It Might Be Your Kid

So practice forgiving yourself

It won’t be your kid because you read the books and took Lamaze and gave them baths, you made their dinners and rubbed their backs and came home in time and did the work. It won’t be your kid because the school was good and piano lessons and dance classes and baseball and soccer and birthday parties. You’re a doctor, a lawyer, your nanny is great and the grandparents are close and it won’t be your kid because they don’t do that. Whatever that is. It won’t be your kid because you searched their room, or swear you don’t need to. It won’t be your kid because of a backyard swing set and the best pediatrician and college counselor and you read the books again and again and again.

If you think it won’t be your kid, you must be white because Black mothers know it can always be your kid. It might be your kid because to be alive is a risk and to live is to die. It might be your kid. Do not think for a moment that your money or expertise or suburb is stronger than gravity or the only guarantee we come with.

It might be your kid whose anxiety keeps them home from school or depression lays bare or whose cancer comes back or whose heart is just too kind for this place. It might be your kid.

The goal is not Harvard or Goldman Sachs or marriage and perfect picket fences. A life well-lived, of meaning and contentment, with the grace and luck to make it one more day, one more moment, one more breath. That is the goal. But some won’t and the lucky amongst us will say thank god mine are safe and we’ll hug them tighter if only in our minds, because we know it might be them.

The books and the baths and the dinners and the parent-teacher conferences and the diaper changes they matter, my god they matter and they are expressions of love and acts of connection, but it is the love itself — the bounty of no words left unsaid or wounds left unhealed — that is the purpose.

The judgers and the whisperers will be there, ignore them. Fuck them. Their hubris is a sin and take care not to fly too close to the sun yourself. I did, and I landed seared, and looked up and said okay yes, I understand now. I understand they are human and there is no formula or magic potion or Best In Show. My god yes, they and we are simply human and give yourself the gift of remembering that every single day.

Wake up each morning and do the best you can that day. And each night before you sleep, forgive yourself for falling short. For not knowing what you were supposed to do, saying the wrong thing or nothing at all, for failing and flailing and living in fear. Aim to make forgiving yourself a daily practice like 8 glasses of water and Omega-3s and 10,000 steps. Be gentle when you forget, feel too fatigued. Daily forgiveness is preventative medicine for mothers and a muscle we must keep strong because my god, my god, the brutality of it all.

Do not suffer in silence because you read the books. Oh, fuck the books. They didn’t tell you to expect the turbulence, that shaking is part of the deal. They did not warn you to buckle up, but you must, and you are not alone. Someone else’s kid is still in bed or at the shrink or ascending to the sky or six feet below. You are not alone, not ever. One of us, or millions, has shed those tears and swam in that anguish, so please find solace in my promise that we are with you. You are not alone.

Keep going. One breath at a time, one moment at a time. You won’t always be here.

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