Category Archives: family

Decembering

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This month needs to be its own verb. The lists alone are ridiculous. I keep meaning to update, but haven’t had five minutes to think. I’ve been…

…birthdaying!

Noelle and I have birthdays four days apart in December. Here are her packages waiting to be opened (it’s spy gear. She loves it. New post soon about the gendered boy/girl aisles at Target.)

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She also got her ears pierced, a long-awaited milestone. When I asked her if she wanted me to get my nose pierced so that she wouldn’t be the only one, she said, “No, then I would cry.” Thinking she was being sweet, I said, “Oh, are you worried it would hurt mommy?” She just tilted her head, “No, I would cry because I would be embarrassed. You just don’t have nose ring style.” She begged me the whole time not to get my nose pierced. At least it distracted her from worrying about her own ears!

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For my birthday, Jonathan and the girls bought this beautiful antique locket from our favorite store on South Congress, Uncommon Objects. This is me laughing at myself while I take my own picture. I love my locket, though.  And I love layering it with my Hill Triber jewelry. It’s to put a picture of the new baby in when we finally get matched from China before we get her. That’s the time I’m most worried about–I hate waiting.

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We have her stocking up with her first little present from us, the Hill Tribers doll I love. When we hung up her stocking, Joy said, “I sure really miss my new sister.”

Me too.image

And then, when I’m not handling birthdays and pre-school programs and Christmas parties and teacher gifts and adoption paperwork, there are my two constant active verbs…

…hilltribering. We have had outrageous Hill Tribers sales (we’re at 250% growth in website sales alone). Sometimes Caren lets me come play at the shipping center with her awesome tape gun.

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…and dissertating. I am editing the heck out of chapter 2 to send in a draft before Christmas. I think my post-it note system is genius. Jonathan is pretty sure I’m becoming the guy in A Beautiful Mind.

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But I spend a lot of time scribbling in the margins because I have to be finished in the next six months. I want to reclaim December next year. Only fun writing from now on.

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So if I’m not updating in the next few days, it’s because I’m Decembering my heart out.

I Have Loved You for a Thousand Years

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I’m obsessed with this song. I realize that it’s probably the teeny-bop song of the summer and that it was part of the Twilight soundtrack and that on the youtube page, Christina Perri says that her friend “wrote it for bella + edward.” Which makes it perhaps a little bit ridiculous that as an adult woman I keep playing it over and over on iTunes, but I don’t really care. I was sitting in my car in the hot parking garage on campus the other day, almost late for a meeting, and I couldn’t turn my car off because I heard this song for the first time on the radio.

I heard lyrics that hit me hard, like “I have died every day waiting for you.” The tension of waiting for this next child to come home is already too much and I don’t know her name or her face or anything about her other than that she exists and we’re moving as fast as we can toward each other. We haven’t even been matched yet; she still a concept, not a little quirky person who will fit right into our family. We haven’t had our home study or sent in our child preferences profile. We have miles to go before I start getting overly emotional about teeny-bop songs in parking garages.

My friends who have been through international adoptions are probably rolling their eyes or chuckling to themselves and thinking, “Dang, you have a long road ahead of you.” And I’ll just laugh at myself and say back, “I had no idea.” I really, truly didn’t know, the way you can’t really know anything until you head down that path, what this was going to look like. Just waiting and laying myself open and holding my heart ready for a love that is coming, it’s brutal and it’s beautiful all at once.

So excuse me while I crank this song up again just a few more times and sing at the top of my lungs, ”every breath has come to this…One step closer.”

A Good Man Is Hard to Find

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Dear Noelle and Joy,

I realize, at 5 and 3, that you are too young to be worried about the man you’re going to marry. Oh, you talk about your wedding day, since you were the baby flower girls in my cousin’s wedding, and you love to imagine yourselves twirling around in a floofy white dress. But the sooner you learn, the better you’ll be: a wedding isn’t a marriage. It’s a five-hour moment in your life that will pass in an instant, one you will remember with nostalgia and laughter (seriously, no one told me to pluck my eyebrows!).

The long hard slog that follows, the decades of work and toil and agony and joy, those are the things that concern me the most.

