letters

The Sixteenth Letter: Eleven Years In

/ Elizabeth

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Dear Daughters,

Eleven years ago today, your dad and I got married in a tall stone church on State Street in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. It was a hot June weekend in the Susquehanna River valley, and the roads near the church were roped off for a race. I saw family members who’d gotten stuck in traffic sneaking in just before I walked down the aisle.

We said in our wedding vows that we would serve God together, side by side.

Side by side.

Side by side for eleven years. Towering over most other human beings.

Two states, three graduate degrees, two apartments, two houses, four cars, two daughters, in eleven years.

We’ve lost five grandparents and found four nephews and two nieces in eleven years.

We’ve sanded down hardwood floors, painted and mudded walls and more walls and more walls, built a deck, planted gardens, strapped IKEA boxes on top of the Outback, dealt with motion sick babies. Eleven years.

We’ve walked with friends through divorce and remarriage, infertility and miscarriage. We’ve watched all ten seasons of FRIENDS an embarrassing number of times. We’ve entered the world of smart phones. Eleven years.

We’ve been published and—more often than not—received rejection letters. We’ve applied for jobs and not gotten them. We’ve gotten liturgical, begun eating locally, and started buying fair trade chocolate. Eleven years.

We’ve read a lot of books, written a lot of poems, attended a lot of Over the Rhine concerts. We’ve stopped drinking any tea in the morning that isn’t PG Tips. We eat Thai food on Tuesdays. Eleven years.

We’ve gone to Italy and slept in an airport in Atlanta. We’ve roadtripped it to the Grand Canyon and rented cars in Seattle. We’ll always call Pennsylvania home, but have managed to plant deep roots wherever “here” is. Texas. Kentucky. Eleven years.

We’ve gotten a little preachy on our soapboxes, stronger in our convictions, and urgent in our causes. We also go to bed earlier. Eleven years.

We’ve started going gray. Taking a little longer to recover from hard work days. Wrinkling around the eyes when we smile. Eleven years.

I’ve asked your dad many times over the last eleven years—“Do you think everyone has as much fun as we do?”

Because we have a lot of fun.

Not that there haven’t been tears and frustrations and anger and tears. Lots of tears. Life is hard and marriage is harder. Those months and years after having babies? The hardest. At least for me.

And eleven years in? Still hard.

But still fun, too.

I can’t imagine being side by side with anyone else.

I don’t know what our marriage will look like to you, growing up in this house. You’ll see the tears sometimes, and you’re both already such sensitive and sweet girls. But you’ll also hear the laughter and joking, the singing and dancing. You’ll see the book reading, you’ll hear the soapboxes, you’ll eat the tofu. And you’ll probably tower over everyone, too.

Regardless, as your dad and I serve God together, side by side, I love knowing that we’ll have you toddling along behind.

Stay close.

Love,

Your Momma

The Fifteenth Letter: Less Is More & Being Sincere

/ Elizabeth

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Dear Daughters,

There’s a shop I frequent in my little town, and there’s a really friendly woman who works in this shop. The first time I went in when she was working, she complimented my hair. Ironically, I was about to go get my hair cut, so I told her so and kind of laughed about it. She proceeded to tell me how lucky I was to have waves in my hair—was it natural? Yes, it was, always has been, trust me—because she used to be, or maybe still was, a hairstylist and she knew about these sorts of things things. It felt a little awkward to continue the conversation, so I mostly just shrugged it off since, well, I like my hair super short and I was getting it cut regardless of this woman’s opinion.

But, of course, it was nice to be told how rockin’ my hair was by a stranger.

Another time I went into the shop, the same woman was working and she asked me about the boots I was wearing. She said she’d been looking for a pair of boots and mine were really amazing boots—the exact thing she’d been looking for. Then we talked about them for quite a few minutes: what brand they were (Keen), where I bought them (Amazon), how comfortable they were (very), how last year’s styles are significantly cheaper.

And they are great boots. I’m a jeans-tucked-into-my-boots kind of gal. I will sing the praises of my boots to just about anyone who wants to hear it.

Still, call me cynical, but as the conversation went on, I couldn’t help but wonder about how over-the-top her interest in my boots was. I didn’t doubt that she liked the boots, but it seemed odd that she liked them That Much.

A few minutes later, a friend of mine came into the shop and I heard this same woman interact with her. I listened from across the room. This time it was how gorgeous my friend’s shirt was. She went on and on about it.

