The Eleventh Letter: Unbelievable Things

/ Elizabeth

phonto

Dear Daughters,

I remember praying for my grandmother to be healed from cancer and really, truly believing she would be. Believing it. Knowing it.

I was away at a summer leadership camp the summer before my senior year of high school when I got a phone message to call home. I remember my stepdad crying on the phone when he answered and told me she was gone.

I don’t know when I stopped praying for unbelievable things.

As a teenager, someone once was praying “over” me–that is the lingo I would have used a lot back then–and he touched my hands and told me that my hands would be used to heal people some day.

He really said that. My hands.

I hear people pray a lot. We’ve got prayer lists in the bulletin, prayer meeting on Wednesday nights. So many meetings and occasions when we gather and “open in prayer.” It is such a normal thing.

I pray a lot.

We are already teaching you to pray. Before meals. When we’re sick. When the booboos need healing. For our friends and family.

But rarely do I hear any of us pray for unbelievable, miraculous, specific things, and rarely do I expect them to happen. Most of what I hear when I gather with other Christians are prayers for God’s peace and comfort, that God would be felt within tragic circumstances. We might pray for a medical treatment to work or for wisdom for doctors. Of if we do pray for healing of the physical body, we usually throw in a “if it is God’s will” or “in God’s perfect time.”

I’ve even fallen into the habit of simply praying for God to have mercy on so-and-so, and leaving it at that. God knows, right? God’s got it covered.

But I’ve been wondering recently whether we are afraid to pray for healing–real, miraculous, crazy healing–because we know it might not happen. Because our faith will be judged according to the success of those prayers.

And so we comfort ourselves with the knowledge that in the unanswered prayer, too, God is still working behind the scenes, in unseen ways, knowing the good better than we do.

Okay.

One of my best friends has multiple sclerosis.

I went to a women’s’ conference recently and during the first session, I thought–and I don’t say this lightly–that God was telling me to pray for her to be healed. Healed. Not for her treatments to work to suppress the disease’s progression, but healing. I felt like I was also supposed to tell her that I would pray for her.

I didn’t.

The following morning, a different speaker at the conference shared about having cancer and how she knew God had called her to pray for miraculous healing–to believe the unbelievable, even while seeking treatment. I knew again that God was telling me to pray and believe the unbelievable.

But what is strange is that in the midst of this conviction, I knew that it didn’t matter whether the healing took place–that the efficacy of my prayer was not to be judged on the outcome of the prayer–but that the important thing was for me to believe that healing could happen. God wasn’t saying, If you pray for her, I will heal her. But rather, Why don’t you believe she could be healed?

That was over two months ago.

I have a reminder on my phone that buzzes at noon every day to tell me to pray for her to be healed. You, my toddler bean, even know to pray for her now, and it really does give me the warm tinglies when I hear your little voice ask God for such a big thing. And you don’t even know it is a big thing.

The truth is, I don’t know what it would look like to be healed of multiple sclerosis. No more relapses? No progress in the disease? No more secondary issues of energy levels and depression?

But what does the unbelievable look like in any situation? What is the miraculous?

Of course it seems ridiculous to pray for cancer to just disappear, for broken marriages to be healed. Those are impossible things. And that’s not even touching on the biggies of our broken world, the structural inequalities and injustices that are hurting so many people. It may not seem crazy to pray for them in general ways, but it sure is crazy to believe a miracle that big, that impossible, can happen.

Why bother praying at all, girls, if we aren’t going to pray and believe the unbelievable things?

This is a strange letter for me, because I don’t often get preachy.

I’ve been slowly adding more reminders to my calendar to pray for people I know, people with real hurts and pain and brokenness, so now my phone buzzes or dings at us multiple times a day. Sprinkling it in is the only way I’ve found to add prayer in at all and, at the very least, it pulls me out of the four walls of our home every few hours, out into the world of real, hard struggles, and gives me some perspective.

And, of course, it teaches you to pray, too.

You don’t know what miracles are yet, but I want you to pray for them. I want you to believe in them.

I want it to be normal.

Love,

Your Momma

The Tenth Letter: You Are Not My Whole Life

/ Elizabeth

IMG_2483 Dear Daughters,

Part of me wants to be—someday—one of those older moms in my church who is able to say that being a mom was the most rewarding, amazing, hardest, joyful thing I’ve ever done.

Someone with perspective who can encourage young mothers to cherish the moments when the children are young because the time goes by so quickly, or, more sacramentally, to encourage them to see beauty in the mundane, to remember that we really are being shaped and formed by those repetitive seemingly unimportant loads of laundry and bath times and buckling and unbuckling the carseats ad nauseum, because we will blink and they will be teenagers and teenagers are so hard and babies are so easy and…

And the truth is, I hate hearing those messages. I resent them. As a mom. As a woman of God.

