finding finish
September 29, 2014 § 5 Comments
Yesterday my daughter participated in her first 5k. The day began with a celebratory spirit and heightened anticipation, friends fell in and out of animated conversations as the crowd waited eagerly on the cusp of a fluid, infectious energy.
As a family we cheered from the sidewalks of our neighborhood, marking our daughter’s path as she wound her way through Sunday morning sunshine. When at last she rounded the corner to our home in the final lap, she tossed herself heavily onto our driveway and planted her hands and feet flat against the familiar surface. Red faced and aching, she listed the tender places of her body ready to remove herself from the day’s event.
It was a moment so familiar to the experience of mothering; reaching for a child mindful of a fall, eyes and heart spotting dangers they cannot see as they leap. To let my daughter walk away from finishing would undermine her beginning, leaving too much room for remorse and messages of inability. Instead I reached out for a hand that accepted my own and we walked toward the end together.
To my daughter,
Your distance was shy of finishing, but I was measuring a different span; the space between giving up and persisting. Beginning something new is as important as finding your way to finishing something difficult. Soon the sore muscles will subside, but you will remember the sense of accomplishment that comes from completing a commitment. Each ending builds courage for our next beginning.
Love you.
Mom
to my daughter
September 21, 2014 § Leave a comment
I wish I could press my finger against a moment and keep time from pushing us so quickly into the next distraction; I would sit a little longer on the sidelines of your last game. Over the past three weeks you have grown from lost to found. The doubts that kept you so firmly rooted in place were missing yesterday from your form. Watching you chase after the game and track the ball, moving between plays, there was a lightness of self and fullness of presence.
Post-game you had the infectious energy of someone too soon extracted from an experience. Tired and proud you didn’t linger boastfully over the win, but rather shuffled funny insights from the field. You rattled off nicknames and playbacks, injuries and inside jokes while stripping off shoes and shin guards. The uniform remained.
This alone, your team colors, best represents the evolution of your experience.
After your first game you quickly shed and scattered your uniform into the forgotten discards that litter your room. You washed the experience from the day and cloaked yourself in emotions that fought for freedom from an uncomfortable commitment.
One week later your uniform became a badge of honor, evidence that you were part of something. Uncertain in your position but certain in your placement among your teammates. It was the first time you wouldn’t remove your team colors.
This past week your jersey traveled to school and became a new marker for self, a symbol of belonging, and a hallmark around our home. Late Friday night I was washing it in anticipation of yesterday’s game.
Belonging doesn’t happen independently of challenges or uniquely by way of happiness. You have created a place for yourself with effort and accountability, determination and persistence. It has been complicated and uncomfortable, confusing and even overwhelming. Without natural talent or experience, you have had to create trust by showing up to each practice ready to work and willing to learn.
Similarly, success is often a collective endeavor measured by individual growth. Your coach could have allowed you to hide on the sidelines as easily as we, your parents, could have offered you escape. Instead we stand on either side of the same field, looking for strength without ignoring error.
We are only halfway through this new endeavor and I anticipate there will be more challenges as you grow more fully into this experience. Remember, win or lose, it is enough to watch you play the game.
Love, Mom
to my daughter
September 6, 2014 § 8 Comments
This morning was your first soccer game. Until today your frame of reference for the sport was limited to Kindergarten drills and gym class scrimmages. Your enthusiasm for this new experience was based more in an excuse to spend time with a friend than a newly recognized passion for the game. Still, I was proud of your willingness to be uncomfortable and unknowledgeable, to risk failing in an attempt to succeed, to be a part of something larger than yourself.
I anticipated you might play poorly and I secretly wished you a natural inclination that could compensate for the absence of experience. What I didn’t expect was to find my shortcomings centerfield from the sidelines. You were lost and still, overwhelmed and hiding in plain sight. Each gesture of confusion was both genuine and dismissive, I could feel you attempting to shed the experience even as it unfolded around you.
Your teammates were struggling against other children, but you were struggling against yourself.
You may never play soccer again after this season, but you will undoubtably find yourself in new experiences confronted with familiar fears. I understand the temptation to hide behind excuses, to avoid discomfort; these are my ghosts.
No one is perfect. Each of us possess unique strengths and inopportune insecurities that inform our choices. My greatest regrets rest in moments of paralysis when I allowed my path to be shaped by the actions of those around me, bending to my doubts. Even my most colorful, public errors of assertion are rights of passage; proof that I have not forfeited my right to grow and learn in the face of uncertainty. It is a far greater loss to fail at trying; a hollow victory to succeed without effort.
Win or lose, you have to play the game.
