I have watched you since birth and I have lived fully before your existence, during it and since. You are the greatest thing I've ever created or been a part of and you still evolve and grow and teach me. I'm always here. I have never loved anything more than I love you three. I wrote this on May 5, 2015 because I think it's important enough to be said and read. Maybe you think I'm clueless, annoying, embarrassing, bossy... all valid on all kinds of levels.
You are always valuable. You are never alone. You are precious. Seek no one's permission to be you. These are four truths I try to help you learn every day.
"So you know..."
To my incredible, inspiring, beautiful, unique and precious children,
There are going to be days that hurt and hollow you out. Those days are the kind you sit staring at a computer, at the wall or out of a window, just looking, but not seeing anything. You can't think, you can only feel your chest expand and rise to inhale and then purse your lips to exhale slowly. Each breath feels no better than the last, but you know, somewhere deep within yourself, that you have to just keep on doing it.
There are going to be nights when you lie on your back and tears slip out the sides of your eyes without permission. They stream, cold and chilling on your neck, and you lay frozen. The sadness has a weight words can't carry. The mind can't quite decipher how much loss you feel, how broken and tired your heart is. Below the surface, deep behind the horizontal heart that keeps beating and bleeding out, there is a spark that flickers. It is so faint you can't even acknowledge it, but fumes from it's attempts to light sneak into your senses.
There are going to be mornings when the sun doesn't bother to beam past the grey, heavy clouds spilling rain and rolling like the pain and fear from your tears. You find you thrash from your left side to your right, as if arguing a silent point against yourself. The strength to throw the corner of the top cover down to get up is equally matched by the strength of your resolve to roll over and hide in the cool warmth under down feathers and darkness. Without committing to either urge, a voice without noise pushes you to abandon the fight and start the day.
There are going to be weeks that drone on as if to torture and test your absolute capacity to absorb disappointment, shame, shock and alienation. It will feel so much like personal assault from the universe that you will drop to your knees in a visceral scream just because you can, and nothing else feels like it will help. The echo of it, and the strange and unexpected confirmation that you are indeed still alive, mobile, able to be heard, and very present soothes an ambiguous wound you can't identify.
There are going to be people who make you feel small, weak and inferior. You will let them rule your thoughts and their version of you will create a negative rhetoric inside yourself that poison your spirit and deflates your self worth. But strangely, as you listen more to them, you'll start to see the fissures in their false confidence, you may even start to pity their own darkness that needs to hold you down to create an illusion that they are higher up. You might even start to believe that just because someone says something, and just because you may believe it temporarily, it is not necessarily the truth.
There are going to be events in life that shake you to your core. Huge, life-altering cracks in the ideal or comforts of a life you think you built. You will fall hard, crashing into fragile pieces of the glass perception that existed before you hit the bottom and saw, slowly, that you are more beautiful as a mosaic, than a perfectly packaged projection. Something feels more comfortable and empowering about refitting yourself and holding the most sacred, albeit once broken, parts of yourself together with the mortar of self-discovery and the solid embrace of yourself as you truly are.
And then.... the unimaginable happens:
The days feel more vibrant, more full. The clarity of sunlight on the leaves of a tree feels like putting on prescription glasses for the first time.
The nights become a ritual of comfort and gratitude for the days giving's and the emotional intelligence to simply be without expectation or disappointments of what you "thought" the day was supposed have been. You accept what is. You cherish it.
The morning feels new like a fresh cut grass scent, a glass of coffee, a clean slate of glowing white to be colored and painted however it will present itself, and you take a deep breath with full heart and open eyes, happy to have slept well.
The weeks fly too fast because the precious and the fully lived moments are so bursting with presence and life it all happens too quickly. Perhaps you start creatively recording them better, through pictures, words, stories or some sense of passion performed through art form to slow it down.
The people in your life are fascinating and enrich that deepest part of yourself that you didn't even realize was so big, loving and deeply affected by the magical palette of differences the human condition allows for.
The events, you realize now, that change and shape your life are all gifts to bestow a lesson, a message or a hint to something deeper and deliberately woven into exactly who you are meant to become.
This is your life. This is ugly,and sad and hard and messy and at the very same time it is the most incredibly multi-petal flower blooming to rise and expand only as yours can. No vein in a leaf, no pollen of potential spread will be the same as yours because each beauty is owned in itself, and the love for all blooming things is a universal truth that few, but more and more are beginning to recognize.
Bloom. Bloom big and spread your beauty as you grow. You are loved, always have been and everything is here now, and has existed specifically to get you to exactly where you are. Trust it, let go, and unfold into the beaming light that shines on you. It always has, you just had to fight the mud and elements to truly appreciate and understand what type of amazing power you possess to push through the dirt and rain.
You are here, in all your splendor and the entire light, love, energy and universe conspired to let you find yourself, blooming, right now.
With all my love (which is limitless and paralleled by no one, except... maybe, if I'm lucky, yourself! Love YOU like I do,
Your mother.