For one thing, I don’t want to cherish these days. I want them to be a season that will come to an end, and I don’t really want to find beauty and peace here. I want to be discontented because I don’t want to forget that I have gifts and a calling to serve the world—and not just your world.

I love you, my girls, but I don’t want you to grow up thinking I exist for you. Because I don’t. I exist for God. I exist because of God.

When I was pregnant the first time around, an acquaintance from church asked me what my biggest worry was as I faced motherhood. I thought about it for awhile and finally said that I was afraid you would swallow up my life, afraid my entire life would revolve around you, and that there would be no “me” left.

This acquaintance responded—presumably trying to encourage me—that being a mom means your life revolves around your kids. That’s what it is, and that’s how it should be.

I’m sorry, girls, but my life doesn’t revolve around you—it revolves around Kingdom work. You are part of that work, you are, sweet ones, but you are not all of that work.

I want you to know that you are loved, girls, but I also want you to know that you are not my whole life.

Maybe every mother feels like this, I don’t know. But what I do know is that when I point-blank told a friend of mine recently—a friend I hadn’t seen in awhile, a fellow mom in the trenches of the everyday chaos that is raising toddlers—that I kind of resent this whole mom thing, that often there is no joy for me here in the nitty-gritty of diapers and laundry and messy houses, do you know what she said?

She said she was thankful I said it out loud.

Actually, I believe she first said, “I can’t believe you said that out loud.” And then she said she was grateful, because we moms feel like we can’t admit these things.

Well, nobody, except those writers who then go on miraculously to find the sacred in this mess of legos and crumbs and naps that never fit the schedule and croup and the double ear infections. I admire that. I read those blogs. And I find them encouraging.

But here’s the thing: I don’t see sacred, girls. Not most days.

Most days, I see survival.

And I want to flee.

The truth is that if I felt about a career the way I feel about being a mom day in and day out, I’d have quit a long time ago. But I’m dealing with human beings here, as beautiful and wonderful and frustrating as you are, and of course I wouldn’t quit. Never.

Still.

Still. At some point every day, I want to flee.

I don’t mean in a metaphorical sense—I’m serious. At some point every day, I don’t want to be a mom anymore. I don’t want to change the seventeenth diaper, kiss the booboo, run for the tissue as snot drips down your chin. But somebody has to do it, and that somebody is me. In this season. This mind-numbing and life-sucking and just-not-fun season.

These are important things to say out loud.

Sure, there is much I will miss about these days of mothering young children. I will miss the hot baby skin against my neck as I rock you to sleep when you’re fighting a fever. I will miss your dimpled butt cheeks in the bathtub. I will miss the imagination of an almost-three-year-old transforming our couches into rocketships or boats or airplanes, the Frankenstein-stride of an almost-one-year-old learning to walk.

But, truth be told, I will not miss how it feels to live through these mind-numbing days. And I will not miss having company in the bathroom.

Love,

Your Momma

The Ninth Letter: Seasons of Grump & Maundy Thursday Do-Overs

/ Elizabeth

photo 1Dear Daughters,

It’s Maundy Thursday, and the truth is, I haven’t felt very Lenten.

It hasn’t felt like Holy Week this week since, on Sunday, I stayed home with a double-ear-infected child and missed the palm-branch waving. I’m kind of grumpy about that. I’ve been kind of grumpy that it’s spring break for the public schools this week and so nobody else seems to care it’s Holy Week either. I’ve been kind of grumpy about the fact that all of us are sick for the seventeenth time this year, and I’m a little tired of following children around the house with tissues while hardly being able to breathe myself without coughing up a lung.

So there’s that. Lots of grump.

And then this morning it was warm, so I said we could go outside and play for a little bit. The toddler ran out onto the deck in socks because the neighbors were already outside getting into their van (and she’s an unashamedly nosy creature, which she gets from her mother), and then before I even had time to pour myself a cup of tea, she hollered that it had started raining and scurried her little feet back inside.

Sigh.

Some seasons are just grumpy seasons. Days, weeks, months, years. Call it Lent if you want. Or call it life. I call it motherhood. That’s how it feels to me.

And then it rains and you feel even grumpier until you hear those drops on the back deck and the windows on the north side of the house and you remember something. Something you’d forgotten. You like rain. You do.

I do, at least.

I’d almost forgotten because it has been awhile since I’ve been able to enjoy it.

