My Wish

Hey Kid,

Every parent has dreams for their kid. I've been trying to keep mine to a minimum, just to keep you freed up for your own dreams. But yesterday I decided I could make one wish for you. Just one big wish, my main priority, and this is it: I want you to be yourself, unashamedly, so long as you're loving.

That sounds like hippie nonsense until you understand how far I'm willing to go.

It's got to be hard to be a parent. Hell, a person's only on her own for a couple of years, already plagued with her own failures, and suddenly she's got a fresh new person to fuck up. Why wouldn't you want your kid to somehow succeed where you failed? That's what I want. That would certainly prove I figured it out after all, wouldn't it?

My own parents played that game. My mom had a self-destructive period when she was a teenager and all she wanted was to save me from repeating her mistakes. She wanted me to be a good Christian who thinks the right way, because I know she felt that being a good Christian would have saved her from herself. But the funny thing is, the "right" thoughts weren't right for me. In fact, if I had kept on making myself think the "right" thoughts, I probably would have killed myself, because they didn't make sense to me. I don't know if they've figured that out yet. That would be hard for them to do.

Truth is, I really don't think you can keep from fucking up your kid. You just need to give them to tools to get past it once you're done.

But fucked up is fine for now. The world needs people who don't think RIGHT. It needs those people to shake things up, keep everyone from goose-stepping right over their own private cliffs. I don't just mean that the world needs non-conformists or artists or crazy people, although it does, but that the world also needs fundamentalists and policemen and politicians and schoolteachers and war-mongerers and people who pierce their penises and Swiss guards and little children who run around all day long screaming their heads off and women who sweat a lot and fat guys who watch too much TV and people who invent useless crap and it also needs me. And you.

Most of all, the world needs people who are willing to be themselves, because that's a brave thing, and we are full up with cowardice. It needs the kind of people who make up their own songs and sing them all by themselves in their own voices, who paint pictures that nobody else likes, who chase around a ball for no apparent reason, or who just lay down with no TV and nothing pre-recorded and dream up something that no one's ever thought of, just for fun. And I want YOU to be able to do any of those things if you want to--or just about anything else--which is why I plan to teach you that it's wonderful and goddamn miraculous to be yourself.

If I can offer you any one thing to aid that, you will know what love feels like--including the hard parts of love--because I think then you'll be okay. I ask myself, what if, in an extreme, you grow up and become a drag queen? What if I watch you face mockery at all sides, suffer alienation, perhaps die alone, perhaps of AIDS? If that day comes, I will tear at my face and wail and scream. But if I know you lived and died knowing who you are, acting on who you are, radiating love in whatever quiet way, then I'll have peace, knowing that your life made the world a better place.

I hope I have the strength to live these words down.

The world still wants its war-mongerers--I don't know why, but apparently it has decided that it does, because it keeps making them--and they change the world. But their deeds pale in comparison to those that love unashamedly. It's rare, but they do exist. I hope I can help you be one.

That's my one big wish.

I love you.



C.

You Don't Have to be Beautiful

Hey Kid,

Something alarming started happening a few years ago. I'd be out on one of my little body-hating sprees, complaining about my waist or my chin or my ass, looking for a little spritzing of compliments, and some implacable Buddha-type would invariably raise her doughnut eyes and lisp, "Everyone is beautiful." You know where that leaves a girl fresh out of self-validation? Out in the unenlightened cold, that's where.

I'd smile and say nothing but inside I'd get so mad. No, everyone is NOT beautiful! Saying so doesn't actually HELP anything. Why the hell should we believe you just because your version of, "All politicians are crooks," or, "All homosexuals are scary," makes a nice New Age soundbite? "All people are beautiful"?! We'd get a lot closer to understanding how you experience reality if you just said, "I am indifferent to my subtle reactions to the unique qualities of things."

Even the Tao Te Ching says that for something to be beautiful, something else, by definition, must be un-beautiful. It MIGHT be possible to say, "Every person is interesting," but then, by definition, you have to be able to point out things that are UNinteresting in the world, and then we start breaking hearts, and you feel like a jerk, and maybe we should have just kept our mouths shut, hm? Either we're willing to acknowledge that every thing has the capacity to uniquely assert its identity on our consciousness, or we shut up and drink tequila until everything looks good.