Let me start by saying the most important thing of all–you don’t need to get married. You don’t need a man. You need to define yourself as yourself in the Lord’s eyes, not yourself as your friends see you or your job sees you or a man sees you. You are you and that is more than enough, because the “you” that you two are becoming is glorious and strong and brilliant and funny and beautiful and holy and good. Never let anyone tell you that you are less or half. You are capable of standing on your own two feet. You are gifted and unique. You are all that you will ever need to be.

If you choose to get married, make sure you’re looking for the kind of man that I married. I cannot imagine a more wonderful example than your dad. As a parent and as a partner, he’s all I want for your husbands some day. But finding a man like him is not easy.

When you look for a husband, find a man who loves you and respects you as his equal. Make sure he cherishes you for who you are. He needs to think your gifts and interests are fascinating and not threatening. I hate this so much, but there will come a day when someone will say to you that you are “too much.” There might be men who will tell you that what they told me, either blatantly or subtly: “You’re not the kind of girl I want to find.” Once, at the end of a date, one guy let me know rather rudely it wasn’t going any farther because I’d always “wear the pants” in the relationship. (I should have told him it wasn’t going any farther because he was a jerk and, besides, we were both wearing shorts.) The kind of girl those guys are looking for will be gentle and quiet and easy to be around. Good for her. I wish them well.

You were born of different stock. The women in our family stand up loudly and firmly in the face of injustice. We speak out for the good of our community. We listen and we love and we cultivate gentleness, but we’re not afraid to use our voices. We are teachers and leaders and visionaries. We have a spice that makes life delightful even if it’s a bit hard to swallow on occasion. If your fits are any indication right now, your strong wills are on the way to becoming righteous indignation and fierce determination.  I’m so sorry if it’s hard for you as you grow older, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The first time your dad heard me speak to a group of people in college, I was waiting for that moment when he worried how my gifts reflected on him. But he didn’t. Not once. He gave me a huge hug and his eyes lit up and he told me I did great. And it’s been that way every time he’s ever heard me speak or teach in the last twelve years. He knows who he is, what his gifts are, what he likes to do, who he is called to be. So do I. Our various callings do not negate or threaten or lessen each other. It is glorious and freeing to be married to a man who adores me exactly the way I am.

Some day, when you grow a little older, you’ll realize that the roles in our household are a bit different from other people. It used to be, and still is in some places, that moms take care of the kids and the house while dads work outside the home. In our home, we mix it all up. Some days Mommy works and Daddy stays home; other days we switch. Daddy gives you baths and puts you to bed every night, then comes downstairs to take care of the dishes while Mommy works on her dissertation. Daddy does all the grocery shopping, with his spreadsheet on that adorable clipboard he uses, and takes you girls and a bag of snacks with him every time. (You get irritated when I take you shopping–”This isn’t how Daddy does it!”) Daddy mows and Mommy cooks, but that’s because we like to do those things.

When you’re looking for a husband, try to find a man who is hungry to be with his children, who hurries home from work for extra cuddle and wrestle time before dinner, who fights to be the person that takes his girls to birthday parties just for the joy of watching them jump in the bouncy castle. Find a man who never uses the verb “babysit” for his own children.  Look for someone who gets a bit annoyed at all the comments he gets in the grocery store or at princess parties or in pre-school, as if his involved parenting is unusual or he’s doing his wife a favor.

It is imperative that you find a good man who thinks, like you will, that the purpose of his life is to help and serve others. Ideally, he would be as generous as your father, who never buys himself anything and always has room in his well-organized budget for homeless people and refugees and friends in need. He should be strong (even if that strength lends itself to stubbornness) and tender. His heart should break for children in need. He shouldn’t begrudgingly allow you to do ministry or adopt, he should partner right beside you in those projects. He should be so ready to get his next baby girl home in his arms that he pushes through paperwork to get to China faster.

Make sure you find someone who loves to spend time with you. He should be your best friend, your favorite companion, your confidante and your partner in crime. He shouldn’t be your only friend (good girl friends are second in importance to a good husband) because that is too much pressure to put on any relationship. But he shouldn’t find you annoying, shouldn’t criticize and nitpick. You shouldn’t do those things either. He might not do laundry the way that you’d like, but your criticism will only serve to push him away. Trust him, love him, let go of a few pink socks and realize you mess up (with the laundry and other things) all the time anyway. Travel together. See each other in new lights. Spend time alone sitting in silence watching people go by in an airport or a city square. Cultivate memories that involve just the two of you–the restaurants you ate in, the mountain tops you’ve explored, the weird people you’ve seen. The memories of bright moments you shared together will lighten the dark days that come.

