Strive on.

Dear Baby,

So your first Hanukkah and Christmas have come and gone, and in the blink of an eye you've changed from a tiny, crying infant to a smart, engaging little boy. In the last few weeks you've even started saying "mama" and "dada" and something resembling "fishes" (as in, goldfish crackers) and "I got it" (as in, the remote control).

I think it's time that we have a serious discussion about the circumstances surrounding the first few months of your life, and it's taken me a while to be able to digest it enough to talk to you in way that was, as I designed this blog, about lessons learned and not from a purely emotional place.

Seventy-eight days after you came into our lives my father, your grandfather, died. Seventy-two days later my mother, your grandmother, died. The details need not to be discussed here but to say that they were very sick with cancer for a long time.

Talk about bad timing. Well, perhaps not so bad in a way. It was helpful to have something - you - to force me to get up and move forward every day. It was not as much of a distraction, because, as a thinking person, I knew that I couldn't afford to live in denial. Time with them was limited. Instead you were an addition. A purpose. Something that kept me from crawling into a dark place, setting up a tent and deciding to live there. Trust me, there were times I considered holing up in my bedroom with a truckload of Twinkies and volumes of Sylvia Plath poems.

It is in these moments that one reflects on her own parents' experiences. My own mother's mother was buried the day before my seventh birthday. I have imagined my mom having to go to the funeral then come home and prepare for my party. It is a lesson in how parents are forced to live in the moment; we are keenly aware that you don't get personal days or reprieves from seventh birthdays. You get only one shot at them. So it's a simple decision. You pull yourself up and make pink Barbie cakes or paper machete dump truck decorations and get on with it - whether you feel like it or not.

And you get on with living.

So instead of the Twinkies and poetry idea, I read you stories, held you whenever you threw out your arms, got up with you at night when you were afraid or hungry and gave you an infinite amount of kisses. I haven't regretted a second of it, and no doubt it is exactly what your grandparents would have wanted.

But I won't downplay this. I mean, death is a big deal, and losing your parents...well, it probably ranks up there among the most jarring experiences we have in this world. How do we cope?

Not to get all philosophical on you (and know that I don't subscribe to any specific religion at this point in my life), but I hope someday that you will read about the Buddha and his attempts to make sense of the universal experiences of suffering and death. I find it comforting. As he laid on his deathbed he looked around at his grieving disciples and reminded them that the reality is all things decay and die, it is natural to feel sadness, and it's imperative they strive on in their own personal journeys.

I like that. Grieve. Accept. Strive on.

Don't let the pain of loss ever hold you back from making the most out of your life. The nature of life and death is not something we can control; therefore, we are not meant to spend our time worrying about our fate (or anyone else's, for that matter). We can only learn from it and respect it - and ultimately value the present so much more profoundly.

Know that that peace is not found in the dark hole, it is found in the light. It is found in the hugs and kisses and in the little wonderful moments with those who are alive and beside you right now.

I love you.

Mommy

Forgive us. We were stupid.

Dear Baby,

Much time has passed and between here and there we’ve discovered who you are - a happy, giggling little red-headed boy - and who we are as parents.

When I was pregnant a very wise person told me that when one has a child, the child itself is not really the gift. Instead she said, the gift of the journey is how we - the parents - are changed by it all. There is certainly truth in that statement.

Let me say, with full disclosure, that your father and I weren’t sure we wanted a baby. We certainly went into marriage with the idea that we didn’t THINK we wanted children. We wanted to live our lives having challenging careers, traveling, reading and writing books and generally doing whatever we liked to do, when we liked to do it. 

Children would prevent us from doing those things, we said. And we were absolutely correct in that assumption. 

Becoming your parents has, for the time being at least, consumed our entire lives, and quite strangely, we are not the least bit saddened by these - temporary - constraints put on us. I had always assumed we would be. Somehow I always assumed that the trade-off would be a net-loss.

Forgive us. We were stupid.

The adventurous life we gave up was lovely but pales in comparison to the joy and adventure of this first year, watching you go from a wrinkly, sleepy infant to a big, bright-eyed, sleepless boy who wants to read books and stand in his crib.

