Look Up

A Letter to My Firstborn

Dear Firstborn:

Life is sometimes compared to a roller coaster, among other things, because whether or not you want to get on and go for the ride is rarely ever the point or always a choice that is yours to make.  Either way you will inevitably be loosely buckled in and taken on a crazy and bumpy ride with or without your consent.  Everyone is on their own roller coaster and, while some other rides may seem similar, they are not the same.  Through various stages of life, rides can be so smooth that they might even be described as boring or pleasantly monotonous.  While other times the ride is unpredictable, filled with chaos and uncertainty.  It is that part of the ride that can feel overwhelming as you will realize that you have no control over the unforeseen, and, let’s face it, mostly involuntary, dizzying twists and turns or ups and downs.  Even when you have had enough and beg for it stop so that you can get off and regain your footing on steady ground, somehow you will find the courage to stay on.  After all, the only thing about the ride that you are controlling is how you react and respond to it.  As parents, we are on an endless roller coaster ride.  It’s interesting because it is not something that is necessarily discussed or overly considered before we bring home our adorable little bundles of pure joy and innocence.  Parents are dreamers who are seemingly suspended in a temporary state of delirious bliss when their children are babies.  At least that was my experience.  Truth be told, and especially during the early days, parents are not exactly forward thinkers when it comes to their children.  For many, you are just so happy to have a baby in your arms that you don’t often think about how life is going to look in 5, 10 or even 15 years.  The days somehow move slower, one bleeding into the next.  You buy a special book so that you can memorialize all of your baby’s firsts – the first smile, the first time they roll over from back to belly, their first spoonful of solid food, their first word, their first step unassisted, and the list of firsts goes on and on. Those are the years when you follow a chart that breaks down each common milestone and an expected age by which it should be met, and if it is not, you grab your keys and your precious baby and hightail it to the doctor to find out what is wrong with them.  You are frequently reminded to ‘live in the moment’, that ‘the days are long, but the years are short’, and ‘don’t worry, it’s just a phase’.  And all of those things are true.   But you don’t realize how true they are until each of those moments or phases passes by in the blink of an eye and you find yourself nostalgically looking back on them with a wide-range of raw emotions. Those are the moments that you would like to freeze in time.  When you find yourself on your knees begging time to stand still, or at least slow down for a little while, to give you a chance to adjust to the changes that are happening all too quickly and seem to move at a warped speed the older your children get.  Each stage stealthily appears out of nowhere, and then just as suddenly as it arrived, it is gone leaving in its wake nothing more than a memory.  Time is uncooperative like that, and stops for no one.  You know that your child will never be these ages again and you want to hold them there as long as possible.  Because no matter what and come what may, they will always be your baby regardless of how big they get or how quickly they move through each one of life’s stages.

You are reaching an important milestone in the coming days.  Middle school graduation, and then you will head to high school in just a few short months.  I don’t know exactly how we got here, but nevertheless, here we are.  Saying that I’m proud of you is simply not enough as it woefully understates the depth of love and admiration that I have for you.  I started this last year of your time in middle school with no particular expectations.  The beginning of the year felt like any other school year getting you and your siblings back into the routine of waking up earlier and prepared for the academic workload and extracurricular activities.  As usual, our days filled up quickly with the constant movement and scheduling that consumes our minds giving us little, if any, time to pause or reflect.   And then it happened.  It was at the end of November, I think, when I received an email from the school asking for a baby picture of you for the yearbook.  That email was immediately followed up by another notice requesting that I write a letter to you which would go in the yearbook next to your baby picture.  As a writer, this task should not have overwhelmed me to the degree that it did.  I prefer to take the time that I need to consider my words carefully before I am comfortable making them available for eyes other than my own.  The pressure began to mount as I was feeling rushed to summon to the surface the feelings and emotions that I was not yet prepared to face, all the while knowing that the one person who I needed to reach and who would feel the depth of my words the most would be you.  And as Mark Twain said, “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter.  ‘Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”  Truer words have never been spoken and are words to live by, but with the weight of a deadline looming over me, and in my haste, I invariably misread the assignment.  I thought the letter could not exceed 700 words but when I re-read the instructions, it actually said 700 characters.  That is a big difference.  Maybe not as big as the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning, but big enough to cause a panic attack.  Everything that I had said and had painstakingly pulled directly from my heart now required a significant amount of editing.  To a mere 700 characters which obviously wasn’t nearly enough room next to your baby picture for me to say what I wanted to say.  But let’s be honest, no amount of space on a single page in a yearbook, with or without a baby picture, was ever going to be enough anyway. 

As a first-time mother, and you my firstborn, my first test as a parent, I did all of those things that I thought mothers are supposed to do.  The minutiae (look it up in your Thesaurus App). The things that are outlined in great detail in the multitude of baby books that I collected and referred to often to make sure that I was doing everything right.  I became a professional baby tracker and monitor as I watched every move you made, measured every morsel of food that went into your mouth and every sound that you uttered that got you closer to your first word, which incidentally was not ‘mama’.  The onesie that you wore when we first brought you home from the hospital, the very first clipping of your beautiful dirty blonde lock of wavy hair after your first haircut, and your first tooth.  All of your firsts are saved inside a single blue box that holds all of the treasured memories of you that I never want to forget.   As you have gotten older and our family has grown, I no longer save material things as much as I used to.  I don’t know why that happens.  I suppose I could refer to a book to tell me, but it turns out that those reference books are nothing more than a collection of suggestions and anecdotes that are based on other people’s personal experiences.  And knowing that everyone is on their own roller coaster forced me to learn how to navigate the twists and turns on my own without relying on the soap-boxed experiences of others.  At a certain pivotal point in parenting, you somehow gain enough confidence to throw away the books and trust your own instincts.  And that is true of parenting and life in general, even when your roller coaster goes rogue.  And it will.   As you get older, milestones are often referred to as achievements and they are not always memorialized in a special book or curated in a box.   Successes and accomplishments are not automatically or routinely rewarded with a trophy or a certificate that bears your name.  For parents, as their children get older, the tests somehow seem to accelerate and become more challenging with volatile and unpredictable levels of difficulty. Sometimes even finding themselves having to run alongside their child and dragging them over the finish line to achieve a particular milestone so that they can move on to the next stage in their life.

I have watched you grow through it all.  You are now moving on to high school, which means that you have successfully met the challenges that come with middle school and all of the social and academic years that preceded it.  Middle school is complex and enlightening at the same time.  It is during those formative years that you slowly emerge and begin to reveal to the world who you are.  You get to know yourself both with and without your parents.  The string of the kite that attaches you to them begins to get longer as they release just enough string to give you the freedom to fly, but not so much that they can’t pull back when you need them.  You learn who is, and who is not, worthy of your time and friendship.  You know that recognition for achievements can only be earned or deserved after hard work and dedication and should not be handed out freely.  You have, and will continue, to do all of that and so much more.  I know it.  For me, as a parent, your mother, my greatest achievement, and what I am most proud of, is you.  From the moment you were born, I was no longer me without you just as you are not you without me.  While firsts are inherently bittersweet, they will, nonetheless, continue for both of us.  Once you achieve a milestone and reach the top of one mountain, you will find yourself standing at the bottom of a new mountain that you must journey up.  But today, take a moment and enjoy the view from the summit of the mountain that you have reached with all of your hard work.  Then tomorrow, look up towards the top of your next mountain and climb.  I will be watching you soar with everlasting support, pride, and love.  Always.

I love you.

Mom