Allow yourself to accept uncertainty

Sit with the tension between your hope and your fear.

Felicity and I, circa summer 2022, shortly after we both got a fresh haircut

Felicity and I scrambled to the counseling center for her third session. It was a harrowing day, typical for our family of seven, but my frame of mind mimicked the state of things: chaotic, frazzled, disconnected. I brought a book to pass the time, but Christine, the counselor, asked Felicity if she wanted me to join them. It did not take long for her to nod in the affirmative.

I always feel I am heading to the gauntlet when my children ask me to participate in their counseling sessions. Not that I am opposed to their requests, but that I am seized with the shame of my childhood that tells me I am an incompetent parent, which is why they want me to accompany them.

It’s peculiar for me to reflect on why I am eager to share at my private therapy sessions, yet my reflex for avoidance at my children’s sessions paralyzes me. What will Felicity say? And what will Christine assume about her, about me, about our family? The point is, of course, to unravel. Vulnerability is the end goal. And I want that, for them, for me, so that we can heal. So that we can learn and access - or build - resilience.

Felicity sat comfortably on the couch, and I situated myself next to her. Christine opened with a recap of the last session. And then, within five minutes, it happened - the Dreaded Thing I hoped to avoid. Felicity spilled her entrails onto the coffee table between us and Christine.

“When Sarah was born, my mom left me with different babysitters. I think she could have done a better job to find someone I knew well. But she didn’t. And I was scared.”

I caught my breath, but my heart felt tethered to a steel anchor as it sank to the depths. The urge to defend, to admonish, to justify welled in my gut. But I sat with that discomfort before I spoke. Decades of attempts at honesty with my own family of origin flashed in my mind’s eye, and I vowed not to repeat the words of my parents.

“I’m sorry you suffered through that, Felicity. I know this life has been so hard on you, especially after Sarah was born.” It was my stilted but best attempt to validate her perception, though I had my own.

What I wanted to add was this: I tried to find the adults you knew well to stay with you while I hauled Sarah from one diagnostic test to another. But sometimes they were unavailable. Sometimes they committed, but fell ill or encountered an unexpected emergency. This is life. It is not straightforward. There is no simple explanation for why you stayed with one babysitter, then a different one the next day. This was not my choice.

A melange of emotions flood me when I think about those early days when Sarah was a baby: regret, terror, grief, frustration, confusion, overwhelm, disorientation. I carried grief mostly for Felicity, who was two-and-a-half, and the world as she knew it - her world - had been snatched from her without warning. Even as I toted Sarah to her renal ultrasounds and blood draws and CT scans and consultations with geneticists and neurosurgeons and orthopedic surgeons and craniofacial surgeons, I never stopped hurting for my oldest girl.

My intuition apprised me during those early days when Felicity was a toddler: There will come a time when Felicity will need therapy. And she will chastise you for failing her.

At the time, I tucked the notion somewhere I could not easily retrieve it, because the admission of what I had done to Felicity incapacitated me. I had not directly hurt her (and was relieved that no one else had, either). These basic truths kept me afloat during the early days of crisis management and acclimation to caregiving for a medically complicated child.

But as much as I tried to eschew her reproach, I couldn’t. I had to affirm her pain and viewpoint, despite the tortured hours I’d spent poring over every possible avenue that would maintain her semblance of normalcy at the time. And there was truly no good option at my disposal.

There are no best practices at parenting. The most I could offer Felicity was my acknowledgement that her life has been difficult and that I have not always supported her in the ways she needed. It was the same level of empathy I had pined for from my own parents but never received.

I pictured Felicity at the age of thirty, maybe forty, scrounging her memory to understand herself more deeply, then recalling the trauma from being unexpectedly uprooted from a life that offered her solace and stability. In my imagination, she comes to me and shares what she learns, what she remembers, and I am prepared for the gauntlet.

I am ready for my beheading, only this time she extends mercy and I retain my body, my mind, my own memory. Maybe this will happen. Maybe it won’t. What I know is that I have to do two things: hold her reality in the palm of my hand with kindness and patience, while also holding my own mistakes and shortcomings in the other hand.

Christine allowed one minute, maybe two, to pass in silence. Her eyes shifted from my face to Felicity’s, and even though Felicity’s body was oriented toward Christine, mine was slanted toward Felicity. She would not make eye contact with me, and Christine noticed, I’m sure, because then she spoke most tenderly, in a tone like softened butter, “Felicity, it’s wonderful to hear your mother receive what you told her today. She really loves you.”

Felicity shrugged and scowled. “Yeah, maybe.” In that instant, I wanted to crawl out of my body and shed my skin. Then, I wanted to vomit. Because everything I strove to become as a mother - without experience but loaded with (book) knowledge - I had not. In fact, in Felicity’s eyes, I had become what my own mother was to me: critical, demeaning, abandoning.

Tears pooled in my eyes, but I did not grant them permission to trickle down my cheeks and reveal that this exchange was the Dreaded Thing from which I could no longer run or hide. Sooner or later, and it happened to be sooner, I had to confront this - and other - Dreaded Things.

Christine turned to me as Felicity and I stood to leave. “The best thing you can do is allow Felicity to accept uncertainty.” I nodded and thanked her. We rode home in silence.

The uncertainty, the tension in which we straddle the space between hope and fear. This is what makes a life and what makes a life lesson, too. The primal impulse to flinch when we are reprimanded or when we notice a hard truth about ourselves does not provide the expanse necessary for change. Only sitting with the tension itself can do that, because we are no longer confined to the rigidity of the parameters we set for ourselves and our relationships.

This is life. It is not straightforward. There is no simple explanation. This was not my choice. I wanted to shout this at Felicity, at the world, but what changed things was when I shouted it to myself.

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What I am currently reading:

What can I say that has not already been said about Cheryl Strayed’s work? This I will share: the only book I’ve read by Strayed was her breakout bestseller, Wild. (And I saw the movie starring Reese Witherspoon shortly thereafter.) But this book glimmered on my local library’s “New Releases in Non-Fiction” shelf, even though I knew nothing about Dear Sugar.

When a book speaks a jarring truth that echoes in my mind, something I chew like cud for hours or days until an insight is spurred from said truth, then I know I have landed upon a gem. And Tiny Beautiful Things is just that. Strayed is not careful, but she is thoughtful. She responds to tough, even impossible questions that are asked of her. And it seems she even selects the solicitation of her advice from among the unanswerable questions.

Even so, she writes to us all, because everything we live is touched by the questions that have no answers. Everything we live is touched by loss and love and confusion and ambivalence. The manner in which Strayed is able to interject her own anecdotes without sounding preachy, she uses as an attempt for connection. And she excels at this.

If you want to reach deeper into yourself, read this. Even if you don’t, read from those who ask the questions you may find yourself asking one day. And lean into the kindness Strayed offers us all.