If you're like me, you can probably remember your first real heartbreak. I remember it felt like being torn in two. I suddenly knew why it was called "breaking" as cracks seemed to form throughout my whole self and everything started to spill out in a jumble, messy and hot.
It was the first time, but not the last. I learned to put the pieces back together. They fit differently each time, like there was more of me to cover once I'd added some wisdom, some muscle, some memory. And once back together, I would try again. Climb that high wall and jump, no wings, no net. Sometimes I floated for a while. Sometimes I simply crashed. Each time I hit bottom hard. Each time I broke again. Each time I learned something more of the sky, the wind, and my own weight.
At one point my poor mother--for whom I now have endless sympathy, knowing as I do that your child's pain is infinitely harder to bear than your own--sat me down to talk. Sweetheart, you love so hard. That's good, it's who you are, but I worry that at some point it will do you permanent damage. That one hurt too many will make you jaded, and you might not be able to be open to love when the time is right.
I won't, I promised her. I won't be broken permanently. It's OK that I get hurt, because it means I'm strong enough to be vulnerable, and I plan to stay that way.
Promise me? she asked.
I promise, I said.
And I did. Because for me, strength was never about being impenetrable, but being open. Taking the hits. Feeling it all and getting back up when it hurts. Making yourself open again, vulnerable. And each time I did that, I got stronger. More resilient. Wiser. I learned better where to give my all, instead of how to keep it to myself. I learned to see people differently, to appreciate things that had been invisible before, to trust myself to be enough. Because love was the point, the only point, that mattered. And you can't love by being safe, you can't love if you're too afraid to be hurt, you can't love by holding tight to the edge - only by jumping off.
When the time finally was right I could see it clearly because I'd learned so much from all those falls. I'd grown so much. There was more to me than there had been when I was a girl, and I knew real beauty was so much more than I had recognized before all those falls.
So it was that I discovered another level of love that would have been impossible before, and I finally flew. My mother saw my feet truly leave the ground and she just knew, too.
But falling in love in a way that finally made me fly wasn't end of the story. As the ends of things always are, it was just the beginning of something else- it was just growing we hadn't recognized yet.
When Lexi was born I went through it all again. I loved this new person with a ferocity I couldn't have even imagined before. The enormity of it brought me to tears. And yet in loving her, I had to let go of me in a thousand ways--my time, my space, my autonomy, my work, even in so many ways my friendships, hobbies, personal relationships. I was no longer living my moments and days as just me, but as the support system for this new life, and it consumed me. I had to make peace with having passed another threshold, walking away from the things that had defined me until then, and into something different.
Since then, parenting has been an endless parade of these moments - ends that are beginning, losses that are gains, cutting away what was, what is comfortable and safe and familiar to make way for what is next - unknown and unknowable, scary and awesome and overwhelming. We've waded through diapers, nursing and bottling, three sets of first steps, potty training, loose teeth, first days of school, first solo swims, skinned knees and illnesses, lost friendships and new ones, too. Every one a loss in it's own way - the way first teeth, and then adult teeth each move in and erase the baby smiles you've loved so well. The way weening means independence and yet somehow the end of something precious. The way you cheer when that chubby hand lets go of your finger and your child wobbles across the floor to your spouse on two feet, but cry a little inside knowing that their days of riding sidecar on your hip have been replaced with hand-holding, and running ahead.
When we got Ellie's diagnosis at 2, it marked the end of all the normal expectations for what her life would look like - they simply fluttered off into the sky like so many tiny birds fledging at once. We might be able to know when to expect her to lose her teeth, but most things became wide open. We were free in the way that is most terrifying. We'd jumped off a new wall, and I was falling, speeding for the ground, crashing into a thousand pieces.
It took time and tears to pull them back together. It's crazy, but it was so much like a bad break up, that threshold between blissful ignorance and knowing. It's amazing to know that you can mourn the idea of a future that hard, but I did. The stages of grief hit me like familiar waves, and we rode them out, clinging to each other and to her until we made it to some stable shore. Until, like every time before, I put the pieces back together. Again, they were a little different. Bigger. The new me now included lots of space for uncertainty, and in that space, things started to grow.
I learned that when you lose expectation it leaves a lot of space behind. Wild, beautiful things grow in the spaces, like flowers through the cracks in concrete. Joy in the little things blossomed, sturdy trees of faith and hope and delight put down strong roots. Ellie planted a garden there whose roots split me wider open, and in the openness, I grew.
We're still passing thresholds. They don't happen at predictable times, but they sneak up and surprise us. This year Lexi and Spencer moved into public school, and I agonized. I spent months preparing them, preparing the schools, preparing myself as much as I could. Saying good bye to our school days together was harder than I'd imagined, so full of nostalgia and uncertainty. When I was with them I was all cheer and optimism, but alone the tears hit, and I lost a lot of sleep.
But we pushed forward - because it's not about safety. It's about jumping and growing. They jumped, and they didn't break. They flapped, they tottered, they flew. They're fine. They're better than fine. They wave me off as they head to the bus. I smile as they go, and I mean it.
Last night, Paulo took Ellie up to bed as he usually does. She's 10, but she's always wanted to be cuddled to sleep. It took a long time before the cuddler could be someone other than mommy, but she got there. And those nights were equal parts struggle and sweetness. Sometimes it took ages for her to fall asleep, and being trapped in that small bed endlessly waiting, being kicked and cuddled, was torture. But just as often she'd snuggle up and be quiet for the first time all day. She'd press her forehead to mine, hold my face in her little hand and kiss me. The first time she told me she loved me without prompting was in bed at night. And most nights after that she would tell me or Paulo - "I love you so much." There's nothing quite like that.
None the less, we've wondered when she'd be ready to go to bed alone. Every so often, we'd bring it up. But when we've asked her if she wanted to try to go to sleep by herself she'd get so emotional - her eyes would brim with tears, her lip and voice quavering, "But I would be so lonely! I need my mommy and daddy!" And that was always the end of that - there was no way we would push back on that. The issue was closed.
So, when three minutes after going up, Paulo came back downstairs last night, I assumed she wanted water. But then he sat next to me on the couch. "Is she already asleep?" I asked, surprised.
"No," he replied, "She said she didn't need me. I asked if she was sure that she wanted me to to go downstairs, and she said yes."
I was stunned. I think we both were. Wow. I sat there for a few minutes taking that in and listening. Was she on the stairs? Had she moved into our bed? Was she looking for someone? I even checked upstairs twice. But she was fine. Her door was still closed. She'd rolled over and gone to sleep. She slept in her bed all night.
So here we are again. In a moment, we've crossed another threshold. Those seemingly endless nights of lying next to her, waiting, listening to her sing or chatter, whispered "I love yous" forehead-to-forehead, they just ended. And this is a good thing, the way all bittersweet things are good.
Because every growth is born of something ending, some moments slipping away to make space for something new. Something unknown and beautiful we just haven't met yet.
Tonight it started with those four words:
I don't need you.
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