As I listened in, I began to question my own motives in complimenting other people. How often do I cross the line from complimenting, making conversation, and chitchatting into the territory of telling lies? And then I got philosophical about whether or not it matters.

Don’t get me wrong—this shop woman might have been telling the truth. Maybe she makes a conscious effort to find something beautiful in every person who comes into the shop—our hair, our clothing, our funky glasses. And then she voices her genuine appreciation in an attempt to boost our self-esteem, brighten a customer’s day, or, even more simply, to make conversation.

It does break the ice, after all, to tell someone how good she looks.

But what if it isn’t sincere? What if you tell someone she has amazing hair and she really doesn’t? Well, it probably is not a big deal and, what’s more, it will probably make her feel pretty great.

But no harm, no foul? I’m not sure.

Your dad does not tell the parents of a newborn that their child is cute if he doesn’t think the child is. I’m serious. He’ll say something kind—look at those eyes! So much hair! What tiny hands!—but it won’t be that the child is cute or beautiful if, quite honestly, he doesn’t think so.

Because he thinks honesty matters and there’s no reason to use a dishonest statement as the basis of a conversation. He’s still complimentary, he’s still making conversation, and he’s still being positive and encouraging to new parents.

But not all babies are cute.

I know that I like to compliment people. And I know that I’ve caught myself telling someone she looks good or that a shirt is beautiful when I don’t particularly think it’s true.

I don’t think it matters.

Or, I should say, I don’t think it matters to a degree.

But what if we get into the habit of telling these fibs? That’s where it gets fuzzy for me.

Well, for one thing, too many fibs, even positive ones—maybe especially positive ones—can make us seem insincere, whether we are or not.

Because that’s how I also felt in the shop that day—when I heard my friend being effusively complimented. I didn’t think, “Gosh, she does look pretty awesome today.” I thought, “I bet that woman didn’t even like these boots.”

I don’t want to overemphasize this example because, quite honestly, my feelings weren’t hurt. I don’t care if someone likes my boots. That’s trivial.

But it could matter in other instances.

And feelings could get hurt.

The point is that when I heard someone else going overboard with the compliments, it made me want to be more circumspect when offering my own praise.

It made me want to be more genuine.

It made me want to be sincere when I offer a compliment or an encouragement.

Because I want my words to matter.

And that’s what I guess I want to tell you today. Your words do matter.

Less is more. Be sincere.

Love,

Your Momma

The Fourteenth Letter: Privacy Fences

/ Elizabeth

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Dear Daughters,

We hired a local company to put up a fence for us a few weeks ago.

We’d talked about it for awhile, mostly in terms of safety and keeping you hemmed in a bit, but we knew it would have to be a pretty long fence and we couldn’t decide how to partition off the yard.

Houses in our 1950s neighborhood are pretty close together–though not nearly as close as those of most of my suburbia friends. Still, on one side, we’ve got a double driveway separating us from our neighbors. Or “joining us intimately to our neighbors” is perhaps a better way to put it, given the impossibility of keeping our lives separate from theirs, even if we wanted to. So there’s no place for a fence on that side.

On the other side, well, we’ve got an extra lot. It’s all wonderful green grassy yard, except the part we’ve dug up to plant a garden and the old, precariously still-standing trees. On that extra lot is a decades-old swing set, the pine-tree-green painted metal kind I played on as a kid. Perhaps because it is such a retro swing set, or because that extra lot is also on the corner of our block, the neighbor kids like to swing on it.

We’ve welcomed and encouraged them to play in our yard for the five years we’ve lived in this house, but it’s really only been this summer that they’ve finally started doing so. It helped that it got so hot back on mother’s day weekend that we got out the impressive kiddie pool and acquired a sandbox. But even during the preceding weeks, that ancient swing set became the highlight of the neighborhood, it seemed.

The more the yard got used by you and by the neighbors, the more we really wanted a fence. A picket fence. Four feet tall. Spaces between each slat. It wasn’t to block everyone out, just to keep them safer.

So we had a local fencing company come and give us an estimate, and then finally, after many weeks of rain, they arrived to build the fence. We knew they would do it in two days–the first day, placing all the big brace posts, and the second day, putting up all the pickets. It would seem miraculous.

And it kind of was.

Except that the posts they sunk into the ground the first day were all eight-footers. Eight-foot posts, every few feet, all the way around the immense side yard. It looked like we were building a fortress.

