Dear Dylan, Ruby, and Hope,
When I started this experiment ten years ago, I wish I could tell you I had some sort of grand foresight about what all of this would become. I did not. Dylan and Ruby, you were so little. Hope you did not even exist yet! Dad traveled all the time for work. We were living in a new town. I missed my friends, my sisters and Grandma. I missed me.
I know that sounds odd and yet that’s how I felt. That I had steadily been this one person for 30 years and almost overnight it had all flipped. Suddenly I was a mother and just a few short months later my own mom was gone. A year went by and I was pregnant again. Life just kept going which is exactly how it should be. Life just keeps going whether you are ready for it or not.
But I felt so lost.
It wasn’t specifically that I didn’t know where I was heading. Honestly, none of us ever do. And spending too much time hand wringing over that isn’t really worth it. It was more like everything felt so upside down for so long that all of the fundamentals, the people and tasks and routines that had made up me for three decades had so seismically shifted in such a short period of time, that I couldn’t figure out where I was. I was lost because I couldn’t make sense of where I’d been. Your early 30s, early parenthood, early marriage, losing parents, moving, any one of those things can be disorienting. Now, do them all at once. So that’s where I was, roughly around March of 2012.
Now you should know that I’m not historically someone who sticks with anything for a particularly long time. That isn’t an unfair criticism of myself, it is just the truth. I quit two different kinds of saxophones, three summer camps, and four jobs. That isn’t to say I don’t stick around for the really important stuff like my family or relationships. But most definitely I can say with confidence that I am exceptionally good at quitting a lot of other stuff. That when it gets hard, or I am close to actually getting good at anything, I cut and run. I excel at this feature.
This blog, which I started quite literally as something else exactly ten years ago, should have been the perfect example of that. My first blog post was not actually a blog post but a thing I was supposed to write for a friend’s baby shower. But it was 2012 and blogging was kind of hitting its stride as a way of women communicating with other women. I sat down and started writing because I needed something or someone to tell me that they understood what I was going through. I needed someone to help me feel less alone while I got my bearings in motherhood and adulthood.
I guess that’s what this blog was always about. Or at least that’s what it became anyhow. This blog was a map. I was so deeply in it in these early years that I couldn’t even remotely see my way back to me. So I wrote. I thought that if I I just kept writing, I could find these little markers along the way. I wrote when it was good or bad or hard. I wrote when I got lots of attention for my writing. I stayed and wrote when all of the attention and clicks left, when like only 10 people would read what I wrote. I stuck around when there was no one to publish anything. I stayed when all of the original bloggers were gone. I stayed and wrote when Daddy changed jobs, when we moved, when we almost moved, when Hope was born, when Bat Bat died, when we sold Grandma and Pa’s house, through Covid, and losing Pa. I stayed and wrote through this strange early middle chapter from when I was a young mom of two kids to the not so young mom of not so little three kids. Life is different now. I’m different now.
So what did all of this become? I guess it became something else along the way. At times, it was a surprising place for other mothers or motherless mothers to gather. Sometimes, it was a space for me to teach you things you were too little to understand, but I knew you’d need someday, like the importance of self-care, boundaries, of being passionate about something, about the power of owning your mistakes, or the importance of just generally making mistakes. Of learning to thrive not just survive because of and not in spite of your own humanity. I hope you’ll read this and remember to laugh at yourself sometimes, or a lot of the time, or learn how grief is not linear. It lingers but that does not mean joy is not possible too. Oddly, grief and joy sort of coexist in the exact same space because all of it comes from the same place where you love deeply. I hope you’ll see that I wasn’t just Mom. I hope you’ll see all of me. I”m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. I know it’s a thing I’ve deeply missed for the entirety of my parenting experience: the chance to talk with my own mother, peer to peer, about what all of this is like. I hope someday you’ll open up this map, you’ll read these imperfect words, and travel back through all of me. Or at least who I was then.
But the point of this is not to go back. We never can, and I don’t want you to get stuck there. Take these memories and lessons and odd little snapshots of our lives together over the past few years and use it for only what it is, something to light the way forward. To think about how you want to go on. Life keeps moving whether we want it to or not. We might not know what comes next but we will know where we’ve been. It’s enough to orient us now, isn’t it.
So it feels like ten is the right time to move forward from this place. In all of the ways I imagined exiting this blog gracefully, never did I imagine I’d be here, wherever here is. Never have I felt more certain and uncertain at once. I’m emboldened by this skin-deep awareness of what matters and what doesn’t. These past few years have somehow led me both simultaneously back to the deepest knowing of myself that I have ever felt, and also the most keen sense of having no clue what happens next to anyone or anything. I’m the one that showed up when it was good and when it was hard and when it was actually okay. When I didn’t know where I was, I learned to lean on my family and friends who remind me that where I am is defined less by where I’m heading and entirely by where I’ve already been and who the hell has been walking beside me this whole time.
Pa always said that if you have brains and a mouth, you’ll never get lost. It was his curt and not so gentle reminder that if you can stop and take stock of where you are and of where you’ve been, then most assuredly you will find your way back home. Believe it or not, after ten years, that’s exactly where this blog led me. I’ll be forever grateful to you for helping me get there.
Love, Mom
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