generosity

I Have No Gift to Bring

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

As I was printing out boarding passes this morning (the beautiful gift from my sister that means I can spend the holiday with family), I was listening to some holiday music.  The Little Drummer Boy carol caught my attention, and I wondered how many times over the years that same carol has caught my attention.

I have no gift to bring; to lay before a king…

This sometimes feels like the story of my life.  And I would welcome you to the story of my life, but you probably don’t have a ton of experience that would help you relate, and I definitely do not want you to gain a ton of experience that would help you relate.

There have always been reasons—totally valid and important reasons—for my inability to afford the gifts that most in North American society consider requisite around the holidays.  And while gifting and giving look really different in different households, there is usually a component of the holiday season that involves offering gifts.

Obviously, the first reason for not giving gifts is childhood.  Kids don’t have money, and when they do have money they usually spend it on stupid shit, like cotton candy or collector cards or fluffy pens.  So, as a child, giving was done on my behalf by my parents.  And while my parents were not “well off” and very far from wealthy, they saved and budgeted in ways that allowed at least a bit of gifting.

After you transition from childhood to adolescence or adulthood, other people stop adding your name to their gifts for others.  And while some of us are blessed with good jobs and parent-provided college tuition, leaving us cash for gifting in this season of life, I was not.  I had the opposite, in a way.  It wasn’t that my parents were not supportive.  They were supportive.  But I was not just transitioning from childhood to adolescence or adulthood.  I was on a downward spiral to total meltdown at the rock bottom.  I was tortured by challenges that most need not face, and this transition meant something intense and painful and confusing and hard.  I didn’t have resources to offer gifts to others.

I can say that I have always been a generous giver.  The lack of resources didn’t always mean that I was balled up into a severe self-interest.  I gave my heart.  I gave my body.  I gave my ideas.  I gave my support and care.  I gave in myriad ways, but not in ways that our society usually recognizes.  Love isn’t considered a good gift, for some reason.  Stuff you spent money on is somehow what defines giving in my society.  Which is sad, because I truly believe that love is so much more valuable than even the most expensive and extravagant stuff.

The rock bottom that I spiraled toward left me in a difficult situation.  A single parent, an addict, and a mentally ill but undiagnosed and untreated person, I was left with few resources to offer others.  I poured my energy and my love into my daughter, into my education, and into my “dead end” jobs that left me still dependent on others to get by and pay for the basic necessities of life.  I still gave my heart and my body and my ideas and my support and care.  But I still felt insufficient due to my lack of having and my lack of giving in this monetary sense that Americans hold so dear.

I pulled my way out of the pit of despair time and again.  Many times because a hand was outstretched to meet mine, and give me aid.  Many times because I forced out the energy needed to climb out of desperation or out of hope—they both push you toward a goal, even though they are such different feelings.  There were moments when there was finally “enough”, and I gave thoughtful gifts to my family members and friends.  There were moments when I was unrolling the toilet tissue from a public toilet onto an empty cardboard roll and putting as much as I was able into my purse—stealing the most basic of items to survive.

Today I find myself in a position of need once more.  And this threatens to be a position that I never get out of—a situation that cannot change.  Disability and all sorts of vulnerability leave me without the resources that I need to survive.  I’m not yet stealing toilet paper, but I am on the brink—the temptation to take what I need when others refuse to give it is strong on some days.  So is the urge to drink too much or start smoking again.  It is desperation that pushes me forward these days.  And I am not in a position to give.  I’m in yet another season of need.

And this gets us back to the start of this post—the little drummer boy.

He has no gift to bring.  He has nothing of worth.  He has no resources.  But he places himself at the altar, packs his love and his talent and puts them under the Christmas tree—or maybe not at the tree, because Christians who would consider the nativity and a lighted tree in tandem didn’t exist during the nativity.  Honestly, nobody considered the nativity on the “actual” nativity, and lighting trees was a pagan ritual that was adapted by people who began to believe in a nativity but missed partying on the solstice.  Instead of giving up the party, they created their own reason for the party.

Pardon the tangent.  But people really should research what they celebrate and why.  It might be both scandalous and helpful, because it would help some see that people of different creeds are not really all that different, when it comes down to ritual and celebration and basic systems of belief.

So, the little drummer boy throws down with his little drummer talents.  He smacks those bongos like nobody’s business.  And all who hear him are pleased with his performance and it is deemed worthy.