In that hazy, previous life before children, I would open the windows when it rained and squat down by the floor and breathe in that strange beginning-of-downpour scent and open up the laptop or the journal or get out the scrap paper and write. I used to run in the rain or walk in the rain or just reach my hand out the door and feel the rain on my bare skin.

With little ones circumnavigating me during all waking hours, however, this just doesn’t happen anymore. Rain means I stay inside and incubate germs. And get grumpy about it. Windows stay closed because the draftiness generates whininess and goose bumps. With little ones, the only rain I hear is the white noise machine imitation of rain.

Three years into this business of motherhood, and I’m pretty tired of the white noise, girls. Pretty darn tired of it.

But: rain.

Rain has always Inspired me. Capital-I Inspiration. There’s something alive and refreshing and starting-the-day-or-week-or-month-or-season-over that happens when it rains.

And I need those do-overs.

I need to be reminded, as I remind you when you grump about the weather, that God created the world to work this way. Rain nourishes the ground so the lettuce seeds in the garden can germinate. Rain nourishes. Seeds germinate.

We get a do-over.

Lent’s nearly over and, I’ll be honest, it’s unlikely that the upcoming weekend is going to be very meditative for me. Good Friday. Holy Saturday. Easter morning. They’ll come, I’ll go through the motions, tissues and cough drops in hand, maybe get around to filling that antibiotic prescription, and then they’ll be over. I’ll probably be a little grumpy. Or a lot grumpy. But, girls, that’s okay. That’s the way it is sometimes.

Because today, today, I did open the windows downstairs for a little while. I did listen.

And when your feet got cold, I put socks on you.

Love,

Your Momma

The Eighth Letter: Messy Houses & Being Real

/ Elizabeth

photo 2

Dear Daughters,

When I was a little girl, I spent a few days each summer at Grandma and Pappy Lehman’s house. I walked in the morning with my grandma and her TOPS friends, learned how to weed a garden, played UNO in the evenings. Each summer, we’d spend a few hours cleaning her spoon collection. I slept in the purple bedroom at the end of the hall.

One of the best things about visiting Gram and Pap’s was getting to go to work with Gram because Gram was a cleaning lady.

I loved going into those big empty houses. They were never very messy or dirty, but that’s probably because Gram cleaned them regularly. My favorites were the ones that seemed like mansions to me at the time, the biggish homes in upper-middle class suburbia. The master bedroom beds were all incredibly high, which always seemed so fancy to me. I have friends who live in those kinds of houses now.

I don’t know if visiting Gram is when I learned to clean or not, but I sure did learn to clean early on. Cleaning—vacuuming, mopping, dusting, toilets, sinks—and doing dishes and sorting laundry and stripping the bed and remaking it: I don’t remember not knowing how to do these things.

Of course, I still know how to do them.

But I rarely do them. Only when absolutely necessary.

Or so it seems.

We bought this house in 2010, so we’re in our fifth year here, and I’m pretty sure it’s only been cleaned thoroughly twice—both times by your grandma, immediately following one of your births. By “thoroughly,” I mean that the baseboards were wiped down, the windows shined up, the closets sorted through.

It just isn’t a priority for me.

Don’t get me wrong, it isn’t that I don’t prefer a clean house. I like things to be picked up, and I don’t like the mess. I hate feeling the dirt under my bare feet and it annoys me when I find the shirt I want to wear in the dirty laundry basket.

In fact, having the house a wreck really does bother me and stresses me out. Just ask your dad. I especially freak out about the house being a mess when we are about to have people over.

Part of this is because I was raised in an exceptionally clean house with a bathroom that got scrubbed down every week, and this set the standard a bit too high for my own mental health.

And part of this is because I’m embarrassed to let people see my mess.

I wish the latter weren’t the case, but there you have it.

I distinctly remember visiting a friend of mine in Texas and walking into her kitchen to get something to drink. The sink was piled so full of dirty dishes that I couldn’t use the faucet to fill my water glass. I thought to myself, Wow, I really wish I was relaxed enough to have people over with this big of a mess in my kitchen. And then I thought, No, I don’t.

That was before I had children.

Girls, having you in my space perpetually disrupting things and making a mess—for example, pulling the books off a bookshelf I’ve just restocked—has chilled me out a little bit. A very little bit.

If I know people are coming over, I tend to do a quick once-over of wiping up crumbs, throwing all the loose toys into the nearest box or bin, putting the dirty dishes into the sink, if there is room in the sink. Sometimes I even look into the toilet bowl just to make sure it’s been flushed. Sometimes.

But you know what?

Sometimes people stop by unexpectedly. And the house is a mess.

That is life.

