B.Rose

Photo credit: Peg Kaplan
Let me tell you about my daughter.
She is the one God sent into the world to find the brittle, weak, dark places of my heart with the speed and accuracy of a homing missile, shatter them, and then help them grow back together into a softer, healthier, whole-er heart. My God, it hurts.
She's been doing this for nine years now. Nine whole years of heart-breaking and heart-making. We have reached the halfway marker on her childhood journey, and that is particularly difficult for me to wrap my mind and heart around.
There's no one quite like her... but still, she is like me in a few ways. Our standards are high, our emotions are big, and our saltiness is strong. We both enjoy creating and appreciating beautiful things, have a strong sense of justice and an immense yearning for freedom, and we glory in our weirdness. Doesn't that sound like the makings of a beautiful relationship? One might think so, and I would agree, but that's not where we began.
B.Rose came to me in the exact middle of the dark night of my soul. That was so hard on us both, and on our relationship. I felt for so long that I didn't know her, and couldn't connect with her– at the same time her connecting to me felt like so much clinginess, like smothering. I couldn't take it. I informed both God and Ben multiple times that she would be much better off if someone else were her mother. I was too angry. I wasn't patient. My heart was like a rock. I worked so hard to shut down her big emotions– I think because of a truly wretched combination of my own depression, my standards, and my fear of the response her emotions were triggering in me.
Thankfully, my daughter is not a represser of her feelings.
When she got big enough to say so, she told me in no uncertain terms that she would be running away from me and going to China– and that I was not allowed to come. She would be finding a different family that would love her and care about her better than our stupid family.
I think it's fairly common for children to declare in a fit of pique that they are going to run away, and by this time my girl had two brothers and some chores that increased her umbrage, but I was aware enough of the nature of our particular struggle to know that she would make good on her promise as soon as possible if something didn't change immediately... and by something I mean me. Then something crucial happened that underlined the gravity of our situation: one hard day, when my child was four years old, she told me she hated herself.
I was shocked, and my heart got really good and broken then, as if she had picked it up and spiked it onto cement.
We humans are not born hating ourselves– that is a learned behavior... so where did my daughter learn to hate herself? It looked like I was the culprit, and that she had picked up this destructive perspective from me: from my relationship with her, and likely also my relationship with myself. It was an earth-shattering realization, and one that still hurts to think about. Oh my tiny girl, I am so sorry.*
It's one thing to know that change needs to happen, but it's a completely different thing knowing exactly what that change should be, let alone how to make it happen. But I will tell you that girl got through to me, and since then I have seen the goodness of God in the land of the living.
With B.Rose I have been learning:
– to acknowledge and speak plainly about how difficult it has been for us, and about how important it is to me to do the work to cultivate a healthy relationship.
– what kindness and love toward myself really looks like.
– how to ask for forgiveness.
– how to accept both her large feelings and my own without judgment (wow, this is hard).
– to not be afraid of anger, and to practice in real time remembering that love is the permanent bedrock beneath every transitory emotion– and that no matter how I feel right now, my love for her is bigger than that feeling and always will be. (Romans 5:1-5)
– the importance of honesty in our relationship– especially for each of us to be allowed to be angry at the other, and safe to say so, and say why.
– to let her have all her feelings about any boundary I set or action I require, without feeling like I have to make her okay with the boundary or task. This is important, because we can tend to get a little ragey about our autonomy around these parts. More on that here.
The major difference I see between me and my daughter is that while I am learning how to be nurturing and caring, and to reach through my discomfort to embrace her and her siblings– her heart is naturally nurturing and caring and embracing. Well, with the brothers it's a whole 'nother thing, but this wondrous girl is the first to ask me if something is wrong and offer me a hug, and let me tell you, she is the best hugger. It might be because she's nearly as tall as me, it might be because she knows the importance of hugs for her own well-being, but either way there it is.
So when I look back on the generations of mother/daughter relationships in my family I see times of great difficulty and pain, but I also see the faithfulness of God to each generation, and I'm so glad He hasn't decided to give that up yet.
*I knew even while originally writing this post that I was forgetting something important. I racked my brains, and when the memory came back to me a day after hitting “publish”, I thought “of course nobody would want to remember this– it’s horribly painful and self-incriminating. Ugh. Welp, I guess I’ll tell the world.”
I’m not here to protect myself. I’m here to be honest about the darkness, and to find the truth, and the healing and freedom that go with it.