I have lost a lot of my “talents” over the years.  My voice doesn’t work, so I don’t sing with the beauty I once did.  I’ve spent many years away from a piano, so that skill has slipped away from me.  I can’t run or dance or throw myself into a role on a stage.  I’m a good writer, and a good artist—maybe even exceptional in those fields—but with my physical and mental limitations due to illness, it can be very hard to complete pages and fill canvas.  I can’t smack bongos like nobody’s business.  I can’t even do the things that I am good at doing anymore.

I used to hear the carol about the little drummer and feel like I could relate.  I had no resources from a financial standpoint, but I could still offer my talents, like that little boy who somehow ended up in a barn with his drum.  I still found value in what I had to offer.

It gets more and more difficult to feel valuable.  Ableism hits me hard at times, and I begin to see that challenges are stacked one atop the other, filling up all the space where the value I once placed upon my life and my self once rested.  There isn’t as much room for feeling like I have something to offer.  Even though I still have much to offer.

Love and care and support and kindness and equity and a voice and a vote and intention—all of these are things that I have to offer.  I don’t need to have anything to place before the king.

I also don’t need to perform for the king.

The mistake that the little drummer boy makes is believing that he needs to offer a performance if he can’t offer stuff.  He doesn’t consider that just being present is, in itself, a gift.  He doesn’t consider that his existence alone has value.  He thinks he needs to bring something monetary, and when he can’t manage that, he thinks he needs to bring some offering of talent.  Why, I wonder, doesn’t he believe that he can just go over to the barn and hug the parents and hold the baby and offer his love as a gift?

Is it because we don’t think that love is a gift?

Love is a gift.  Presence is a gift.  Existence is a gift.

I don’t have extravagant gifts for my family and friends.  I didn’t send out holiday cards, and I don’t have any packages wrapped and placed under the tree.  But I am beginning to realize that I don’t need either the presents or the talents to have a valuable contribution to the holiday.  I AM the valuable contribution.  I AM a gift.

I’m not trying to say, “Look at me!  I am awesome and you should want my presence as your gift!”  I am attempting to convey that the value in this scenario is value inherent in personhood.  Giving things is great.  Sharing talents is great.  But existing—being present—is the greatest.

Being present is the greatest gift that any of us can offer.

Yes, I want presents.  Yes, I want donations to my fundraiser.  Yes, I want contributions to my start-up that help me open a business.  Yes, I want to hear beautiful songs and embrace the talents of others.  But more than these, I simply want presence.  I want to be there for others and have others be there with and for me.  I want to share existence, and honor the gift of being.

I know that is a bit ethereal a concept, and it can be difficult to comprehend my meaning.  In simplest terms, I want to be and let be.  I want to live and let live.

And that, for me, means embracing that I am a gift to those around me.  My open and accepting and loving and helpful and generous self is the only gift I need be concerned with giving.

Having money and resources is wonderful.  I would love to have more money and more resources.  But I don’t need more money and more resources to offer an amazing gift.

I am gift enough.

Pa-rum-pum-pum-pum.

 

 

More Than I Can Handle

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

 

There is this common statement among those who choose a Christian religious base for their belief system.  I hear it often.  I hate it more every time it is said.

“God won’t give you more than you can handle.”

I call bullshit.

I am dealing with more than I can handle.  I’ve been dealing with more than I can handle since childhood. And every day I wait for the moment when pretending at control is overcome by the chaos of being overwhelmed.

So, here is the thing I need to say:  either the Divine absolutely gives out more than one can handle, or the Divine isn’t a part of the equation at all.

Please do not misunderstand and read that as “God doesn’t exist”, because I won’t challenge anyone on that point.  I believe in divine intervention and live a spiritual, but not religious, life.  The existence of some Divine source is a part of my belief system.  And it does not need to be yours.  If you are not religious, I suppose you could ignore this post altogether.  (But I hope you don’t.)

The statement that the Divine will not let you be overwhelmed, however, is bullshit.  I’m overwhelmed right now.  I was overwhelmed two days ago.  I was overwhelmed last week.  I am consistently given more than I can handle.  And if the Divine exists, and I am overwhelmed, then god does give you more than you can handle.  If the Divine does not exist, then the statement is just bullshit from the very first word.