Recently, our friends stopped in with their new baby. Of course, I invited them in. I had to step out of the room for a minute when the nine-month-old woke from her nap, and when I came back in, our friend said, “I was just saying that I really love that your house isn’t picked up. It makes me feel so much better.”

That, girls, is profound. People need to know that life isn’t perfect. That it’s messy sometimes, maybe even most of the time.

If your friends—and heck, strangers—only ever see you with your hair done, with your car clean, your books in alphabetical order on our bookshelf, your life all put together, then they’ll never be able to be real with you. And real life is so messy.

So go ahead and disinfect that toilet bowl and throw your dirty clothes in the washing machine. I’m not saying you should be a bum. But I am saying you should be real.

And sometimes the ring inside the toilet bowl is what’s real.

Love,

Your Momma

The Seventh Letter: Patchouli & Typewriters

/ Elizabeth

photo 3

Dear Daughters,

After a long and difficult week, today I saw my reflection in the car window while picking up our Thai food takeout and I cringed just a little bit. I was wearing my favorite winter jacket—a circa 1978 reddish brown leather jacket with a faux fur collar, courtesy of your dad’s mom, my mother-in-law. Back in 1978, it was a gift from your Papa when uncle Ryan was born. Since she is tall and I am tall, it fits me better than pretty much any coat I’ve ever owned.

Did I mention the faux fur? It pretty much rocks.

There I was sporting this ridiculously retro jacket and my boots and skinny jeans, and I was carrying Thai food takeout—most of it with tofu in it—and I had my giant sunglasses on, and I was about to crawl into our 1999 Volvo stationwagon.

It was, well, so perfectly cliché in a typewriter-in-the-living-room-next-to-the-MacBook hipster kind of way.

Or at least that’s how it felt until I got to our friends’ house with the takeout and I got to eat my pineapple fried rice with tofu, no spice, thank you. And the toddler picked out all of the tofu from her plate to eat it first because it’s her favorite part. (She calls it toe-food.) And we cracked open some homemade dill pickles to have on the side and cheddar cheese, because everything is better with chunks of cheese. And we laughed and joked and loved with our best friends after all of us had survived a terrible, no good, very bad week.

It wasn’t cliché, girls. Not then. It was life.

Over the holidays I was able to visit with one of my favorite cousins. He and his wife are the sort of cool people I have always wanted to be, even back when we were all teenagers together. They wore patchouli before I even knew what patchouli was and shopped at vintage clothing stores. She was the first young person I knew with a tattoo and had a bleachy streak in her hair. They went to college in San Diego. They are awesome people.

As I hugged him hello, he still smelled like patchouli.

No joke.

They live in small-town Pennsylvania now and homeschool their kids; he’s an art teacher at the public school; they talk about nitrate-free bacon.

Maybe because I have always wanted to be like them—free spirits and yet somehow grounded, passionate, and fun—when I catch myself actually being like them, I feel like maybe I’m an imposter.

An imposter with my fair trade coffee and chlorine-free diapers and homemade babyfood.

An imposter with my second-hand clothing and compost bin and church that has a community garden.

An imposter with my retro pyrex bowl collection and arm-knit infinity scarf and, yes, typewriter we pulled out of your grandparents’ barn.

But at other times, most of the time, really, I feel at home in my skin, in my clothes, in my car, at home eating our tofu Thai food around our second-hand dining room table. With friends. Always with friends.

On those days when I don’t feel like an imposter, don’t care that on the outside I look like a hipster cliché, that, for goodness sake, I really think that typewriter is beautiful, I realize this, this is who I want to be.

So, girls, I guess what I want to say to you today is this:

Be who you are. Love people. Care about what matters.

Don’t worry about the rest.

You know, I’ve been thinking—I don’t wear patchouli, but I might start. It smells like earth and happiness.

And life.

Real, lived life.

Your Momma

The Sixth Letter: Everything Is a Letter

/ Elizabeth

photo 4

Dear Daughters,

Maybe it is because I’m a writer, but ever since I’ve been a mom—or at least, ever since I came out of the post-partum haze of will-I-survive-this and why-does-anyone-have-more-than-one-child chaos—I’ve wanted to write everything down. For you.

And by “everything,” I mean everything. Everything about me, about you, about the world, about your grandparents, the important things in life, love, loss, brokenness, joy, good books, beauty, creativity, sacrament.

Everything.

It’s ridiculous. And ambitious. Impossible. Overwhelming.

Not that I don’t write a lot, trying to take a stab at this “everything.” I do. I jot notes, mostly, notes and bullet points and sentences and paragraphs, things that are important that someday I can flesh out a bit more, someday when we aren’t in survival mode, aren’t fighting pink eye, aren’t dealing with diapers and potty training, aren’t picking goldfish out of the carpet.