If you find someone like that, it might be worth getting married to him. And there’s a slim chance your father will not chase him away from the house with a shotgun. I’m already working on him to stop giving every little boy who comes near you the stink-eye. We’ll make a deal–in twenty years, you bring home good men who love the Lord and love you for the women he created you to be and I’ll work on your father to be sweet when the time comes.

With love,

Mama

Taking a Minute

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Sometimes in the mad, mad rush of my daily life, giving my babies my all and squashing the rest in the tiny margins I leave, I  breathe in and am grateful.

It’s not easy, but I’m doing this thing. I’m raising these babies with this intriguing man who fascinates and pushes and engages me daily and who loves us enough to hold two girls in his lap at lunch so I could finish my taco in peace.

I’m writing these words. I’m teaching these students. I’m loving these women with whom I’m forging a beautiful and unlikely community.

I think that if little Jessica could have known those many years ago when she worried where she’d end up, she’d be pretty glad.

Walking down this gorgeous hallway outside my cube, in the cool of a spring evening on my way to teach, I felt deeply, deeply grateful to be this girl in this life with these people.

Raising Dirty Kids

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We took our girls over to play at their cousins’ house the other day and they had a blast. It’s not because there were all kinds of toys and playground equipment in the backyard–it’s because the five oldest kids spent as much time as they could playing in a pile of dirt. They poked it with sticks. They moved it around with shovels. They saved insects and found roly-polies. By the time we were ready to go, my girls had dirt on their hands and dirt between their toes and they were as happy as two little clams.

I remember hot days playing outside until it was too dark to see, running barefoot through my neighbors’ yards, climbing trees and building forts. I remember the feel of unfettered freedom, of summer afternoons when boredom led to the most elaborate pretend games I could create with some carboard boxes and a handful of markers. I remember dust and bugs and skinned knees. I want to raise girls like with the same kind of dirt-in-my-fingernails childhood I enjoyed.

It’s become increasingly rare to find neighborhoods where kids on bikes ride anywhere they want. I don’t see many kids dangling from trees from their knees. I don’t come across pick-up games of soccer in the street.

Except when we go to visit our refugee friends. There, in some of the lower-end apartment complexes in Austin, I find kids hanging off of porches, yelling at each other in soccer matches, running to their friends’ houses, playing with chalk on the sidewalk, laughing, talking, and playing in a tumble of childhood that is really, really appealing to me.

I want my kids to be like these kids. I want them to know how to be dirty. I want them to be friends with people that look different from them. I want them to fit right into the sweaty, childish bunch.

And yet.

Many of the words these children yell are not the words my kids hear at home. The way their friends talk to each other is not in the same tone my sheltered pre-schoolers are used to. The subject these kids bring up are sometimes too adult for six- or seven-year-olds to ever be discussing, much less around my beloved and sensitive babies.

There are certainly times when I’ve intervened, and I watch my little girls like a hawk while we’re there. But I still let them run and play ring-around-the-rosy or hopscotch or paint their nails. I let them climb all over refugee apartments, hiding from their little playmates who watch them for how to play this new American game. I let them wander and get sweaty outside with their friends, some of whom are their age and some of who are much older both in years and experience. And, on occasion, they hear things they might not otherwise hear.

My goal isn’t to protect them from everything that could hurt them. It’s to teach them in age-appropriate ways how to enter the muck and the mire of the world, to see those who are dirty and different, and to be comfortable being their friend.

I want to be really clear–I don’t think the children we are around when we go to these apartments are dirty, or that their houses or dirty, or that their lives are dirty–I mean that things have happened to these kids I want to protect my babies from. War, divorce, poverty, drug use, abandonment, loss, pain–these are the things that have touched the lives of my kids’ precious playmates. These are the types of things no child should know.

In the last year, our oldest daughter has gotten particularly sensitive about this. There are a lot of times when I wonder whether or not we’re teaching her too much about the injustices in the world, but I’m not sure how to tell her about some things and not others. She’s obsessed with governments, who is “grumpy” (like Burma) and who is not (like the U.S.). She’s worried about our translator’s wife, who is still stuck in Malaysia because of bureaucracy, and wonders if that’s going to happen to her parents. We assure her it won’t, but she, like her mother, is probably always going to be stuck in the deep end of the pool. It occurred to her one day that all of her Hill Triber friends had to leave their country because of their grumpy goverment. It hurt her heart, but in a sweet way that’s made her want to help her friends even more.