I’ll try to elaborate without getting into a weird rant or too many details.  When I was a child, I was sexually assaulted repeatedly.  I couldn’t cope with that.  It was too much.  And while my actions were often a cry for help, they went unheard or were misunderstood, so I was marinating in more than I could handle.  I was feeling so much pain and shame and confusion that my brain literally stopped knowing about the sexual molestation.  I had a complete dissociation from the events.  My brain shut those events and any and all memories of those events down.  They were tucked away in a place I didn’t have full access to, and they didn’t become known to me in a conscious way until my first year of college.  And when I became aware of those events once more, it was more than I could handle again.  I became depressed, suicidal, and easily enraged.  I was a mess.  I dropped out of college, moved away, dropped out of another college, harbored a runaway, became a drug addict, and got married.  All of these events were too much to handle.

My husband was violently physically and psychologically abusive.  I got pregnant, got divorced, had my baby, went on a blind date, and started a relationship with a man who influenced my return to drug use and eventually became physically abusive, as my ex-husband had been.

Too much.

And then, it would seem, I “got it together”.  I worked hard, cared for my daughter, went back to college, got a master’s degree or two, and ended up working in Chicago.  While these years seemed like the most excellent years of my life to the onlooking outsider, inside of me there was just as much struggle as there had been in years past.  I smoked a lot.  I ran often.  I did everything asked of me, until I could not do it anymore.  What most don’t know about those years is that my kitchen was a mass of dirty dishes half of the time, I was drinking too much, I was fired as a teacher’s assistant because I didn’t have enough time to read and grade papers. I failed a few classes. My daughter resented me for leaving her with others and not hearing her needs often or well.  I was struggling to keep it together, and looked fabulous on the outside, while the inside was being ripped and torn into ugly, bloodied chunks of flesh.

I had become a master of pretending at a very early age.  It took a lot for me to fall apart in front of people.

But behind closed doors, nightmares and weeping and screaming and praying and begging for the pain to end kept on happening.  They didn’t stop as I grew up and developed and became a “responsible adult”.  They just got pushed under layers and layers of façade.

Around 2010 was when things stop staying hidden.  I couldn’t control it anymore.  Tears would come at the most inopportune time.  The lack of sleep from nightmares and insomnia was causing my body to suffer.  I started experiencing chronic illness, and I started to look and sound like a person without hope—crazed with the desperate state of my psyche and the onset of more and more symptoms of illness.  I was breaking down in front of people, instead of doing it behind closed doors.  And people ran away rather than be sucked into my despair.

It’s hard for people who are not given more than they can handle to watch you crumble under the too much.  They don’t understand it.  And it is frightening.  But what I think is the hardest thing for those people to come to terms with is that the platitude they have believed is not true.  Some of us are given way more than we can handle.

Because some of us are given more than we can handle, we need help.  Help, need, care, and the like are not things that most want to offer, so they cling to the lie and insist that god won’t give me more than I can handle.  But I know that is just an excuse not to get involved in the pain of others.

Empathy hurts.

Walking into the center of another person’s trauma is painful.  Feeling what they feel is terrible, because it is completely and utterly too much.  And nobody wants to feel what I feel.

Nobody wants constant physical and emotional suffering.  Nobody wants to face fears and be struck down and struggle through depression and suicidal thinking and destroy relationships through mistrust and sob with such intensity that you need to sleep for three hours to recover the ability to stand.  And, on one hand, I don’t blame you for not wanting to experience what I experience.  On the other hand, leaving me to suffer alone and offering me platitudes that I know are lies makes me despise you for not standing in solidarity.

Because if you cannot handle what is coming at you every day, and if you are overwhelmed, you need others to help carry the weight.  I have approximately six people who help carry the weight in a consistent and generous and loving way.  One of them I pay, because she is my therapist.

I understand more than anyone how heavy and exhausting and painful carrying the load of my life is, but I don’t have the option to step out from under that weight.  I have to cope, shift, manage, and try not to be crushed forever by that weight.

There is another saying—less religious and more true—that I sometimes use.  “Many hands make light work.”

A heavy burden becomes light when there are twelve people lifting, and not just one. I would love for us to acknowledge our avoidance of the burdens in the lives of those around us.  I would love for us to accept that the only way to make things better is to add our hands and help carry the burdens of others.  I would love for us to admit that there is a lot that is overwhelming, and that it won’t go away because we pretend that god makes life easy enough for us (or hard enough for us, depending on your perspective) in relation to our ability to be weighed down.