And besides, if everyone is beautiful, than I can only be incidentally beautiful, as opposed to stunningly beautiful, which is what I NEED TO BE IN ORDER TO BE OKAY.

On the other hand, this still leaves me obstinately feeling fat and ugly, which is my inalienable right as a female member of Western civilization. My mother felt fat and ugly, and her mother felt fat and ugly, and her mother before her felt fat and ugly, and if any of us stops sitting around talking about how fat and ugly we feel, why, it might just REND THE VERY FABRIC OF TIME!!

But I'll tell you this, kid, it hurts like hell. Those days where you can hardly make yourself leave the house because the mirror has crushed your soul like a bug? Those aren't good days. Those are days when I'm easy to push around. The thing is, "I" is more than my appearance, but on Ugly Days I forget that. On Ugly Days I let myself start believing the rest of me is as worthless as my the way I look, and that feeling lasts. It's lasted me into brief, vicious love affairs with mean, ignorant boys who weren't worth it, because I was looking for some kind of relief from the feeling of being unlovable. It's lasted me into despair.

And that's bad enough, but then I think of those boys I slept with because I didn't love myself, or the other people who felt fatter and uglier because a fairly thin, nice-looking woman like me said she was ugly. I taught those boys that if they could get a girl when she had no self-esteem, they could get the sex they wanted, no matter how mean or ignorant they were. I taught those people who listened that they should hate themselves too, setting them up for partners who won't respect them either. And what will all these people do when they have children of their own? Will they, in modeled steps, teach their kids to loathe themselves too? Will mean, ignorant people be allowed to control the whole world?

I don't want to do that to the world. I don't want to do that to you. I want to break the chain, rend the fabric of time, so that if only in me, you can see modeled a woman who refuses to capitulate to the fear of being ugly.

Having said that, I figured it out. If I object to defining everything that is as "beautiful," I have no right to define everything that I am by saying "I am ugly." The statement is equally reductionist. That "I" is not just my face or my hips. That "I" is my mind and my spirit. That "I" is my future. And since you are my future, that "I" is you. In fact, that "I" is everyone and everything that becomes unloved when I stop loving myself.

My goal, for you, and for the world, is to stop normalizing the idea that physical beauty and skinniness are the most important things. I'm just going to shut up about it. No more complaining, no more gazing glumly at the mirror. I might still struggle, but I don't need to spread it around. I don't need to teach it to you. You'll learn it on your own. But from me, you'll see that it's possible to rise above it. And if we can do that we will be, if not stunningly beautiful, still, absolutely stunning.

That's the plan anyway.



I love you.



C.

Garden Metaphors

Hey Kid,

I started my first grown-up garden this year, out on the balcony of this top-floor apartment Dav and I play house in. I'd always thought I had a brown thumb, but then I thought, hey, what would life be like if I stopped inventing reasons for why I can't do the things I most want to do? I mean, damn, it's only plants after all. I love plants. And all a plant wants is a few simple things: water, food, and light. I thought, if I can just give a plant what it needs and get out of its way, why shouldn't it grow?

So that's what I set out to do. I grew everything from roots and seeds, not seedlings like I'd always seen people do. I wanted to see with my own eyes that it was true, that plants want to live, you just have to make room for them to do it.

Almost everything came up. Except the parsley. I don't know what I did wrong on the parsley. But everything else was fine. Nasturtiums--those floppy orange flowers that people put on salads to be fancy--because they remind me of Santa Cruz, strawberries, raspberries, cilantro (if we still live in Montreal, you know it as coriandre), a lilac, two tomato plants, basil, and a wild columbine... Plus any number of little weeds and mosses that I ended up letting grow, at least for a while. When they first started popping up, I'll be honest, I was just so damn honored that some little seed would want to live in my dirt, like the place so much it'd move in without even asking, I didn't have the heart to tell it that it wasn't invited.

Right from the first, I fell in love with every inch of my little potted garden. I'd rush out three, four, five times a day to check on the seeds, hoping I might catch them in the instant of growth. I talked to them, pet their little leaves, and fed them faithfully. The instructions on the tomatoes said to trim off their dead leaves, so I did that too, with all the little plants, trying to help them be as perfect as they could possibly be.