While I would love to protect her all her life, I can’t, so I want to begin now teaching her how to deal with a world that is full of so much dirt. She will face it soon–elementary school begins next year. If time keeps racing ahead like it has the last five years, in ten more minutes she will be standing at a graduation ceremony with a lifetime ahead of her without us there to guide her every moment. Our time together is short and we are making the most of it.

Because when she stands there, I don’t want her to be a precious hothouse flower who has spent her childhood being sheltered from all of the things that make up life. I want her to be a hardy, outdoor plant who can spread her roots deep in the soil and weather a storm well. I want her to be independent, imaginative, confident, well-traveled, full of experience and ready to take on the world.

To do that, we have to get dirty together.

Why We Want to Adopt

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I hate answering why we want to adopt. It’s a question that comes up formally in our adoption process and casually when Noelle walks up to the other moms at preschool or strangers at the grocery store and says, “We’re getting a new baby from China!” Putting this choice into words is hard for me because the reasons are both so simple and so complex that it’s hard to say. I’m always curious how other adoptive parents answer that question. It’s certainly not because we want to “save” a child, though it probably was when I dreamed about it in high school. We moved past that a long time ago. For us, perhaps the easiest way to explain it, is that it’s part of our story.

We want to adopt because in our work with Burmese refugees, we’re familiar with the shell-shocked look of someone walking into an overwhelmingly new city and culture. I’ve picked refugees up from the airport and seen the stoicism that is a protective outer shell. As time goes on and they become more comfortable, I’ve watched adults loosen up and smile when I thought they were only serious and silent. I’ve watched grief fade as people put down roots in their new homes. We’ll be raising our new baby in a community of children that will look much like her and maybe understand a bit of where she’s coming from.

We want to adopt because we know that even though they put down roots, nothing can replace what is lost. Last week, our precious translator, Dr. Selai, told us stories of his 84 years of life. He described songs in the Chin language (his particular hill tribe) that no one remembers any more. He pointed with his chin at the children in the room who will have no idea of the dangers their parents went through as they became refugees. He mentioned the memories that are lost with each generation that gets further and further away from their roots in Burma. His voice was limned with tears. There is hope in their new life, and great joy, but the loss is ever- present.

We want to adopt because before Jonathan’s father was killed by a drunk driver, his parents were on their way back as missionaries to Brazil to adopt two girls. I’ve known since before we ever dated that bringing home two little girls was one of my husband’s dreams.

We want to adopt because we think that living a life that is interruptible is the hardest and most staggeringly important thing we can do. This is especially true for planners like us. We will have to adjust our lives around this child rather than molding her to fit our dreams. We will interrupt our narrative to tell a new kind of story as a family.

We want to adopt because once we loved three children in Brazil enough to take them home and make them ours. We couldn’t for a variety of reasons: we were 24, with no means to adopt. The oldest was 13, and by Brazilian law there has to be more years between the adoptive parents and the child. We moved like nomads for the next few years and had no place to bring these children home. By the time the dust of our lives settled, they were no longer living in the children’s home: the oldest was adopted into another family, the second living with someone else, the baby living with an aunt somewhere. I lost track of them for a long time and finally reconnected over facebook (of all things). I wondered, before I had children, if I would realize that the love I felt for them was passing, a placeholder before the love of my own children took over. I realized the opposite–I had always loved them more than enough to be their mother. And though the decisions we made were good ones, I still keep a picture of those babies by my desk and I love them fiercely. They carved out a space in my heart that is aching for them and for them alone.

We want to adopt because there is another hole in our family that our biological children can’t and shouldn’t fill. They are exactly what we’ve always wanted and enough, even as their younger siblings who don’t look like them will be. I’ve always wanted an armful of children and I’ve always known some of them wouldn’t be blonde. It’s always been when, not if, we adopt.

We want to adopt because it fits so well the story we’re living. It’s just the next chapter. We can’t wait to meet our newest little character.