You don’t keep placing items in a grocery bag until it breaks.  You open and fill a second bag.  You disperse the weight, balancing things out and making certain that there isn’t too much pressure in one spot.

(Yes, I just unintentionally made a grocery bag analogy to suffering.  But I can’t really think of a better analogy right now, so it stands.)

So, we are given more than we can handle.  Which is why we need others supporting us.  All of us need others to carry a bit of the weight at times.  That looks different at different times and in different spaces.  But none of us is immune to being overwhelmed.

My life has had too much to handle for a really long time.  I get better at handling it through coping strategies.  But I still haven’t worked through all the burdens or had the weight lifted.  I still make valiant attempts at handling it all.  I still pretend I am well while I am carrying immense pain just under the surface.  But I fail all the time.  I hurt all of the time.  I feel too much.  I need too much.  I falter too much.

And my only hope is that others might find their way toward helping, and that hands would be added, and that my burden may become light.  Help me Obi Wan Community, you are my only hope!

I hope that empathy might become something that we embrace, despite the hurts, because it also brings shared joys.  I hope that generosity rules the day.  I hope that we start to dissect the lies that the platitudes reinforce, and come to understand that we need one another to survive.  I hope that we find the strength to share, to respect, to dignify, and to accept.  I hope we leave behind individualism, judgment, marginalizing, and rejecting.

I don’t know that this is an eloquent post.  It is a needed expression.  Mostly, I need to say it, because it is boring a hole through my mind.  But I also hope that it is heard and accepted.  Because I have always known that the Divine isn’t giving me any number of things to handle or not handle.  The Divine gives me an assist when all the things are too much.  The Divine doesn’t give anyone burdens for the fun of watching us struggle.  And the Divine doesn’t give burdens to prepare us for assisting others in their burdens.  The Divine is the opposite of burden.  The Divine is love.  And whatever is burdensome is what we need to fight against, not for.

When racism tears apart a community, we fight against that.  When illness strikes a body, we fight against that.  When fear creates divisions, we fight against that.  When poverty leaves people in the streets, we fight against that.  When little children are violated, we fight against that.  When women are not given a voice, we fight against that.  When gun violence steals lives every day, we fight against that.

And we fight together, in solidarity, and as one entity.  Because there is more in each of those situations than we can handle, and ridding our society of these evils requires our many hands, working together, to unburden the most vulnerable.

I happen to be one of the most vulnerable, because life tossed all sorts of challenges at me, and so my plea for justice—the unburdening of the most vulnerable—ends up being a plea for my welfare also.  I beg for hands to help on a regular basis through my fundraising site.  But I want, today, to express that there are so many more burdens than mine.  And there are so many who do not have hands helping at all, where I have a few.  So, I’m not just advocating for myself.  I’m advocating for all the poor, disabled, homeless, captive, imprisoned, endangered, devastated, depressed, and unsupported victims of all the ills within our society.

Lend them a hand.  Live in solidarity.  Challenge your assumptions and preconceptions.  Dig deep into your heart and your mind, and figure out why you let burdens continue without intervention.  Smash those excuses that keep you from moving toward empathy and solidarity and understanding and care.  Do things that change lives.  Do things that save lives.

And stop saying that god doesn’t give us more than we can handle.  Stop spreading that lie.  Start spreading love.

 

Food Chain

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

I’ve watched this progression happening inside my home over the past month or so.  The container garden in my sun porch at some point brought little flying bugs into the environment.  Whether they came from the soil or from the great outdoors is unclear, but they arrived, nonetheless.  And I have tried several remedies that promise to remove the microcosmic infestation in the front window, to no avail.

But the progressive part is that as the population of the tiny insects increased, so did the incidence of spotting arachnids.  Spiders.  I hate them.  I have an irrational fear of the spiders.  I’m the Ron Weasley of the real world—freezing, crying, losing the ability to speak, and basically freaking out when a spider comes calling.

For the most part, the arachnids have been tiny, in correlation to the tiny bugs, I suppose.  So, I am coping with relative sanity.

Next have come the “creepy bugs”.  Someone once told me not to kill them, because they consume spiders, so they are apparently a friend to the arachnophobe.  But they are no friend to me, because I consider them creepy.  They look downright scary.  They are some sort of centipede, I suppose, but they have legs jutting out the bottom en masse, and they have a symmetrical wealth of leg-like protrusions on the top of their bodies.  I’m getting a shiver up my spine just imagining them for long enough to describe them.