Love, Mom
to my daughter
September 4, 2014 § 2 Comments
Last night over homework we pushed and pulled against one another’s expectations with false assumptions that undermined good intentions. I clung tightly to a desire to be purposeful and present in your learning while you built walls of righteous independence with admirable expressions of stubborn determination to hide hurt feelings.
Like an argument never spoken, we were responding to private fears and insecurities more than one another’s beliefs. I almost dismissed disrespectful undertones as a premature posturing of pre-teen arguments to come. Then, with a deep breath, I turned to leave and caught the sigh in your shoulders; recognizing a tenderness and vulnerability that mirrored my own.
It was an opportunity I might have missed had I blinked or looked in the wrong direction. Instead, by chance, I found the path to a conversation I was unwittingly silencing. First, though, I had to hear a few hard truths.
My messages of support were clouded in subliminal statements of judgement. Somewhere along the way you came to hear a criticism of can’t.
At this I wanted to bristle, I could feel the dander of prickly injustice. My head spun against the false contradiction to my genuine intentions, but my speech only cluttered yours. So I listened.
Every struggle shared with your brother, each statement of can and must; assertions of ability and questions of effort, however irrelevant to your personality or needs, had been carefully itemized and internalized as measurements for my expectations. Within these messages was the beginning of a new awareness of how my words translate your assumptions.
Today is cluttered with commitments, but I needed to carve out a moment to preserve yesterday least I forget this lesson between us: I had to first hear how I sounded to your ears before you were willing to listen. I had to accept responsibility for unintentional harm before you would invite my help.
I’m still listening.
Love, Mom
to my daughter
September 2, 2014 § 4 Comments
Today I watched one minute fold into the next, counting down the time between waiting for and recognizing the sound of your hand on the doorknob. I was impatient as I spent the seconds clumsily busying myself with empty tasks to keep still.
Between the false distractions I wondered if you look for me the way I look for you in familiar fragments of our days. I praised my patience even as I chastised my weakness, abandoning my perch to bridge the space between us. With each step I wondered if my love is too much, if the space you fill is too large for your needs.
As I rounded the corner of our street, pledging silently to go no further, I spied your easy gait as you stretched your arm high into the air, waving dramatically. On a whim I elongated my arms into wings and marveled as you mirrored my lines. When finally you were close enough to see the twinkle in your smile you slipped into a run and I lowered my arms as you leapt, holding you tightly against the memory of so many similar exchanges.
Thank you, sweet girl, for quietly answering questions I was struggling to form; for filling the space that is yours alone.
Love, Mom
to my daughter
August 26, 2014 § 2 Comments
Yesterday was your first day of fifth grade. Unlike so many years when you lingered among peers and their parents exchanging hugs and smiling for photographs, this year you slipped quietly inside the building to collect a new responsibility. I wish I could have seen you slip into the bright orange belt that accompanies the happy task of becoming a patrol guard, I imagine it was punctuated with the same dimples that rewarded news of the privilege. Instead I left you to your task, honoring your need to take direction and lend assistance, despite a secret wish to spy from the perimeter of your experience.
On the walk home I noted the length of my single shadow across the sidewalk and registered the irony that the little girl who used to give me cause for chase along this path could now walk so confidently under the weight of authority. The little toe that would teeter just across the line of good behavior now informing others by example. It was a reminder of the beautiful complexities of your possibilities.
Last night, after unloading your day’s stories and trading your patrol belt for soccer cleats, you blazed a new trail. It has been years since you attempted soccer, your last endeavor was marked by flushed cheeks and sleepy limbs in the company of Kindergarten classmates. This time you raced towards a damp field between a sprinkling of raindrops accompanied by a close friend. The only two girls you moved confidently into the fray of boys, asserting yourself into their comradery. This time I stayed to watch.
There was one moment among all the others that I loved best. Towards the beginning, just after introductions and silliness, the coach demanded laps. While the other children, familiar with the routine moved forward, you looked first to the coach then back to your teammates. Registering the expectation and error you compensated by stretching your legs to catch up; chin turned toward the sky you began to steadily pass others until you settled into the middle of the pack and held your pace.
There were other moments, too. The look on your face when you realized you had forgotten your water bottle; the shaky length of your form as you fought tired arms to execute a determined push-up; your arm tossed casually around your friend’s shoulder in a stolen moment or the way you casually proclaimed a willingness to wear a number I knew to be your favorite. Colorful demonstrations of your personality that complimented exercises in character.
