Dear H,
When you don’t know where to begin, always start with what you know. I wish when your world tips a little, you’d learn to lean on this too.
Darling, I don’t know a lot about how you’re growing up. Details are far and few in between. Honestly, we don’t know each other these days deeply. I thinks that okay, but times like this: I am missing a big piece. What is going on in your life that one nudge collapses your internal ecosystem?
Here is what I need you know: You will always be loved by your Dad. That is not a thing that withers. You won’t understand it fully until you raise your own family. You just have to believe me. It is not a thing that is fragile. It can not break. Or end. Or be ruined. You will forever be loved by your Dad. You can lean into that safely. You can trust in in. You can put your faith there.
However, there will be many times other heavy things will accompany love. These are the things to pay attention to. This is a nature of any relationship you have. The really good ones have a balance. They have a comfortable ebb and flow. Yet, inevitably, as relationships goes on and on– even the safe and good ones– there will be conflict to work out.
Those moments where things are stirred up, how you work them out: That’s your character. Your character has nothing to do with the eventual outcome of this conflict. You won’t get through life without being upset or causing someone else to be upset. It comes with being human. Just like you try on clothes, sometimes it take a little while to figure out what feels right. To figure out how you want to carry yourself. It is suppose to be awkward and with moments you aren’t proud of so you can know grow into yourself in a meaningful way. It is suppose to give you choices.
When I say, I want you to have healthy relationships, I am not talking about love between you and Dad being in question. That is not something you can lose. It is never in jeopardy. Don’t let fear squeeze your heart. Often, fear is not telling you the whole truth. Don’t let it be the loudest voice in your head.
The thing your feeling– I’m guessing maybe a combination of fear and shame– are trying to lead you to in a heavy handed way to the small nugget of truth that love alone does not define a good relationship. Love is the glue that stretches infinitely and will forever tie you to your people.
The truth of the matter is that relationships are fraught with responsibility and inconvenience, darling. They mean you split your time belonging to yourself and to other people. They are weighty, heavy things that should be treated with care, respect, and sometimes a little sacrifice. We carry that for several reasons including love, duty, loyalty, but also, quite simply, because it is worth it. It brings us joy and comfort and safety and support.
Your place is secure. We know you’re good and decent. However, I am trying to teach you how to handle important relationships with care as the heavy, inconvenient, lovely, fulfilling, important things they are. I’m nudging that you are putting the weighty part on someone else’s shoulders… and you’re getting old enough to learn how to carry it. Care for it. Be responsible for it.
You are up for the task. I don’t need to save you from it. Neither does your mother or father. You don’t need to be afraid of it. Or know exactly how it will turn out. Or have assurances. Honestly, you’re gonna have some really great moments of success and you’re gonna fuck some shit up. Which, honestly, is lovely. It is lovely to know that things will forever fall apart and come together and you’ll still be standing through it all.
In your fifteen years you’ve seen many relationships that are healthy and many that are not. You have been on the outskirts of people’s decisions to stop carrying a relationship. Those choices, baby girl, usually have little to do about love. They usually have to do with the many other things: fear and shame, lack of reciprocity, too full of unsaid things and heavy with resentment, and or they aren’t a safe to be in. It is a really hard thing to untangle when a relationship is one that makes you better or of it’s one that costs you. Both the healthy and unhealthy relationships are often rooted somewhere in love. Love, for all the emphasis, is not the thing that makes us stay or go in relationships.
My nudge was this: Your relationships are your responsibility to care for and to nurture, darling girl. You’re old enough to take these things on– even if they are hard and new and you might make mistakes. You are making a lot of choices that are going to define you. Some of those will inconveniently directly… and even indirectly… impact people you care about. As you make them, I’m asking you to think for yourself: What am I showing up for? What are you making time for? Who are you including in your decisions? If you are asking Mom about it, then is it a thing you should also be talking to Dad about it? Who else does your choice or path impact? What does your choice say to you? What will it say to the people you love? Have you checked in with those people to make sure you read the room right?
Look, we live with too many unsaid things. On our end, mostly because no one wants to go through the filter of your mother. We are waiting for you to be ready to hear them.
Telling you to pick up after the wake of your choices, H. If you’re old enough to make some decisions, then you’re old enough to learn how to carry them. They belong to you. Honestly, no one did you any favors waiting this long to show you the weight of it. Giving it to you to carry. Well, that’s love, too.
Because I love you. In the unbreakable, forever way. I love you enough to tell you the things you need to hear so you don’t end up broken because everyone was too busy saving you from the life you were meant to bare. It is your one, precious life… and you can’t waste anymore of it not learning how to carry it.
Love, Mom 