Those somedays probably won’t come.

I realize this.

But I also realize something else—there is a sense in which everything I write and live and do already is a letter to my daughters.

I have a journal for each of you where I write notes about what you’re doing, how you’re growing, the funny things you say, when your teeth come in and you crawl and walk and faceplant. So those are letters to you. Real letters. You’ll read them some day.

But those poems I write? I think they are letters to you, too. Even the poem about the man in the coffee shop who reminded me of a piano player we knew in Texas, the poem about slicing open an avocado, the chamomile poem that became an epigraph for my friend’s novel—someday you will read these poems and others and yes, I really think so: they are letters.

When I highlight in the Richard Foster book I’m teaching in that Wednesday night class at church, when I jot notes in the margins, these are letters to you, too, aren’t they? They would be, at least, if I were gone and you were looking through my things.

I remember my mom looking through her mom’s Bible after she passed away, and the same for my dad, looking through his dad’s Bible, and they talked about what their parents had underlined, poring over it, wondering about it. Will you read through the verses I’ve underlined? Will they be meaningful to you? Will you wonder about me and my conviction and my pain and my joy?

Or, creases on the binding of my favorite books—will you look at those pages some day?

Splashes of food on the recipes in my cookbooks? A note about adding extra broccoli or one-and-a-half-ing the cake batter to make a layer cake?

The handprint Jesse Tree we made this year that hangs on the back of the basement door?

And what about those things I hang onto? So many things. In closets and drawers and boxes in the basement. Old T-shirts I save that are steeped in memory–races I’ve run, theatre productions of your dad’s, second-hand-thrift-store-thread-bare T-shirts from high school. That collection of old Pyrex bowls, my grandma’s glass bell, our wedding quilt. The index card love notes your dad used to hide in my things when he went out of town.

It matters to me that you’ll “read” these things some day. I think about it and about what you’ll discover and learn and love.

So, daughters, while I’ll keep jotting those ambitious notes about the important things in life, keep hoping that someday, someday I’ll write even more, I’ll also just keep living life.

Because I have this crazy hunch that life, all of it, is itself a letter.

Your Momma

The Fifth Letter: Stuff & Story

/ Elizabeth

Dear Daughters,

This morning I got up early to drive my mom to the airport. Grandma prefers to be at the airport ridiculously early for her flights, so we left at 4:15 am. (I’m the same way, so I shouldn’t make fun. I do, of course, but I shouldn’t.)

In the dark of my bedroom, after already rousing to nurse the baby and then unsuccessfully trying to fall back to sleep, I turned off my alarm and grabbed a sweatshirt, socks, and a pair of easy-on sneakers before heading downstairs.

As I tied up the shoes, I remembered that I had ordered them online six years ago before your dad and I headed to Italy. We’d been saving for five years and planned to celebrate both our fifth anniversary and your dad’s finishing his doctorate at the same time. Because we intended to live out of backpacks for two weeks as we stayed in bed and breakfasts, I needed a versatile and small shoe that would be comfortable for walking and hiking. The ones I ended up buying–these–are a strange shade of burnt orange, and the eyelits are pink, but they served their purpose as we hoofed it in and out of cathedrals and museums in Rome, Venice, Florence, and Tuscany.

That’s what I was thinking about this morning during my sleepy daze at four o’clock in the morning. Italy.

Your dad and I don’t spend a lot of money on new clothing. You might resent this about us some day, but the truth is, I hope you, too, are thrifty. Because thrifty-ness in our case isn’t just about money, or about our ethical convictions about the supply chain of most mass-produced goods, but about the importance of story and permanence and valuing a narrative.

Sure, I keep these shoes because (a) I have them, (b) they fit, and (c) they’re lightweight and comfy, but I also keep these shoes because they travelled around Italy with us. For our fifth anniversary. At the time, five years felt like forever happiness. Now it seems like we were only babies ourselves.

Tying these shoes up this morning—a double knot, because the laces are slippery and somewhat short–I remembered the ridiculously long path we hiked along the Cinque Terra and how it felt to come down into one of the small, colorful seaside cities perched on the cliff, with laundry hanging out of nearly every window and the strange German tourist we saw walking around in his Speedo and white socks and sneakers.

I haven’t thought about that bizarre image in quite some time.

The socks I’m wearing are a fuzzy giraffe-print pair that your dad’s grandmother gave me for Christmas one year. I have a picture of the toddler wearing them, pulled way up to her thigh.