I remember a time with my friends Nic and Adam had a snake in their second floor apartment.  We lived in the same apartment complex, and when the snake showed up in their environment, I immediately jumped into anti-snake mode.  That meant a concerted effort to trap and kill any and all mice or rats that could be present in or around my apartment.  I’m not sure how you snake-proof a home, but the concern I addressed was the food supply for snakes, not the snakes themselves.

I never had a snake in my apartment.  I did catch some mice.  And the mice were present because some lady in another building on the complex had made it her personal mission to capture and send to shelters the cats that lived around the apartments.  Had she left them be, the cats would be eating the mice, and the snakes wouldn’t move in because they would have no food supply and a potential predator in the cats.

So, as I watch this little cycle of life in my window sill, I think about where I sit on the food chain.  And by this I do not mean that I am concerned with who or what might consider me meat.  By this I mean, what threats and resources are affecting my life, and why.

I’m not high on the list as far as human hierarchy goes.  I’m a disabled, impoverished, woman.  So that is at least three strikes against me.  I’m also white and educated, so I am offered some privilege.  I suppose if we were to consider the hierarchy of my society (and several others) a food chain, I might be the spider. (Ironic, since I am petrified of them.)

I might be the one who had a few being “below” and a few “above”.  I am not in the worst position, but I am not in the best.  I assist others, but I also need assistance.  I live in this middle space, clinging to a rung halfway up the ladder.  And it gives me, I believe, an interesting perspective.  I can relate to those with more and those with less.  I can relate with the “haves” and I can relate with the “have nots”.  But there are days that I cannot relate with either—or I don’t want to.

There are days when I want to leave this underserved, loud, dirty, potentially dangerous area.  I get tired of the noise—the sirens, the yelling, the gunfire.  I get tired of the long commute to anything and everything.  I get tired of not fitting in or looking right or getting stopped by the cops because of my white skin.  I get tired of being followed by dudes yelling “damn” at my ass.  I get tired of trying to explain away how or why I live here without outing myself as poor.  And I get tired of all the other people who seize stereotypes and make assumptions about this place I am tired of being in, because despite its faults, this is my home, and there is much beauty and strength in this place.

There are days when I want to be a person with greater means.  There are times that I feel jealous of the friends with cars and homes and second homes.  There are times I want the “American Dream”.

There are more days, however, when I want to scream at the people who have all of this, and to tell them what selfish, self-serving, privileged bullshit they participate in, without even knowing.  I get tired of people who are wealthy pretending they are poor.  I get tired of people whining about the inconveniences of their gigantic remodel.  I get tired of people saying they are broke and then going out to dinner every night.  I get tired of being associated with this type of upper-middle class person just because I am white and educated.  I get tired of people assuming that I belong with the “them” while I feel like an “us”.

Frankly, it is exhausting to be in this middle space, between two worlds, because I feel like I must constantly critique and defend one to the other.  I want everyone in my neighborhood to know that there are some generous and kind, rich, white people.  I want everyone who would not desire to set foot in my neighborhood to know that it is filled with intelligent, hard-working, kind people.  I need to constantly justify all the things to all the people.

And then there is the added stress of my own situation needing to be constantly justified.  I need money.  I need help.  I need time.  I need energy.  I need surgery.  I need to make it sound acceptable to have all of these needs, or people refuse to take seriously or meet those needs.

The middle is an impossible place to live.  You can almost touch the better things, but if you reach up you risk falling back down into a worse space.  So you stay, clinging to the little that you have.  Hustling and hoping.  Wanting more but not able to live through less.  Clinging to the place where you have barely enough to survive.

If that sounds depressing, it is.

There are no questions as to why my antidepressant medication dose keeps increasing.  This rung is a depressing one.  This middle of the food chain feels like a constant threat, but also like a huge blessing.  I’m not at my worst.  But I am also not at my best.

