Forged in fire

The power of connection

Nearly 15 years ago, my mentor and colleague asked me in our weekly meeting how I was doing. I had recently returned to full time work after my brief (and unpaid) maternity leave from my relatively new job in the intensive outpatient substance use treatment program. I was working on starting a program focused on supporting Veterans and their partners dealing with intimate partner violence. And I had three small children at home—ages 5, 2.5, and just about six months. I am fairly certain just the question broke the thin veneer of control I had over the building overwhelm. I started tearing up. Of all the many things I was trying to manage, what stood out as the most challenging was the ups and downs of my little toddler sprite, L. He fully embraced the terrible twos and threes, pushing hard against limits. Scooting along as fast as his little legs could push him on his balance bike. Stealing his baby brother’s pacifier the minute our backs were turned. Jumping from whatever surface he could climb up onto. Darting away when asked to come close. Asking to be pushed higher and higher and higher on the swings. Asking again and again for sugary foods. And while often it was the seemingly incessant pushing and pushing and pushing to defy the limit or try and get extra Annie’s chocolate bunny grahams, sometimes, it turned into a full meltdown. Tears and yelling and falling on the floor, with all attempts to soothe or contain met with a little body pushing and kicking the parental arms away. His emotions were big and challenging to contain. We tried so hard to meet every push with a firm but compassionate hold on the boundary. To meet every tantrum with the understanding that his emotions were too intense for his little body to hold, to match these big cries with love and soothing, modeling calmness and acceptance. All of this on just a few hours of uninterrupted sleep, managing full-time jobs, the still daily ache when I left those babies and went to care for other people’s struggle and devastation and difficulty managing the hardness of life. So yes, asking me how I was in those days could sometimes unleash my own powerful emotions.

After calmly listening to my narrative of exhaustion and feeling at the brink of my ability to gently parent this exuberant and often impish toddler of mine, my mentor said kindly, “It sounds as if you are waiting for L to thank you for your patience, your compassion, your effort to meet his needs with kindness and love. He is a toddler. That is not going to happen. If you are lucky, it will happen when he is an adult, perhaps if he has his own children some day. But parenting is not something we get direct feedback for doing well. We have to parent without expectation of acknowledgement.” Of course, I don’t remember his words exactly, but this was the message he offered me. A message I have carried with me throughout the past decade and a half of parenting three very different boys.

Something unlocked in me as I realized the truth in those words. I had been looking for a thank you. I had been yearning for an acknowledgement that sometimes, being L’s mama was exhausting, that his limit pushing was throwing me up against my own limits of endurance and patience. I wanted just the smallest recognition that he asked a lot of me and I was doing my damnedest to provide it. But, of course, it was not going to come from my rascally little toddler. It was not his job to know how hard he was pushing us. Sure, part of our job as parents was to teach him gratitude and kindness, to recognize his impact on others, to acknowledge the efforts others made for him. But being a good mama meant providing what my children needed—whether it was an enveloping hug, a gentle and calming touch of their little furrowed brow, holding to a firm limit that would keep them safe, lighting up with joy when they came into the room, helping them hold those big emotions and learning that these feelings will pass. All of this and so much more. Because I was their mama. Because I chose to be their mama. Because they were gifted to me by the universe. And not pairing that love and support with obligation or expectation. Not burdening them with the sense that they were too much or not enough. But instead, filling them with the love and joy and deep gratitude that I felt as their mama. That the moment I saw their beautiful, reddened faces—so new and so ancient at the very same time—my entire world burst open and turned upside down, inside out. My heart grew more than the Grinch’s ever did, and everything changed.

We live and work with a divided consciousness. It is a beautiful enough shock to fall in love with another adult, to feel the possibility of unbearable sorrow at the loss of that other, essential, personality, expressed just so, that particular touch. But love of an infant is of a different order. It is twinned love, all absorbing, a blur of boundaries and messages. It is uncomfortably close to self-erasure, and in the face of it one’s fat ambitions, desperations, private icons, and urges fall away into a dreamlike BEFORE that haunts and forces itself into the present with tough persistence.

~Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance

Parenting littles in the midst of building a career, trying to maintain a community of friends and sustain a marriage is a lot. It requires an intense present focus that can sometimes lead to a feeling of interminability. When Z was my only child, I remember so much worry about whether something was a phase or a trait. Was this cluster feeding every hour something that would continue into his first year of life or was it a growth spurt? Were these night terrors something we would have to contend with for his childhood or a few months? Was his unwillingness to take a bottle a small, temporary protest at my return to teaching or a non-negotiable stance? How would I possibly manage anything longer than today? All the reassurance from friends with older children and experts didn’t have the same effect as living through it to the next phase. And while it was a little easier with the next two, they of course brought their own, unique spins on life and so when infant L woke up night after night and screamed for 30-45 minutes, the worry started again. The ability to see past tomorrow, imagine a day that isn’t consumed with just getting through, was hard to come by in those early years of parenting. The amount of work one has to do to usher tiny humans into childhood and then adolescence while working and managing all the other responsibilities that adulting requires can feel insurmountable. The very lessons that I was trying to teach both my writhing two-year old—his adorable little face reddened and wet with anger, frustration, sadeness, and tears—and myself, that big emotions pass, you can return to a relative equilibrium, rarely are you granted only one chance to get things right—eventually, I not only learned but believed this.

Space starts to open up as these children grow, as they become better described by terms like young adult, grow taller than me, the personalities that were budding from even their first year of life begin to blossom and bloom with vibrancy and delicacy all at the same time. As they pull away. As the words between us come in bursts of closeness and eagerness to share what they know and in periods of monosyllabic responses and clear disdain at the audacity of a simple question such as “where are you going?” or “how was your exam or your day or your time with friends?”