The T-shirt I’m wearing is a “Walk Across Texas” campaign shirt from my old job at Baylor University in Waco, eight or nine years ago. I was on a team of middle-aged women who were wearing pedometers and keeping track of their footsteps in order to win this T-shirt. There may have been more motivation than that at the time, but all I remember is the T-shirt. Which I’m wearing. Right now.

The long-sleeved T-shirt on top of that is a Hard Rock Café London shirt—where your dad and I went on our first date, second semester of college, thirteen years ago. We were spending the semester abroad with our undergraduate college’s First-Year Honors Program. We were nerds. We still are nerds. But our first date was in London, which is freaking awesome.

The navy blue sweatshirt on top of that was my stepdad’s from when I was a kid. It’s got some fraying spots along the neckline and sleeves, but it is soft and warm. And it’s kind of eighties in its style, the big and bulky size of it, but–I never believed this would happen, never–the eighties stuff is coming back in. It’s almost cool. Maybe twenty years from now, you’ll pull it out of your closet and find the same to be true.

The scarf I wore in the car this morning was a souvenir my college roommate brought me from her semester abroad our junior year. She went to Paris, and these long pashmina-style scarves hadn’t yet become commonplace here in the States.

I could probably list off similar stories and facts and tidbits about eighty percent of my wardrobe, a sure sign that I hold onto my clothing a long time and also that I have a memory for details that aren’t important in the scheme of things.

Or maybe these are the details that are truly important in the scheme of things.

Because I guess what I am trying to say with this catalog of my clothing’s history is this:

Live as if everything has a story, girls.

Because it does.

Your Momma

The Fourth Letter: Big Eaters

/ Elizabeth

Daughters,

Today for lunch, the toddler ate a bowl of vegetarian chili, 1/3 of an avocado, a scoop of cottage cheese, and two banana cookies. And that wasn’t an exceptional meal for you.

Then, after the six-month-old woke up and nursed—yes, first you nursed—you still seemed hungry so I heated up the leftover baby oatmeal in the frig and mixed it with unsweetened applesauce. I started with what I considered to be a hearty bowl for you, considering you only began solid foods a few weeks ago, but it wasn’t until after your second bowl that you even turned away from the spoon to hint you may have had enough.

You both like to eat.

When your dad and I lived in Texas, we had dinner at the apartment of some of our friends, and they mentioned in passing that since they invited us to dinner, they knew they had to make a lot extra.

Our reputation for eating had apparently preceded us.

We’re big eaters, ya’ll. Big eaters.

Now, most people wouldn’t know that from looking at us because we’re exceptionally tall and slender. But we come from eating families.

It’s no wonder that the toddler is in the nearly 100th percentile for both height and weight and already has your daddy’s strong and lean figure.

Baby girl, you will catch up soon, I’m certain, though you were two pounds smaller at birth than your big sister. You’ve already outgrown the sizes she wore last Christmas at nearly 8 months old.

I remember meeting a coworker of my mom’s when I was maybe twelve or thirteen—old enough to be a lot taller than my mom, strikingly tall for my age. The friend said—out loud—in reference to me: “Just think of all the extra weight she could carry!” Or some such ridiculous thing to say to a young woman.

But she was right, of course. My being tall has led people to exclaim that I was “all baby” both times I was pregnant, despite my having gained over fifty pounds each time. It’s an optical illusion, I’d say, because there is no polite way to continue that line of conversation.

You will probably be big girls.

I always hated the word “big.”

It’s what everyone said about me, for as long as I can remember. Big and solid. Big.

And we ate a lot.

We do eat a lot.

We’re eaters.

I love this about us.

But I wonder how to raise girls who love to eat who don’t think about food all the time, and calories, and pants sizes, and all the silly baggage of growing up as a woman in our ridiculous culture.

And there is baggage.

I have a husband who loves the extra fleshiness that carrying two babies brings, but I still drag around a couple suitcases worth of baggage when I look in the mirror these days or see pictures of myself. I hate that because I know it’s silly.

And I hate it because every time I catch myself being unhappy, I think about you and how I want you to love your bodies, your strong limbs, long torso, and broad shoulders.

I also hate it because it reminds me of those I know and love who carry heavier bags on this self-image journey.

In the last two years, I have known two beautiful and exceptionally talented women—and I mean head-and-shoulders-above-the-rest-of-their-class kind of talented—who’ve been treated for eating disorders at in-patient facilities. Two in two years.

It breaks my heart as the mother of young girls, because I know for these two who did begin treatment, these I know about, there are probably dozens of others in my community struggling, too, those I don’t know.

I look at the healthy and amazing and inspiring college students I see walking around our local college campus, and I want to ask them if they know they are beautiful.