The truth is, I kind of judge people who have privacy fences, at least the kind of privacy fences that are keeping their yards private from the road. Sure, I understand putting up a tall fence along property lines–that’s what we did along the back, given the plethora of sheds and outbuildings and a leaky swimming pool our neighbors to the rear have–but, well, privacy fences are just so unwelcoming.

Which I suppose is the point.

After that first day, with these enormous posts in our yard, I worried that people might be judging us. I wanted to shout at every car that drove by: “Wait until tomorrow! It’s not a privacy fence! I promise! It will be pretty! Don’t judge us!”

And that is ridiculous, I realize. Nobody cares what kind of fence you put in your yard. At least, most people don’t. I tried to reassure myself.

But then a friend of mine came to visit that afternoon, and one of the first things she said, when I pointed out that the posts would be cut down to four feet tall, once the pickets were up, was “I was going to say, you sure don’t seem like privacy fence kind of people.”

Then we invited neighbors over for an impromptu dinner out in the yard, and one of them said, looking at the eight-foot posts, “I didn’t think you seemed like privacy fence people.”

So apparently I’m not the only one who has a category of “privacy fence people” in their minds.

The good news: We don’t seem like those kind of people.

The bad news: Our posts made us look like those kind of people.

It didn’t matter in the long run, of course. Within two days, we had the fence built and trimmed down to size. But it did get me thinking about what “kind of people” we are and how we present ourselves to our neighborhood.

We’re community folks. We’re hospitality folks. We’re it’s-okay-to-invite-friends-in-for-dinner folks. But do our neighbors know that?

I can say that I want our yard to be a welcoming place for the neighbor kids, but I don’t know the names of our older neighbors directly across the street from us. It’s awkward, five years in, but we’ve remained in that wave-from-a-distance kind of relationship. Trying to remedy this, I did walk their little dog back over to their house the other day when she showed up in our yard, and as a result I learned the dog’s name is Daisy. The dog’s name.

It’s a start, I guess.

I’m glad that people who know us know that we aren’t privacy fence people.

But what kind of people are we? Well, I suppose that’s always a good question to ask yourself.

Love,

Your Momma

 

 

The Eleventh Letter: Unbelievable Things

/ Elizabeth

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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 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 First Letter to My Daughters

/ Elizabeth

Daughters,

There’s a small framed photograph in the hallway outside the downstairs bathroom, just above the thermostat.

From the wood paneling in the background, I’m pretty sure it was snapped in the late eighties in our apartment in Grantham, Pennsylvania, where my dad finished up his BA at Messiah College. This one is a color copy of the original, slightly grainy and dark. In the image, my great-grandmother is flanked by my mom and my grandma, and my brother and I are standing in front of them. Four generations of women. I’m probably about seven years old.

I pause and look at this photograph a few times a week. I can remember my great-grandmother’s passing a handful of years after this photo was taken, perhaps the first funeral I attended, and I remember my grandmother’s passing, just a few years ago.

What strikes me about this image is that my mom is now older than my grandma was in this photo.

I am grateful for the good relationship I have with my mom. We text and FaceTime and talk on the phone regularly. She’s come to stay with us after your births, though missing each of them by only a few hours. She’s called me for recipes, I’ve called her for garden advice.

This may seem strange, but I realized something recently: As good as our relationship was and is and will continue to be, I just don’t remember my mom as she was in this picture. In her thirties. Before the divorce. Just having finished her RN degree. With a big perm.

I am in my thirties.

The interesting thing about aging is that I don’t remember people as they were in old photographs; I can only remember them as they are now. I see snapshots and think that I remember moments, but I don’t really know the people as they were. I can’t hear their laughter or see the way pants puckered or smell the perm. I don’t remember what worried them or what they watched on TV. It’s as if my mom was always the mom she is now.

I love my mom in her sixties. She’s amazing. And way more fashionable than she was when this photo was taken, by the way.

But what was she like in her thirties?

That’s what this blog is about, I suppose. Trying to offer a small piece of who I am so that you will know and you will remember. Trying to help you know the me I was when you arrived on the scene, the me I was when I was learning what it meant to be a mother, the me you’ll hopefully still be able to find in the me of my sixties. Or seventies. The me who struggled a lot and cried a lot, but also loved a lot and cultivated a life of community and courage and compassion around her daughters.

Basically, I want you to know me.

Welcome to my world, girls.

Your Momma