But something sad happened. The tomatoes, well, tomatoes are fools for abuse. They loved the pruning. But as the days went by I began to see something was very not right with the nasturtiums, the ones I'd been looking forward to so much. I'd trim off a dead leaf, and then a new leaf would sicken. So I'd trim it off, and the nasturtiums just shrunk and shrunk and shrunk, until, with a heavy heart, I had to leave them alone while Dav and I went on vacation.

Which, of course, is how I learned the lesson I want to remember for you. It turned out, when I left the little nasturtiums' dead leaves alone, they flourished. God knows why, but they apparently just need to be allowed to die off a little bit at a time so they can make new leaves. When I let them do exactly what I'd told myself a plant could do, all on its own--that is, grow... given food and sunlight and water--when I stopped treating them like I knew what they needed better than they did, they were fine.

When I was in high school, my parents tried like crazy to trim off all my sick leaves, and I lived in a state of near constant anguish. I nearly killed myself then, just like my little nasturtiums almost did. I know my parents only wanted me to be the most perfect me I could be, only wanted me to stand there and let them cut away all my unsightly parts and become exactly what they imagined I could be. But it just made things so much worse. And when I finally got away, went to college where they couldn't force me to be or do anything, I began to flourish. I didn't self-destruct, I just shed what I didn't need. It took six years or so, but I got healthy again.

Whoever you turn out to be, I hope I can see you for what you are. I hope I can see what you really need, and not just treat you like some tomato. I hope I can at least have the sense to see when you're not thriving, you precious person, designed from birth to flourish with just a little food and care, and take my fool hands off so we can see what you really are.

I love you.


C.

Hello

Hey Kid,

I've been thinking about you for a long time. Even when I was nine, I was snatching my favorite books out of boxes headed to GoodWill, hoping that one day I might give them to you. You're still a figment of my imagination. The truth is, you may never exist, who knows? And, to be quite blunt, (and don't take this the wrong way), I've been trying to put off having you for as long as possible. But my reason doesn't really have that much to do with the usual business about freedom and responsibility. My real reason for not having you yet is that I don't want to screw you up.

There's a box of journals somewhere that I always meant for you to have someday. Sadly, they're boring as poop, unless you're somehow interested in your mother's teenage angst and boy problems. My thought was that it might help you to know that I wasn't perfect when I was your age, no matter how I might want to lie and pretend now. With any luck, you won't be overly-impressed by me anyway, but I hope that we'll respect each other. And so I wanted to be honest with you from the beginning, I wanted a reason to keep me honest with you. I figure that's something you can respect.

But now I feel inclined to try something even more specific. I'm 24 as of a couple weeks ago. I relocated from San Francisco to Montreal last year, accidentally, after a long, lonely road trip across America. I fell in love with the man I'm with now, Dav, and he is asleep in the other room. He's good to me, he's a kind, decent man. He turned 30 a few months ago, and he is wiser than I am. He keeps me somewhat balanced. I am not always balanced. You may have discovered this already. I'm so sorry. I have been trying to get myself under control before you come.

This is us:
The point is, he may turn out to be your Dad. He's at an age where all of his friends are starting to have kids. He has a job that's stable enough to support a family. And he loves me deeply. Since I love him very much too, I have to start thinking that we might have you in a few years.

Incidentally, if we're still in Montreal when you're reading this, please don't hate me. Could be worse. I could have moved to Phoenix. San Francisco was damn expensive.

The point of all of this is, these are letters to you, but also for me, of things that I am learning as I go, trying so hard to bear in mind for your sake. I'm going to try to write down everything I want to remember as I parent you. And I'm going to try to explain to you about my own Mom and Dad, so you know where I'm coming from. The truth is, we all learn how to be adults from our parents, for better or for worse, and despite all the pain I went through in becoming an adult, I deeply fear repeating my parent's mistakes, simply because I don't know any better. I love my parents now, at last, although with a certain level of foreboding, and I hope that nothing I say will come off as nasty. But you deserve to know.

And, of course, I'll tell you about me. Two years out of college, a degree in literature from the University of California at Santa Cruz, writing every day, some days thinking I understand so much, some days feeling like the world's greatest fool. Odd-looking, but kinda pretty, well-built, athletic, (well, who knows how you see me now). I'll post more pictures so you can see a little bit more of what I'm talking about--not just me, but my whole world.

I hope it's still a good world to live in by the time you get here.

I love you.


C.