And by beautiful, I don’t mean skinny or stylish, air-brushed or pearl-adorned.

I mean inspiring and vibrant, intelligent and passionate, articulate and fun, wearing their skinny jeans and Toms shoes and colors and cuts I never thought would come back in style.

And the young women I know who also love to eat? Those who come to our house and eat the meals we serve and ask for seconds? Those who come to our Sunday school class and eat a donut? They make me happiest.

Because here I am, raising you, my beautiful, big girls, to be eaters.

Of course, I’m also raising you to know that you are beautiful and to be confident, with your solid frames and muscular legs, your clear blue eyes, and brown curly hair, and your dimples. I hope you keep the dimples.

“I so tall, Mommy,” the toddler tells me, as you make faces at yourself in the mirror. You love mirrors. Love them.

I know I can’t make you confident, but I can soak you in confidence, even now, sending those roots down deep to nourish you through the difficult years. Those difficult years will certainly come. But now, even now, I tell you how smart and gorgeous and funny and strong you are. How proud I am of you for the little things—the alphabet, the playdough, the painting, the singing for the toddler; the rolling, cooing, grabbing, observing, and jabbering for the chubbalub babe-ster.

And yes, I even tell you how amazed I am at the quantity of food you can pack away. Because it is awesome.

Stand tall, my girls.

Now let’s go eat a snack.

Your Momma

The Third Letter: The Important Things

/ Elizabeth

Dear Daughters,

I really like lists.

Before trips I make lists, we keep a running grocery list, and my journals have always consisted of lists upon lists—gratitude, to-do items, prayer requests, essay and blog and poem ideas. I write them on post-it notes, on the backs of envelopes and scrap paper, in the margins of books, on graph paper I keep on a clipboard. If you look in my purse, books I have only half-read, my striped go-everywhere bag, back pockets of unwashed jeans, under the seat in the car, you’ll probably find some of my lists.

When I was pregnant the first time around, I went on a retreat with one of the women’s groups from our church, and the theme of the weekend was “Of This I Am Certain.” Prior to the retreat, we were encouraged to think about the things that are most important to us and, what’s more, the things we hold deeply and with certainty.

I made a list:

* The red sock will always turn pink if you wash it with your 
    load of bleached whites.
* It is always better to invite someone in, to share food, 
    to listen, to cook from scratch.
* Few things in life are as rewarding as freshly baked bread.
* There will always be enough food at the potluck, so don’t 
   hesitate to invite more into your home.
* Exercise is never a bad idea.
* Checking your e-mail will always take longer than the 
   few minutes left on the oven timer.
* Community is hard work.
* Memorizing Scripture is always a good idea.
* Recording what you are grateful for will make you more grateful.
* Thank-you notes will never go out of style.

That’s it. And that’s the order the items came to me at the time. You’ll find the original list handwritten in the first pregnancy journal.

Maybe you can tell, but my train of thought has always been nonlinear (so less like a train and more like a… traffic jam), and I almost never number my lists—just bullet points, or check marks, or arrows. Actually, lots of arrows. And squiggles. And underlines and asterisks and usually multiple colors of ink, as I’ve gone back and added more items.

I’m really good at the brainstorming stage of the writing process, by the way.

When I was pregnant the second time around, I decided to write a second “Of This I Am Certain” list, without going back and reviewing the first. Only two years had passed, but I was curious what would strike me as worthy of being called “certain.” In that pregnancy journal, you’ll find these goodies:

* Hand-written notes are always a good idea, and 
   making them personal is important—thank yous, 
   condolences, encouragement, love.
* Coffee is good to drink for social reasons, but 
   tea is better.
* An item's value and quality is more clear after it’s been 
   handed down—that new leather couch might be fake leather 
   but you wouldn’t know it until it flakes off.
* Sitting, resting, reflecting, and making lists of 
   gratitude, of prayers, is what mental health is.
* Crying is okay. Never feel bad about it.
* Having friends who are older than you, who have 
   made it through, will get you through.
* Keeping in touch with people is all your responsibility. 
   If your friendships fade, blame yourself and do 
   something about it.
* Always invite someone to eat—there will be enough.
* Making bread for other people is never a bad idea.
* You shouldn’t write things down you don’t want other 
   people to read. Ever.
* You don’t need to clean up for guests, but organizing 
   the clutter might make you feel better, let’s be honest.
* There are always things you can do to help people.
* Public libraries are great resources.

It’s now a year after I wrote this list, three years after the first one. Are these the certain things?

You’ll notice that neither time did I think to put religious belief on these lists.