Dumptruck in a Disney Bag and a Clean-Up Dog

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Our little Joy turned three last Saturday. Joy is a great name for her because she is so completely full of giggles. For her birthday, we went to San Antonio for the weekend because a family get-away sounded more fun for everyone than a party. We’re lucky to have a big family in town who get together for birthdays and have enough children to be a ready-made party, so we’ll have cake with cousins at the end of the month. We went to Sea World the day before her birthday on what was the weirdest cold and rainy day we’ve had in months–I love Texas. Of course it was 45 degrees on March 9. We went to the Rain Forest Cafe for lunch on her actual birthday and the waitress told her she was the jungle princess right before they sang “Happy Birthday,” so she’s been telling me she’s a jungle princess as if it’s a real role she has to work hard to fill.

When she woke up on her birthday, Joy just started giggling and she didn’t stop. She’s asked for two things for the last several weeks: a dumptruck and a clean-up dog. As far as I can tell, a clean-up dog is her own invention. She wants a real dog that will clean all her toys up with its mouth and vacuum for her (don’t we all?). In desperation, I took her to a toy store to give me a clue what she meant and immediately, she fell in love with this little creature:

Which of course makes sense, since the dog looks just like a dust buster. I bought her the cute broom and dustpan set and put them in a box. When she opened the Disney bag that held the dumptruck and unwrapped her weird little clean-up dog, she was so excited. I love her at this age–she knows exactly what she wants and she’s happy as a lark when she gets it. I only hope every birthday is as successful as this one for our quirky, adorable little girl.

Nothing a Little Sunshine Can’t Fix

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The air outside was already warm and we had walked outside as soon as we could get out into the sunshine. Our lawn mower broke just as someone decided to replace my yard with grass from Jurassic Park–the constant drizzle the last few weeks means it’s growing almost in front of my eyes. Still, we braved grass to Joy’s knees to spend some time outside. While Joy “mowed” with her little bubble mower and Noelle swung as high as she could, I rigged a clothesline along the fence.

As I began to hang up the delicate pieces of tatting, Noelle walked up and said, “Mom, are you hilltribering again? Can I help?” I laughed, because there it is, the verb that summarizes so much in our lives. She held the clothespins and handed them to me one at a time while I attached bracelets to the string on our fence.

We have a new project for our Hill Triber women making wholesale bracelets for one of my favorite vendors ever, Noonday Collection. We’re friends with the founder, Jessica, through our friend Meagan who teaches ESL with us. When Meagan introduced us, it was kindred spirits as first sight. We’re so excited to be making bracelets that Jessica helped us design that they then turn around and sell. Wholesale is the direction we want to go in as a non-profit because it allows us to focus on our women rather than designs and marketing. This collaboration with Noonday is a great chance to test it out.

Our artisan who hand-tatted each beautiful strip that would become a bracelet is definitely a giver. She’s also drying mustard for her friends. When you go to her apartment, there’s a long line of drying mustard hanging out on the balcony. As you can imagine, that pungent smell seeped into the cloth. So I hung them out in the sun. A little Febreze and some sunshine made a world of difference.

While I hung them outside, the girls looked for snails and camouflaged bugs in the tall grass, then waited for what seemed like hours trying to catch butterflies on their fingers. We watched the two squirrels that live in our tree outside chase each other along the fence. We saw airplanes fly overhead. A group of grackels landed in the grass next door and a hawk circled high above us for awhile. I brought out my camera because I wanted to capture every curve on my children’s faces. Eventually we went in for lunch. And I felt deeply grateful for a morning in the sunshine, hilltribering and meandering.

Mommy Identity

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I hadn’t thought about losing or reclaiming my identity when I entered into motherhood. We just wanted a baby. But in the years since I became a mother, I’ve been shocked by the depths of the identity crises I see around me. I know I’m not the only one who feels this way.

But it’s not just motherhood that impacts my identity. In the last ten years, I’ve been a graduate student, non-profit director, writer, English teacher, missionary, editor, and stay-at-home mom, all while being a wife, daughter, sister, friend and Christian. Each of these roles have been attached to a specific culture with clearly understood cultural values and identity markers.

And we live in a culture where we identify ourselves daily. We write and shape the narrative of our identities by the clothes we wear, the events we attend, the way we update our facebook, who we follow on Twitter, how we blog about ourselves. How we present ourselves has never been as important as it is in our media-saturated, wordy world.  Navigating the roles in my life has wrung me out.

This is not about self-esteem, and it’s certainly not about post-partum depression, which is a unique and discrete category (a clinical diagnosis shouldn’t be confused with identity issues because of change, even if some of the language is the same). It’s about having to choose between multiple identities that I find most stressful and most interesting about my stage of life. I truly had no idea five years ago, when I was a few months away from having my first child, that I would have to stake out this identity for myself.

