.

So naturally I swung my legs off the edge of the bed and went downstairs to make oodles of breakfast.

Much love,

Agnes

Dear Agnes,

If it were possible to reach through my computer screen, I would give you a big high five and celebrate your successful night out! Daring to be brave and to step outside of your familiar is nothing short of heroic. Being outside of your comfort zone is often a wretched thing, but I am so proud of you for embracing it and for contributing to conversation at the risk of sounding foolish! (Though I find it hard to believe that anything you have to say would do anything less than contribute to the quality of conversation being had!).

You and I are in slightly different places right now, Agnes. You're a few years 'ahead' of me! You see, I just became a Mom a few months ago. This new title is so new to me, in fact, that my personal journal is scribbled with several entries that say something along the lines of, "When will I really feel like a Mother?" I find myself staring at Baby Girl, realizing that I am and will be to her what my own incredible mother is and has been to me. It's daunting. It's thrilling. It's terrifying. It's such a privilege! The moment I saw the "+" sign on the pregnancy test last March, I immediately and irrevocably adopted the title I have dreamt of for years: "Mother." In my eyes, I was 100% a Mom. However, now that she's here I've realized that it is also role that takes time to grow in to.

See, when I go out without Baby Girl (to class or the grocery store and such), for the most part I feel completely normal. It's still comfortable for me to be out and about without her. Now, don't get me wrong, I miss her when we're separated. Of course I do. Often times, I find myself looking at the people around me and thinking, "I'm a Mom! You can't see it on the outside, but 3 months ago my life and heart were radically changed. Right now you are seeing just one woman sitting in one bus seat but the truth is that my heart is not with me anymore. The cavity where it used to reside is empty and now it lives in this tiny little Lady that I call my daughter." It makes me look at the others around me and wonder about the mystery that comes with strangers. What secrets do they carry? What do the details of their lives look like? Anyway, I guess I'm sort of in this limbo stage where I feel fully me when I'm with her and fully me when I'm without her. Slowly, though, I can feel that the woman "without Baby Girl" is less and less who I am. It's good. It's new. It's a change that needs to happen and I'm embracing it as it comes.

I dream of the day when our family looks more like yours. When Baby Girl is the oldest of three, and they come rushing in to greet me in the morning and children I haven't met yet make my heart explode by saying things like "HUG GREEN." Until then, I'll continue to embrace each day as it comes.

It's always lovely to hear from you, Agnes. I hope that since your night out on the town, you've been able to find a healthy balance between personhood and parenthood. I hope that you're being brave with your days - even the 'ordinary' ones - and that you're feeling that same feeling of contentment with the start of each morning!

Most Affectionately,

Sybil