Why is that, I wonder? It seems strange, considering I am a Sunday school teacher, have been in the pew all my life, even when it was a folding chair at youth group, have been ordained as a deacon. You know. I’ve got the street cred of Christianity.

And I am happy to confess the creeds, which are, of course, lists.

Does an “Of This I Am Certain” list need to include an “I believe” statement? Should it all be “I believe” statements?

Huh.

Maybe the reason I didn’t include religious belief or faith issues here–didn’t even think to include them either time–is that I take the lists of religious belief for granted. That you’ll believe, too. That those are the easy things to believe.

The hard things to believe are the nitty-gritty people-in-your-home kinds of things, the dirt-on-your-floor kinds of things, the being-real-people-in-the-real-world kinds of things.

The being-hands-and-feet-of-Jesus kinds of things.

Which is really why we confess those other lists, right? We do these things because we believe those things.

At least, I hope you will do these things. Because they really are important.

I’m certain.

Your Momma

The Second Letter: Glimpses

/ Elizabeth

Daughters,

I made cookies during your nap this afternoon so I could eat the batter without the guilt of you wanting to eat some, too.

And I’m not even ashamed of it.

As I poured a bag of chocolate chips into a bowl of cookie batter, I remembered my grandma telling me that we could know how much she loved us by how many chocolate chips her cookies had in them. This was Ginny, my stepdad’s mom, and she was young and wonderful, and when we married into her family, she was ecstatic to have two more grandchildren–her other two lived overseas at the time. She loved us and told us so.

Ginny died of colon cancer the summer before my senior year of high school. It was the first real loss I remember feeling. My young faith at the time was certain she would be healed, and I felt that loss deeply.

I hadn’t thought about her chocolate chip cookies in quite some time.

The thing is, there is no concrete memory attached to the chocolate chip/love ratio comment, just a brief moment passing through, but it is myriad moments like that one I wish I could compile to pass on to you.

Oh, how I wish it. The ways we remember those we love. The quirks of this life. The things I remember, even if fleetingly, especially the things I remember about people and places. Maybe most especially the absences of people.

How can a list of moments be worth passing on? Who cares about chocolate chips? Or whether I ate way too much raw egg this afternoon for any single person to consume in a lifetime?

I don’t know.

But I do know that chocolate chips can, sometimes, take us to a moment in our past worth remembering, a person worth remembering. So can milk. Tomato soup. Basil. Meatloaf. Pie. Cinnamon sugar.

I’m serious.

When I pour milk into my tea every morning, I nearly always think of my maternal grandmother, the way the milk in her coffee swirled around and remained partially separate in her glass mug. This memory is so vague, in fact, I’m not sure it is a particular moment that ever happened, and yet it feels real, as if it happened many times in the old farmhouse we shared.

Once, after she moved into her new house, she burned tomato soup while I was visiting her. I told her it tasted burnt, and she told me that soup couldn’t burn. And then she tasted it. It did taste burnt. I was right. Did that really happen? True or not, I think of it when I make tomato soup on the stove. Every time. I try to be careful not to burn it.

I was cutting up basil with scissors the other evening to sprinkle on top of our Thai drunken noodles, and I remembered the first time I had pesto, remembered my mom slicing up the basil into skinny slivers to mix with the olive oil and pine nuts, remembered the homemade pasta from the machine that had a design flaw and broke repeatedly. I make pesto all the time now. In a food processor. With basil from our garden. But that was the first time, and I can see and smell and feel my mom’s kitchen on that evening before dinner.

On the rare occasions I eat meatloaf, I am transported to the kitchen island at my dad’s house with the high ceilings, the first time my stepmom offered to let me mix the meatloaf by hand. I can still feel that thawed-refrigerator-cold beef squishing between my fingers and into the slime of the raw egg and the sandy breadcrumbs and the squirts of ketchup. Such a vivid sensation I feel on my fingers when I eat meatloaf. It makes me smile because I am more likely to touch tofu than beef these days.

Watching your dad make pie–which he does quite heroically–always reminds me of my mom bending over the counter and carefully crimping the pie crust between the thumb of one hand and the index finger and thumb of the other.

When I open our herb cupboard and see the bottle of cinnamon sugar, I also see my brother and me carefully putting our cinnamon toast back into the toaster oven to melt the butter.

Can it be true that dozens of things throughout each day spark a memory, or at least an inkling, of a moment or a person? It is for me.

How about the way I fold towels or make a bed?

Or how ridiculously thick and soft I like my toilet paper?

Or how obsessive I am about Chapstick?

Or how awesome I am at identifying actors in movies?

All of these tidbits are part of the story I’ve lived and the people I have loved.

Which is really our story.

Because you’re part of this story now, too.

Your Momma