And here we arrive at the statement “ignorance is bliss”.  Because if I didn’t know the best, or the worst, I wouldn’t feel trapped in this middle, fearful of losing my grip and too paralyzed to attempt upward mobility.  The people around me hope with an unyielding strength I have never seen before.  They keep believing in the more, in the higher rungs, and in a new and better day.  I know that the new and better day is not what it appears to be.  I know that there is just a dollar or two between rungs.  I know that there is prejudice at the top that keeps those with enough dollars to move up tumbling back down.  I know that there is abundance and that it isn’t being offered to the people on the lower rungs.  I know that if the people above would just share, the whole fucking ladder could turn on its side, leaving us with equity, and even footing, and no need to compete at the climbing.  I know that those people don’t share unless it is in their self-interest, and their dollars come with strings attached.  I know because I am in the middle.  I know because I am the spider.  I know because I have one foot in poverty and one foot in opportunity.

The proverbial food chain allows for ignorance at the bottom and ignorance at the top.  But the middle is the space filled with knowledge—frustrating, hope-stealing, anger inducing, devastating knowledge.

I know poverty and possibility.  And I am not better off for it.  I am tortured by it.

The wealth of the top is achieved upon the backs of the ones at the bottom.  We are the macrocosm of the microcosmic activity in my window sill.  We consume one and escape the other.

And I can’t stop thinking that this is wrong.  I can’t stop thinking that humanity should be behaving with a more evolved and more educated system than the insects.  I can’t stop feeling that we are very far from what we were intended to be, and that the ladder and the food chain and the striving and the inequity are all distractions from where our attention ought to be placed.  I can’t stop believing that we should be placing our attention and energy on justice—on ending the ladder.

There is this line spoken by Daenerys Targaryen, a character in J.R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire Series, that mimics the sentiment that I often put forth.  After the many powerful houses of the era are named and called spokes on a wheel, she says with great conviction, “I’m not going to stop the wheel, I’m going to break the wheel.”

In saying this, she expresses that she will not simply be the newest in the line of leaders that overtake the current system.  She is, instead, going to destroy that system.  She is going to make a new way of being possible by taking apart the system of injustice currently in place.

I’m going to break the wheel.  I’m going to break the ladder.

I’m going to create a new system, and not allow the once unjust and oppressive way of being to survive.  I’m not going to tolerate the present and hope for a better future, but I am going to smash through the present to create a new present.

What if we stopped being a glorified food chain and broke the ladder?  What if we let go of the ideas of “earned” and “deserved” things and status?  What would Daenerys do today?

WWDD: What Would Dany Do?

How do we break the wheel in our own society?  How do I stop being the spider and consuming the fly?  How do I keep the creepy bugs from chasing me?  How do we create a system that doesn’t look like the unevolved and inhumane clamoring for power and money and resources, and instead looks like cooperative and compassionate co-existence?

I’m tired of being in the middle, but I am more tired of the idea of the middle.  I’m tired of caste systems and hierarchies and patriarchy and all the other systems of oppression and power that make us predators or make us lunch, depending on the situation.

It is time to function on a higher plane.  It is time to break the wheel.  It is time to end this system and find a new one.   It is time for human beings to step outside of the food chain, and use our enlightenment for good and not for evil.

It is time to stop treating one another like meat.

 

 

Birthday

/ christyterese / Leave a comment

I  started bawling while I typed out a text to my daughter.  She turns nineteen today.  I can’t even wrap my head around that.  That tiny seven pound bundle of smiles and tears that was placed in my arms all those years ago changed everything about life and love.  And I know that lots of people will say things like, “I didn’t know what love was until I became a parent”.  I don’t really subscribe to that.  What I will say is that I had never felt love so deep and so full and so beautiful until I held that gorgeous bundle in my arms.

I think this is the worst part about human development—that we forget that moment when our parent first held us and looked into our tiny face and beamed love toward us.  All the late night feedings, and lullabies, and peek-a-boos, and looks of love and joy are left engrained in the mind of a parent, but lost for the child.  And by the time we start remembering our parents’ actions and interactions with us there is discipline and disappointment and distraction between parent and child that wasn’t there in those early days when all we could possibly show our babies was unadulterated and unconditional love.

I realize today, in ways I never have before, that my own mother looked at me that way once.

It was hard, listening to my siblings express their views of my mother and who she was to the funeral director as we sat planning for her funeral.  They knew a different woman than I did.  That was painful, and illuminating.  They received and remembered love and generosity and selflessness.  I remembered a harsh and argumentative history of always feeling not good enough and being a constant disappointment to my mother.  I loved my mother dearly.  I couldn’t figure out how to like her for most of my life, but I loved her.