I wonder if I tell you enough that I envy your strengths. Not the tough exterior of false bravado, but the tenderness of your most genuine endeavors. Those exhausting moments of uncertainty when it is so much easier to look away, step aside, or hide behind excuses. I love the way your toes still stretch across the lines we don’t always acknowledge. I used to worry I might not be woman enough to model such character and so it is immensely humbling to watch you lead, ever modeling for me the woman I hope you grow to be.
Love, Mom
to my daughter
July 31, 2014 § Leave a comment
Today I am marveling at the mystery of time; days that stretch endlessly, then disappear, lost to fleeting years. Like grains of sand that drift between water and wind, it seems impossible to preserve the very minutes that accumulate into years.
Tomorrow is your tenth birthday. Despite the simple math and surety of the date, this fact of numbers feels implausible to my every sensibility. Your own uncomplicated and humble requests for the day seem to invite denial and so I am bewildered by the fiction of reality.
There are no grand expectations or overly choreographed celebrations to differentiate the days, only family and a single friend to mark the milestone. Simple traditions and home.
Everything and nothing tied in heartstrings and candlelit wishes.
With only hours separating the years, I am counting memories in place of minutes. Tallying the impossible to preserve a moment.
Love, Mom
tooth ache
July 17, 2014 § 9 Comments
Last night, as I tiptoed into my daughter’s room to quiet the last lingering light peeking from her closet doors, I stumbled into her fears littered like the remnants of play across a restless sleep. On the eve of a dreaded dentist appointment she was bundled beneath her quilt staving off the morning by stacking her worries against the dawn.
Cutting the light and toppling her defenses we lay side by side navigating the impossible unknown of questions without answers; Whatifs and Whynots chasing long yawns and silent tears. Rather than gift false promises in trade for sleep I cradled the discomfort of fear and let my daughter embrace uncomfortable uncertainties until she had exhausted herself naming each worry.
Stealing herself from anxious hours of anticipation, she sleeps soundly stretched against the sunrise this morning while I let her linger, a little longer, in dreams uninterrupted.
to my daughter
July 9, 2014 § 2 Comments
Lessons occur in the most unexceptional moments. This afternoon your dentist paused over a tooth, exercising a moment’s uncertainty and demonstrating caution. Thoroughly and unceremoniously he gathered information and shared options in words that drifted over your head, but left a weight on your shoulders.
Standing just behind the dentist you looked away while turning toward our conversation. Appealing to your curious nature I invited you to explore your x-ray and asked the dentist to explain the image. You listened without interruption, but held your questions for the privacy of the hallway as we made our way home.
Beneath the darkest corners of your worries was a light filling in the shape of your fear. Questions create space for comfort, they lend reassurance; clearing the way for comprehension and greater care.
Sometimes fear and ignorance intimidate us into quiet acceptance or stubborn avoidance; we hurry through empty motions and suffocate our voice. Ask questions, gather information, and welcome choices. Never allow what you do not understand to inform your actions or your fear to silence an opportunity to learn.
Love, Mom
to my daughter
June 11, 2014 § 16 Comments
I’m sorry. When you walked out of school eager to leave I thought you were anxious for summer to begin. I didn’t realize you were hiding disappointment beneath polite resistance as I quickly captured photographs with friends and teachers. We came home to the company of friends and later left to meet with more friends. You bounced between cheerful distractions quietly and I misread your stillness for contentment. It wasn’t until we were headed home from dinner beneath the cover of dark skies and rain that you casually listed the day’s disappointments.
I wish there were do-overs for mommies. Instead of stealing pictures to mark the moment I might have given you space to speak out so that I might pull a teacher aside to ask questions about the transgressions. Maybe then I would have different words.
Some days disappointment settles on our perspective like a wet blanket blocking all the light and stealing our warmth. We feel a harm in the most tender places of our own insecurities and the injustice of some disappointments undermines our faith in assumptions of goodness. I can tell you life isn’t fair and that mommies are powerless to right some wrongs, but those words are hollow to my own ears.
Instead I gave you imperfect words of honesty. I mirrored your disappointment and didn’t contrive to create excuses. Then I gathered my thoughts and named my confusion and your hurt owning the moment in a letter to an educator asking not for apologies but insight.
In one last impulse I collected you into a hug and explained I couldn’t take back the harm or right a wrong, but I could speak honestly of your worth and not hide behind acceptance. Grace does not demand silence or beg invisibility, it requires strength of self.
I hope one day when you look back at the pictures that mark this moment you remember standing tall in your disappointment. The self-worth that pulled your shoulders back and bent your lips into a smile despite the weight on your heart are evidence of grace.
Love, Mom
scribblechic 