Promissory Notes.

My mom took all of my behavior personally. 

Everything I did, she thought it was an act 

of rebellion against her. But it was just me being me.  
 -- Pink

I got a wedding invitation in the mail yesterday. It was a lovely thing for an outdoor, summery affair, sprinkled with fireflies. It was from my daughter.

It was strange, getting a wedding invitation from my own daughter, seeing it in the mail for the first time just like everybody else. The other weddings I've been involved with as a mother have been hands-on from start to finish. But then the other brides weren't in their 30's and living on a different side of the country, being grown-up school teachers, planning their second weddings. It changes the dynamics of things a bit. 

I guess it never occurred to me that I'd have a 30-something. I mean, we're talking about my original little valentine...a baby girl who pulled me off the fast-track and caused me to reevaluate all my sure directions and my loud opinions. I don't say that as a martyr (I sense my daughters rolling their eyes) -- I say it because it's true. I had other things in mind and I was moving toward them at a good clip, but then almost on a whim, I made the decision to have a child, thinking it wouldn't change much, and instead it changed everything. Mostly, it changed me. For one thing, I could see clearly and immediately that here I had an opportunity to really do something. 

Suddenly I was tasked with building the world for someone, and I wanted to do it right. And that seemed much more important than all my fast-track goals. So I made some new goals.

I had silly ideas, at first. Of course she was brilliant, so I decided to teach her to read. She was clearly ready. She was three. I know, ridiculous when I see it written there, but you had to know her. She had the verbal skills of an 8th grader. No matter, because she had no interest in reading. She was interested in being three. 

So we wrestled over guaranteed mail-order flash cards and such nonsense every day for more than a year, and then I gave up. I sent her off to kindergarten still not reading. By the end of the year, I started to worry. Because I knew she had been ready when she was three. 

And then magically and with no assistance from me or anyone else, in the first few weeks of 1st grade, she started reading. Within a week she was reading at a second grade level. Before the end of the year, 6th grade.  I knew it! I did! But of course, she'd had other ideas. As it turned out, she was in charge of quite a few things about her own life from a very young age. 

That's hard for a parent to understand. We all learn it, of course. But we don't like it. We dutifully order the flashcards and believe the money-back guarantee. We use them faithfully every day. But it still doesn't make us in charge of anything for someone else. Not really.

I'm not exactly sure where my daughter got her rebellious streak, but I have a feeling we shopped at the same store.

I believe that Chieko Okazaki said (yes, this is hearsay, but it doesn't matter -- I love it regardless of who said it) that we "get a lot of promissory notes at church." 

I think that's a great description of what we get. It feels a lot like IF....THEN, pretty much all the time in my opinion. "If we are obedient, or if we do this thing, we will have, or be ____________." Fill in the blank with whatever you like. 

Some of it seems to actually work, but none of it is guaranteed. Because nothing about earth comes with a guarantee. And that's a bit of wisdom that I think really only comes with age. And even achieving age is not guaranteed. You see the problem.

The bottom line is that eventually (and it didn't take that long, really) I reduced pretty much all my parenting goals into one. I made the goal that my girls would feel loved, every single day of their lives. I went after that goal from a lot of angles. Love comes in as many forms as there are minutes, and that's a good thing.  Because as a mother, some minutes you are able to love more readily than others.
 
And sometimes the love means cookies and sometimes, as a parent, it just has to mean broccoli.

The other thing I've figured out is that my love can not save them from the pain of the world. It can't. This daughter who is getting married had a pretty charmed life, until she didn't. And I couldn't stop her from making the decisions that started her on the path that led there, and I couldn't save her from someone bent on damaging her, and I couldn't fix it once the trouble began, and it is only by some miracle that we were able to help her at all while the world blew up around her and then as the dust settled.

But there's where I'm really glad that I stopped trying to make her read when she was three and decided I would try to just love her every day instead. That was a goal that ended up serving me well when the bad stuff came raining down. I remained a safe place, and she sought that safety.

That's really the only thing I know for certain about raising kids, or about human interaction in general. That we get much further by making ourselves a safe place for others.

I think that's the entire point of the gospel, actually. Christ made himself our safe place, and we're supposed to go there when we get lost or need help or screw up or don't have any idea what we're supposed to be doing. I know there are a lot of other rules and directions and to-do lists at church too, and I try to pay attention to them and follow along as best I can. I remind myself to have faith that it will be enough. But I also try really hard not to look at them as promissory notes.

My daughter told me, after she emerged from the fiery furnace, that she was actually glad for her terrible experience. She's a graduate of a prestigious art school, and she said that she always felt she had showed up at school armed with nothing but a pencil, while the other students brought baggage of all kinds packed with material from which to draw. She felt her pain enhanced her art in ways that her loving home couldn't. And knowing what I do about art, I think there's probably a lot of truth to that. But I believe the loving home offered a great foundation on which to set up her easel.  

I can't wait to attend the wedding at which I only have to show up. What a pleasure! I won't have to be stressed or sleep-deprived or anything else. I can just be present and enjoy the firefly light of mid-July, and the glow of my little girl getting a do-over that's going to heal her wounds in ways that I never can.

And I'm not giving up on my goal. I know they don't live with me anymore, but my three charges are still with me every minute and I have a long way to go before I've finished showing them why they are the best thing I could have done with my life. I'm happy every day that they've become themselves, even though not one of them is exactly the way I thought they'd be. They're the only thing I've done that will really make much difference in the world, in the end. 

I can't control a thing about them, but I can promise to always give them the best love I've got and also have the faith that somehow, it will be enough.

- S.