But once, she looked in my face like I looked into my baby girl’s face and she felt only love and joy and possibility.  I wish I had the ability to remember that moment.  I wish I knew that look and that feeling more fully.

My mother was the first person to hold my daughter at her birth.  I was divorcing by the time I gave birth, so my husband wasn’t present for the birth. (That was probably good, because his attendance might have led to me being charged with murder, or assault at the least.) My mother took his place at my side, and neither of us could have anticipated that she would be at my side for 40 full hours of labor, but she was.  And at the end of the two day ordeal, I was too exhausted to hold my own child.  So, the pictures of my baby meeting her grandma precede the pictures of her meeting me.  I was thinking on that long ordeal yesterday, and what it took to get this beautiful nineteen year old woman into the world, and how my mom was there for every moment.  And I remember, exhausted as I was, seeing my mother look at that baby in that moment, with more love than I knew she was able to give.  With more wonder than I thought possible, and with more grace and generosity and selflessness than I knew she had within her.

I didn’t understand in the moment of preparing for my mother’s funeral that the way my mother looked at her first granddaughter was also the way she viewed me.  But she did.

When I texted my daughter this morning I told her all the things I wish that I had heard my mother say to me when I was nineteen.  And I didn’t do it on purpose.  I simply realized, after offering all the love and encouragement and pride that I could muster in a text message, that I wished my mother had been able to tell me those things when I was that age.  She didn’t, or couldn’t, or didn’t know how.  And that was why I knew a different woman than my siblings—because I couldn’t remember that love from when I was so little that the discipline and disappointment and distraction became primary ways of interacting, and when I was old enough to know my mother well, we were divided by so many differences of opinion and a similar stubborn will that we couldn’t express well the love that had been there at the beginning.

It was there at the end.

The end for me was years before her death, but the first year that she began to forget my face, when she clung to me as we said goodbye after a visit and cried and repeated over and over and over that she loved me.  She was trying to make up for lost time and opportunity, I think.  To say it enough that it would sink in—be remembered.

It is remembered, and so is the moment when they placed my daughter in her arms and I saw my mother’s face turn to pure love and the fullest joy.

My daughter is one of the best people I have ever known.  And she brings me all that love and all that joy every day.  She is intelligent, compassionate, caring, kind, generous, selfless, strong, loving, loyal, talented, and exquisitely beautiful.  She follows her dreams.  She calls out the bad and promotes the good.  She gives her last dollar to someone who asks, just because she can’t bear to see people in need or in pain.  Since her childhood she has offered her all for others, climbing up on the counter to reach foods and bring them outside to passing homeless men and women from the age of seven, at least.

And while I find her utterly fabulous, we also have differences of opinion and similar stubborn wills that make it difficult for us to see eye to eye at times.  But, unlike in my relationship with my mother, I have learned to let go of some of my stubbornness, and to let my daughter hold her own perspective and pursue what matters to her.  My mom couldn’t let go of that control—the desire to shape me into what she believed I ought to be, instead of let me be the person I was.  For my daughter’s sake, I am trying to let go of that control.  Sometimes I fail, but I apologize when I realize I have done so.  I look back to those moments of late night feedings and peek-a-boos and lullabies and I hold onto that picture of love and joy, and at the humility I felt—so undeserving of such a beautiful light in my life, of a being who offered me so much and stole nothing.  And I seek to let her be that light today, without my interventions.

It can be hard to let go, as the birthdays pass by.  It can be hard to remember that moment of love, looking into a newborn face.  But I encourage you to hold onto that moment.  Remember it when your child colors on the walls, or when they pee on the living room floor, or when they break your favorite vase playing a sport indoors, or when they bring home that boyfriend with the crazy hair and the smoking habit, or when they hate piano lessons, or when they want their nose pierced, or when they quit their job, or when they marry an asshole (I mean, some of us do), or when they tell you they hate you and you are stupid and they wish they had some other parent, or when they fail at a subject in school.  Remember the light they were and the love you beamed back at them.  Remember that life is short and goodbyes are difficult and loss is devastating.  Remember that no matter who they become or what they do or how they succeed or fail that they are that bundle, placed in your arms when all there was between the two of you was love.  Hold that love close, and speak of it often, and share it with your child and share it with the world.  Because all of us want to be remembered in the end as the one who is loving and generous and kind.

Let love be the thing that is remembered, from the beginning to the very end.