None of the books really covered that part.

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What about you? What issues of identity have you had to wrestle with? Has it been stressful? Freeing? Both?

A Skinny Girl, Sitting on a Train, Going Someplace

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I adore my children fiercely. I cannot imagine life without their precious, precocious, hilarious antics every day. And the moment I blogged about yesterday, in the Cracker Barrel parking lot, was certainly not the worst or the craziest thing my kids have done or will do. It wasn’t the worst diaper or the worst fit I had faced; Noelle threw a bigger fit about taking a bath that night.

The frustration I felt was at a deeper level, triggered by, but not really about, my children’s diapers and fits that day. I framed my frustration in terms of identity, which is something that has stood out to me over the years in the many moments I’ve felt that way. In the Cracker Barrel parking lot, I didn’t think to myself “I can’t believe they’re acting this way” or “I hope those people don’t think I’m crazy.” I thought, “I don’t want to be this girl.”

I was in what is one of the most difficult periods of new motherhood, in my experience. The baby was four months old, which meant I had lost some of my baby weight, but not most of it. I didn’t look like I expected to look when I saw myself in the mirror. I was in the middle of a maternity leave from graduate school, which meant it had been months since I’d felt like an adult in an adult world. For six months with Joy and eight months with Noelle, I moonlighted as a true stay-at-home mom while dealing with post-partum exhaustion. I was trying to stay showered and sane, but there had been times when I had been smart and confident and I felt that girl slipping away from me more and more.

I knew who she was though, the ”girl” I always wanted to be. I summed it up to my best friend a few weeks later, when the baby had not slept for what seemed like days and we were in the middle of the summer doldrums: “I want to be a skinny girl sitting on a plane going someplace.”

I had been that person once, the kind of girl who could pack for an international trip in two hours, who looked forward to train trips because they meant intriguing people, a good book and some coffee. I wore the same clothes I’d had since high school and they still fit. I thought things to myself and wrote them down in a notebook, important and deep observational thoughts. I curled up in a corner of the train seat to take a nap because I was sleepy. I was young, curly-haired, skinny and alone.

I know who I am, what I love, and where I want to go. Like pictures in a scrapbook, I can recount the times I’ve felt most like myself:

–I woke up in an overnight train in Thailand and caught my breath at the wonder of the sun rising over water-filled rice fields.

From visualtourist.com

–Once, after I was married and living in Brazil, I had a conversation with four of my favorite Brazilian girls in the world in which no one listened to each other, and everyone talked as loud as they could, and used their hands as much as possible—I laughed so hard my sides hurt and Portuguese flowed from my lips like honey.

–Also in Brazil, I can see myself teaching twenty children’s home kids, hearing my English phrases repeated back with enthusiastic if horribly wrong pronunciation.

–Every cold day in a city reminds me of the many, many solitary walks I took in Santiago, Chile in the winter when we lived there and Jonathan worked all day. I found an English bookstore once that had a used copy of Francois Mauriac’s compiled writings that I bought and devoured in two days straight.

This picture, from the wikipedia entry on Santiago, looks identical to the view from our apartment–those nightclubs, like the “Boomerang,” used to keep us up EVERY NIGHT. The mountains over the city were gorgous, though.

–My second class teaching at the big university where I work, with the first day jitters behind me, we had a rocking discussion in my class and I began to have some inkling of how deeply I loved teaching.

–Walking across campus every time after I teach is euphoric; I have a sense of purpose and peace I never have in any other time.

That is the “girl” I felt like I was losing—bookish, relational, traveling, teaching, writing, thinking, me.

And then, one winter when my friend Nyssa visited, I added another memory to my favorite identity scrapbook.

–It had snowed, which is rare in Austin, and I dressed the girls in their warmest clothes. We went to meet Nyssa’s new baby at the hotel where her little family was staying while they were here. Waiting for the elevator, without my asking them to, on either side of me, my small girls reached out and took my hands. We held hands all the way up the elevator, through the hallway, to the door of Nyssa’s room.

The simplicity of walking with my children holding hands in the hallway took my breath away. I am also this “girl,” and she’s a mother, and she’s doing just fine.

Tomorrow: I’m not the only one who struggled with identity issues.