Recently I watched a show touting this young surfer who had died as the epitome of how to live; he'd sacrificed his life doing what he loved.

Those folks are wrong. You live the best life by getting up each and every day and giving, by creating something worthy of your sacrifice.

The truth is there is no greater adventure than raising a child. No big wave. No trip to Italy. No rock-n-roll concert. No great novel. No bottle of wine. No career. Nothing compares to you, my son. Nothing compares to your giant smile when you wake in the morning or the belly laughs at bedtime or that look of surprise when you’ve learned something new.

Without question you are the greatest achievement of our lives, Baby. You are indeed a gift, but more importantly you are also our teacher, showing us the capacity within ourselves to love, to be loved, to sacrifice, to laugh, to understand what family really means, to not fear change and risk because it is necessary to face those things in order to build the best possible life.

I hope to become someone you’re proud to call “Mommy.” I hope we can have many grand adventures together. (By the way, your dad is going to want to watch Star Wars 400 times and bore you to tears talking about Roman Emperors. Just go with it.) 

I hope you will keep teaching and I hope I will keep learning, and vice versa.

Love,

Mommy

“Everything you desire is downstream. Just let go of the oars.” – Abraham-Hicks

Dear Baby,

Nineteen months ago I sat with my husband Seth (or Dad to you) on our couch and said, “It’s time that we start making some serious decisions about whether we want to have kids.” To give you a little background, the previous year had been busy with Seth finishing his Ph.D. and our packing up our little house in Kentucky and moving to a suburb of Atlanta. I was thirty-four.

We had done everything we’d said we’d wanted to do before having a family. We’d finished his degree, bought a new larger house, gotten settled (well, mostly) in Georgia, saved some money in the bank. So what are we waiting for? I wondered.

The truth is that your dad (and maybe me too) were living a little bit in denial. The window was closing, and as much as people tell you that there is “plenty of time,” every doctor in the world will tell you that it is a lie. At 35 you are considered an old woman to start having babies, and all your risk factors go up, up, up.

Furthermore, I could hear my own voice ringing in my ears. My mother had me (quite accidentally) at 41, and throughout my life I had stated matter-of-factly that I would NEVER have children so late in life. Oh, but, Baby, life is full of surprises, and the time from ages 25 to 35 goes so much faster than you can ever imagine.

So once decisions were made that we would officially start thinking about officially trying, we were off…to find no success. Month after month, we had no luck. We read the books. We kept a calendar.  Zero. Nothing.  Nada.

All of sudden you start realizing that this making-another-human business is not as easy as everyone says. Then you start to question everything and get stressed, and at some point you have to pick a direction – either you become completely obsessed about every detail of the process, desperate to figure out “why,” OR you surrender. I chose the latter.

“We’ll buy a house in Italy with the extra money,” we said. “We’ll travel and dote on our nieces and nephews. Besides we weren’t sure we wanted to have kids in the first place.” And it was all true. And that house in Italy sounded pretty great. And I was at peace with that vision of our future.

Well, everyone tells you that the moment you stop trying so hard is the moment that you get pregnant. It wasn’t exactly that immediate, but that is more or less the case. Now you’re a real, live person that we will have the pleasure of meeting in January, and, with hindsight, we can see that this journey was less about "having a plan" and more about letting what was meant to happen simply happen. The result: your Dad and I are so happy and amazed and grateful (and, to be honest, a little freaked out and overwhelmed too) about your joining our family.

So, Baby, this first lesson is one that took me a long time to learn as a Type-A, slightly neurotic, workaholic (you’ll understand soon enough).  Life gives you exactly what you need when you need it (not necessarily when you want it). But if you are truly happy with your life now, if you are living in the present (like the Buddhists tell you to do), if you have accepted that the seemingly worst case scenario is not bad but, in fact, is just different, life will be so much easier.

Because the ultimate goal is to spend your time on Earth as wisely as possible, and to do that you must waste little of it grieving the past or wringing your hands about unmet expectations. Take a deep breath. Move forward. Be prepared for whatever new and exciting adventure is around the corner. Sometimes getting what you want IS just a matter of letting go of the oars. Stop trying to steer the boat and allow yourself to drift. What you find downstream is often better than what you originally dreamed.

You are loved,

Mom