In Anticipation of Dark Before Dawn

My oldest daughter will be 10 this summer. She’s still my little girl in many ways. She still expects a stuffed bunny at Easter and still wants a hug at school drop-off. But she is also starting to use her bedroom as a private retreat and her friendships are becoming more defined. She can pack her own lunch and do a load of laundry and quote from Hamlet.

I am thrilled for her accomplishments and proud and sad and trepidatious for a future that I can’t write. How did this person grow from a baby, 4 pounds and change, to a girl who can use a sewing machine and a long bow and execute a grand plié. She has such a sense of fair play and believes so earnestly in rules. I appreciate this about her and yet life, even at not quite ten, is harder when the rules still seem so black and white.

I want life to be kind; I want the world to see this woman-in-the-making and appreciate and embrace her. And yet it won’t, always. If I think about it too much, it already hurts, pre-emptively. Her hurts, the ones she’ll necessarily accumulate just by living. You hope to teach your children resiliency and depth and kindness. Because we know they’ll need all three. And humor and grit and grace.

A while back I stumbled across this Mary Oliver poem, and I thought, “Yes. Yes, that.”

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.

There are a thousand different proverbs, quotations, poems and songs that say roughly this. Adversity is the best teacher. Smooth seas do not make for skillful sailors. But Mary Oliver’s poem took me back to half a dozen times and places in an instant: those moments when you offer up a gift that is nothing less than all of you, everything you have to give. And it’s not enough. Or perhaps worse, it’s received in a spiraling inequity that leaves you more alone than you think you can bear in a room without air.

A box full of darkness. An anti-gift that lets self-doubt sneak in. Parenting articles abound on how to create confident children. I read them. I appreciate them. I want to get that right. So often I wonder if I am.

As my children get older, I feel a sense of increasing urgency. In the middle of an otherwise ordinary moment, I’ll see a certain hair flip or the light will catch just right, and my heart stutters to realize that I only have so many more weeks and months and years to help nurture those seeds of resilience. And that no matter what I do, no matter how strong a foundation I hope to build, this amazing child will one day open a box full of darkness.

I hate it, and yet it’s somehow in that dark room with no air that we learn to breathe again. In. And out. Until we remember how. In that frozen moment of clarity when I catch a glimpse of the young adult surfacing in my no-longer-little child, I know I can’t and shouldn’t put her in a bubble.

Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. Friendships that faltered, relationships that failed, self-doubt and anxiety… But afterward, little by little, I’ve come to realize that a person can’t give themselves away to try to make another person whole. And that a personal identity can’t be built to anyone else’s specifications. That people will say no and people will walk away, people will take more than they give. That only means they aren’t the right people. That the slings and arrows often aren’t aimed at us so much as near us by someone still staunching their own wounds.

Life will hurt. Sometimes a little and sometimes a lot. In the end, the darkness isn’t the gift, the darkness just purely stinks, but coming through it – that’s the gift. If I can teach my children to just keep breathing, in… and out… I can’t live their darkness for them, but I don’t think it’s cheating to hold their hand.