Wish List

and brutal truths

I wish I’d not been so afraid when I brought you home from the hospital. I wish my intuition would have been more intact, and that I’d telegraphed more confidence in my ability to care for you as I held and nursed you in your early months of Life. I wish that I’d been more present in those long early days of just you and me, instead of lost in my head, feeling bored and restless and unsure of myself, convinced that I wasn’t cut out to be a full-time mom–even though I’d been so certain, as I carried you safe and sound and easily in my womb, that this is what I wanted. I wish I’d had the inclination and the guts to stay home with you and mother you like a girl in this world needs.

But the brutal truth is that I totally lost my nerve. Convinced myself staying home wasn’t for me, and that our family would be better off if I had a career. That you’d be better off if I modeled competence and ambition as a professional and if our family had more and could appear like we belonged among those with whom we were in community. Though I never stopped feeling like a fraud, masquerading as a member of a class of people I didn’t belong to.

Sometimes I wish I’d been a more normal mom. One that didn’t spend so much time in my head and question myself constantly and change up how I was raising my kids, creating confusion and frustrating your dad–who, like you, I’m pretty sure spent much of your childhood wishing I could just be normal. Maybe if I’d been more like other moms, we could have parented you and your brother from the same page and you would have experienced the consistency and structure that normal families provide.

But the brutal truth is that mothering and many of its tasks really challenged me. My comfort zone is my inner world and intellectualizing everything and figuring things out and then figuring out that I might have been wrong and then figuring out new things. And here’s some more brutal truth, I like being this way, but I think it was hard for you and your brother to have a mom like this. Often distant, usually deeply engaged in projects that didn’t involve my family, content to let you also figure things out instead of confidently leading the way through Life’s confusing mazes.

I wish you and your brother had grown up in a different time. A simpler time. I have immense gratitude now for how simple my early life seems upon reflection, for the standard problems of that period. I sometimes wish I could have given you that childhood–one of freedom, and basic problems like how to get the guy I had a crush on to notice me while remaining invisible to my teachers, or wondering whether my grandma would catch me sneaking back into the house in the middle of the night. One where popularity contests were limited locally to my school, boredom existed, and no one had the first clue what was going on in my head.

But the brutal truth is that we live in a world that seems like it’s gone off the rails. From my perspective we’ve been headed here for some time, but my generation was more likely to be under-parented yet we wanted to grow up and be free of our parents and do things differently, raise our kids differently. It never occurred to us that our kids wouldn’t be able to appreciate the ideal childhoods we gave them and that this might contribute to making the world seem far too scary to navigate as an adult.

I wish, oh how I wish, that when you told me that you might be harming yourself that I’d not panicked. I wish I would have listened to my instincts and no matter how practical it seemed, no matter what a perfect solution it calculated out to be on paper, that I would have listened to my heart screaming at me about how wrong it was to send you away when you were already feeling so lost and confused. I wish I would have understood the influences that would lead you to doubt yourself and that I’d communicated to you that your family could handle any mess you could bring to us.

But the brutal truth is that I doubted myself. I was scared that my family was falling apart and I desperately wanted to believe you’d be safe in that therapeutic wilderness environment while we both figured some things out; you, that you’re a badass, and me, how to keep our family together. Instead, I spent every night you were there with my insides tied in knots thinking about how afraid you must also be, how you must be wondering what you did so wrong that your parents didn’t know what to do with you. I ignored these thoughts and feelings for three months, trying to convince myself we’d done the right thing, desperately wishing I could trust those in whose care I’d handed you over, because I didn’t trust myself. The brutal truth is that as a result I lost your trust and this would make what was yet to come just all that much harder.

I wish I’d just said “No.” I wish I would have been able to maintain the same careful curiosity that I started out with when you first told me you thought you might somehow be a boy, reflecting to you that your experience was both painful and normal—and that we could handle it. I wish I would have calmly and confidently said something like, “No, honey, you’re my daughter and you’ll always be my daughter. You can use whatever name and pronouns you’d like with your friends and in other environments, but in our home and in this family, we’ll always be honest with you.”

But the brutal truth here is that I made things worse. I modeled the same obsessive behavior you were engaged in. I let the outside world convince me of your devastating future if I didn’t parent you out of this, and then when I couldn’t stop you, I lost my shit. The impotence and shame I felt as your mother during that time is, by far, the most painful experience I’ve ever endured, and it drove me to behave in desperate and scary ways.

Wish I knew then what I know now about attachment and nature’s beautiful design to keep young mammals close to their parents. I wish I’d not committed so much of my attention and creativity to those things that fed my ego and that I needed to convince myself that I was “succeeding” as a grown up at Life. I wish I’d known that kids naturally want to be like their parents and how to foster this orientation in you when your instincts to do so were still intact.

But the brutal truth is that many parents don’t figure stuff like this out until it’s too late. I suspect much of parenting is always an experiment; moms and dads doing the best they can with the circumstances that shape their lives, including all the “progress” that has occurred since their own childhoods that throws unexpected curveballs and knocks us off our game. Then suddenly our kids are no longer children, and it hits us that we’re out of time to do all the things we meant to and we desperately wish we could have a do-over. Unfortunately wisdom only comes with experience, and LOTS of mistakes. Seems so cruel for Life to work this way, doesn’t it?

So this is my wish list. These are the things that when I reflect on them, I still feel deep pangs of sadness and loss. I’ve grieved my parenting ignorance, my fearful decisions, my naivete. I grieve the world that I birthed you into; the state of things, of humanity, the condition of the planet that you inherited and have so little hope for. On the other side of grief, the sadness remains but I’m grateful that it takes up less space now.

I wish I could save you from your own midlife wish list and brutal truths. At this point, I’ve heard so many stories of parents with their own wish lists, literally hundreds of them. Some of them sound very similar to mine; some completely different. The personalities, circumstances, and other details can vary dramatically, yet each story evokes in its teller feelings of grief and frustration, sadness and pain, often destabilization, and even regret.

The brutal truth is that intensely difficult feelings like these have the power to consume a person, and rob you of Life. They can knock a person down so hard they never get back up. I hope that when Life knocks you down, (and trust me, it will) that you feel safe enough in the world to ask for what you need. I hope you give yourself the space necessary to heal but also let others love you and come to your aid. I hope you seek support and guidance from wise elders who’ve learned and grown through their own tragic paths. I hope I get to be one of them.

I hope you forgive yourself of the things you didn’t know, the times you didn’t listen, the times you acted out of childish boldness and chose something radical that turned out to be more painful than you could have ever imagined.

And I hope when life brings you to your knees that you find a way to get back up and embrace your whole self, including the scars that belie the ways you’ve been wounded. That you let the pain forge you into a resilient and compassionate woman of wisdom, one who trusts her own inner guidance and comes to see the exquisite pain and beauty that makes up this wild human experience.

Maybe I can redeem myself by showing you how to do this last part? All these things that I hope for you. Yes, that’s now at the very top of my wish list. And the brutal truth is that you probably won’t recognize all that goes into this redemption until it’s your turn.

So, to any higher power who may be listening, please grant me just this one wish: the strength and will to keep at it for as long as it takes, and to make sure it takes. For my daughter. For my children.

Republished with permission from The StoicMom Project.