Tuesday, November 19, 2013

Lean In

I spent the whole day today with the littlest Quinn.  My forever baby because she will be my last.  The thing about baby number two for me is that she taught me how to lean in.  She was, and is, my Heartbreak Hill.  She came and I fully surrendered to the uphill battle of motherhood.  She stripped away the last of the should be's and will be's and can do's I had clung to in defining myself and left me with right now and just because and gone too fast.  Mamahood.  It's hard and slow but yet I can't explain why the time slips by like sand in my hands.  At times it moves more like honey on glass,  its progression is slow until the sweetness cascades over fingers that were too tight upon the glass to begin with.













My first baby came and she is all kinds of passion, rising up and crashing low and eyes that are always measuring, always calculating.  But I see myself so much in her that at times I feel I am reasoning with a younger version of myself.  The familiarity is soft and kind and envelopes our relationship like a well-worn blanket.  I meet and measure her needs because they have always been anticipated, in rhythm with my own steps.  And then came you my tiny, beautiful Heartbreak Hill.  The grade of your infancy was an easy slope from the beginning, almost masking the hard work necessary to plow forward with two instead of one.  I often look up and see you ahead of us, your pace steady and constant with humor in your eyes and light in your step.  You are at once a miracle of love and patience and energy.


You made me lean in.  You, possessor of your father's expressions, you are the complimentary tide that has completed the ebb and flow of our family.  You are not the mirror image of me, but an honest reflection of what I needed most.  You see baby, as human beings we are always, always, more alike than we are different.  Our waves crest but our greatest loves know when to pull us back.  They are our completion.


Thursday, November 7, 2013

Progress

The first progress report came today.  When I was younger, progress reports and report cards were always good days.  Days where I knew, just knew, that the neat rows of good grades would show my parents just how very much I was worth loving.  They loved me regardless, of course.  Their love was and is still not, offered with contingencies.  But I never had any trouble building my own,  So this first one came, tucked in an unassuming envelope in the already tattered pre-school folder and it just felt so. loaded.  Heavy with expectations and beginnings and way back whens and memories.  All of it so unexpected and maybe not so unexpected.  It was slightly paralyzing to open, as if the misstep of preschool feet could bring the whole castle crashing down.

Such a heavy burden carried by the little smattering of pre-school can-do's, almost can-do's and somedays.  So many expectations, regrets, pride, pressure and illusions wrapped up in a slip of paper carried by an angel in a pink backpack.  Her future and my past swirling together like two of her water colors, drifting together until the two hues collide and inevitably become one.

I don't need a report on progress.  I don't need a paper to tell me my baby still needs to feel the weight of her mother next to her before she falls asleep.  That she is cautious and reserved in who she chooses to unleash her lovely, lovely light upon.  That once she does choose to love and trust that it comes in willful, passionate torrents of ideas and songs and games.  That she is just as fierce in her convictions as her mama but her emotions still run free like a cresting river settling over those she loves while her mother has learned how to temper her tides.  That she is at times hiding shyness and softness behind stern eyes and quivering lips.



She will learn to read, she will learn to write.  She will inevitably begin to quiet, to sit, to be still, to observe, listen.  Despite every desperate step to prevent it, she will at some point believe that approval is necessary and comes tied to appearances, grades and scores.  She will test her self worth as a woman time and time again against such measures, such endless, endless measures.

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that 'to be yourself in a world that is trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment'.  She will try so hard at times to be something other than what she was created to be.  Progress is ultimately finding your way back to your most honest self.



My little girl's preschool progress report is not a measure of who she is and who she will be.  Above all, she is loved.  And the greatest test of her self worth will be her ability to accept and give love.  Without reservation, or judgement.  Nobody is going to deliver that to her in a manila envelope.