As much as I have struggled with and grieved the emergence and growth of that space over the past two years, as much as I have celebrated the independence and self-discovery that space has represented for my boys, I have taken this newly available capacity and returned to connections and relationships that I wanted to restore, repair, and reunite. With many of these connections, it was simply a matter of finally having more time to reach out, plan visits, and maintain connection. With others, repair was necessary, a willingness to listen, a letting go of past wounds to move more fully into a present that held on to the connection over the disconnection. Sometimes, that ability, that willingness to let go of the past had little to do with the individual and my relationship to them and more to do with the painfulness of the time period in which that bond had been forged.

We are what our great mentors have taught us.

~Lailah Gifty Akita, writer and founder of Smart Youth Volunteers Foundation

I have been deeply fortunate to have had teachers and mentors throughout every phase of my life. From my beloved relatives and friends to my kindergarten teacher through to my supervisors in internship and fellowship, these individuals have embodied Rosalynn Carter’s assertion that “A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be.” These mentors have been able to see where I needed to be—particularly in the times when my path forward felt unclear, murky, and perhaps unattainable—and lead me forward, sometimes gently, sometimes with a great push, but always with love and care.

Recently, I returned to the town where I grew up. All my siblings, their partners, and children were gathering and it had been more than two years since we had all been together. As part of the visit, I decided to reach out to set up visits with some important mentors. These were all women who had known me for most, if not all, of my life. They were people who had seen me in some of my hardest times and offered a way forward, a path out of my sadness. Each one of them had played a significant role in helping me to become the person I am today. Each one had seen my struggle, my vulnerability, and offered an outstretched hand and lead me out of hardship and strife. I had carried these women with me in my suitcase heart, corresponding occasionally, but keeping them always with me.

Photo by David Brooke Martin on Unsplash

The visits we shared were delightful. I was so touched by the way they each prepared for our visit—each one had delicate, floral tea cups with matching saucers. A matching sugar bowl. A creamer. They had food neatly displayed—cookies, blueberry bread, fruit. All suggesting a careful, thoughtful preparation for our time together. And then the conversation—the back and forth, sharing and learning, how life had changed and unfolded over the intervening years. The lives of their children, and for one of them, grandchildren. The ways in which COVID and the current situation had weighed on them and their loved ones. Both were so engaged and eager to hear about my boys, my life since we had last seen each other. And I felt overcome by gratitude, respect, and such love for these women whose care and vision for a quiet, striving young girl had helped to lay the foundation for the life I am now living. What a full circle experience, to sit in their homes, sipping tea together, and sharing what books we were reading, how much news we were consuming and trying to avoid, our concerns for the world breaking apart. And our connection, so strong, so alive after all this time. I felt grateful that they both could see that their nurturing and guidance had allowed me to blossom and create a life I am humbled and grateful to have.

As these young adults in my house go through their phases of pulling away, of forging their own identities and figuring out the paths they want to follow, I remind myself how strong and unbreakable true connection is. How easily I could reconnect and reunite with people who were part of my everyday when I was the age my boys are now. How time, humility, and softening of my hard edges made repair easy in relationships that had frayed and fallen apart. I know that relationships wax and wane. I know that my own relationship with my parents has only grown stronger and more understanding with time and perspective. I know that their love for me and now, for my children, has never waned, has always waxed. Just as my love for my children has only grown with every passing year, month, week, day.

Time has taught me that while many connections are forged in fire, some are hard iron, nearly unbreakable while others are like beautiful glass, molten and softened by the flame, then hardened by the shift in temperature. With great care, these relationships can survive, but often, their delicacy leads to a shattering, a complete ending to the connection. Those that are made of iron or other strong metals withstand so much and persist, lasting throughout our lives.

All those years ago, that younger version of me, that mama working so hard to meet the needs of those little boys who were always busy, always curious, always full of wonder, she didn’t yet understand that the acknowledgement she was looking for was all around her. In the way that that same little rascal would climb up onto her lap, stroke her cheek and ask her to belax when she seemed stressed or sad. In the way her baby quieted with the soft rocking back and forth as she held him against her body, his head resting peacefully against her shoulder. In the way that her school-age boy bounded excitedly off the school bus to tell her about something new he had learned at school that day. In the twinkle in her toddler’s eye when he asked her if he could tell her a joke. A joke that made no sense, but had him laughing so hard it made her laugh. In the way her baby looked up into her eyes and smiled, a peaceful serenity settling into his body as he felt the safety and comfort of her presence. In the way that her 20-year-old’s friends call her by a nickname only her parents and siblings call her. In the way that her nearly 18-year-old let her hold him tightly as he cried about his struggles. In the way that her youngest made her a bouquet of paper flowers to keep on her desk at work.

In the way that these three little humans changed her life irrevocably the moment she looked into their beautiful, perfect little faces. The way that connection creates bonds that are iron clad, unable to be broken, indestructible. Not time, not distance, not age can sever these attachments.

Happy Father’s Day to all who father.

Happy Pride month to all LGBTQIA folks.

And thank you, to the several millions of you who stood up and said NO KINGS.

We stand together in solidarity.

We will get through these days.

Together.

Connected.

Hand in hand.

And our ties to each other will emerge even stronger, even more aware of how precious we are to each other. How interconnected. How important it is to provide, to care, to celebrate, to love each other.

All photos were taken by the exceptional Dana Giuliana, unless otherwise noted.

Thanks for spending some of your day reading this post.

I hope it resonated.

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