Dreams for My Daughters, Compassion for Myself
Weather forecasts so often fail to predict the future that your uncle Daniel and I set off for our camping trip years ago chock full of confidence and beef jerky. It was justified as our site greeted us with dry tinder after a mud-free trek. The night sky taunted weather.com with its cloudless twilight showcase.
And then we were wrong. A storm crept into the horizon on our long-planned hike the following morning, and just as we reached our midway vista, the sky opened. Our rain jackets and waterproof boots merely decorated our soaked bodies. The warmth of our campsite was ten miles away, and no other route would help.
Choiceless, we trudged back. My feet were sponges. My waterlogged pack grew heavier by the step. My skin betrayed itself with shockingly painful chafing in my inner thighs and armpits. The showers’ clamor robbed Daniel and me of conversation.
So I turned inward. I let myself notice the pain and discomfort rather than avoid it. My toes dove through each puddle as if on purpose. I tasted each drop that found my panting mouth. I considered the benefits of all this water on the beings around me. And I was utterly content. In misery, I found joy. In embarrassment, I chose presence.
o o o
This story has endured as my go-to anecdote accompanying my mantra “enjoy everything” not because I am so enlightened and grounded, as too much Instagram might lead you to believe is possible, but because the opposite is true. In fact, my factory setting is pessimism. I default to self-loathing. Cultivating joy, therefore, necessitates my choices, every hour, moment to moment. If hope is a discipline, as Mariame Kaba has so famously encouraged her readers, so too must be joy.
Genevieve and Adelaide, I dream joy for you. While you’ll find that it sometimes requires excavation, joy resides beneath every rock, ‘round every corner. Happiness, too, but that connotes something fleeting, notions beyond our control and disingenuous to claim in the midst of hardship. Joy, on the other hand, lies within reach all the time. Refuse no opportunity to grasp it.
I dream of your futures every day. In these imaginings, I do not foretell your careers. I hardly contemplate whether you’ll be partnered or parents someday. I worry little for your academics. We lack wealth, but our privilege enables us not to stress about your economic stability because even in this capitalist hellscape, it is nearly guaranteed - it is itself a privilege not to fear for your safety. What definitely isn’t assured is your relationship to yourself. And if you’re anything like me - and, my darlings, you both are, though in fascinatingly different ways - your struggles will not contend with rent but with shame. With self-punishment. With self-hatred.
It is true that everyone everywhere is interconnected and interdependent, together comprising a superorganism we couldn’t abandon if we tried. Paradoxically, it is also true that you are your first and only person. Compared to anyone else, through the course of your life, you will spend the most time with yourself. You cannot escape her. It ought behoove you, then, to fall deeply in love with yourself. Cherish your own company. The greatest threat to this endeavor is shame. Like joy, it too lurks about in perpetuity, but only ever with sinister intent.
May you become shame-assassins. You will encounter failure, over and over, but in my dreams, you will welcome each misstep as an opportunity to cozy up next to yourself. To become wiser and more compassionate. To grow deeper roots. When you are responsible for harm, may you embrace accountability. May you love yourself and others toward reconciliation and repair. But when shame scales the gates, unsheathe your sword.
I dream authenticity for you, my loves. Adelaide, may you be the most Adelaide you can be; Genevieve, the most Genevieve. May you honor your feelings and respect yourself. May you trust your gut even as you continuously unlearn the systems of oppression that infected your spiritual gestation, as they have mine. And when you find your choices or circumstances have distanced you from your most authentic self, may you find the courage to change your mind, even and especially when doing so might disappoint others. Be present with your wise self and wise choices will follow. Be present with everything.
Loving yourself through misery and mirth alike will take effort - your short lives have already demonstrated that. And it is a strange irony to pen hopes for your future that might land as an unachievable standard that constitutes pressure. But I trust you to hold my blessings with open palms. Just know: you are entirely enough. In all of your imperfection, you are perfect. And I am privileged to walk by your side.
o o o
I can be so damn mean to myself. To live inside my mind is to engage in constant negotiation with critics who despise me. While I have learned to acknowledge these characters and see them out the door with understanding, inner-child exercises my therapist often recommends can tend to fall flat. I picture my childhood self fondly, but my love for him rapidly reaches limits.
My love for Genevieve and Adelaide, however, is bottomless. My eyes swell whenever I try to articulate my affection for them, including in this writing. I am a mama bear, fierce in my defense and tender in my devotion. I am utterly obsessed with my daughters.
And so I’ve found a therapeutic trick for self-compassion: summon my ursine love and aim it at Genevieve and Adelaide, then sub me in once the love arrows take flight. This truth does not always descend from my brain to my heart, but it remains the case: I deserve the same love I never withhold from my daughters. I deserve my own love.
I hope others need no such schemes. I hope for myself that I will not require them forever. In the meantime, I’ll take all the help I can get.
