Dear Connor and Lucy

A Mother's Day Note

Dear Connor and Lucy —

When a doctor at Stanford Hospital first shared the terrible news about my cancer diagnosis with me, one of my first questions was whether or not I would have time to write you both letters. It was a swirly and chaotic conversation. The next sentences were a blur about oncology and the odds and getting me to specialists. He looked at me a little perplexed when I asked him about time and letter writing.

In that moment, I thought about how I write you both a letter on your birthday, and how there was still so much more to say. Lucy, I stared at the ceiling wondering if I should write you a letter about finding roommates after college and how to sort out when and where to wear red lipstick (of course you know better than I do in that department), and Connor, for some reason, I wanted to write you a letter with encouragements if you find out you might be a dad one day.

You can decide where they get their good looks …

Looking back, I get this impulse was borderline bananas. Why write letters when you were both smart teenagers and I could have used all these five years ahead to unspool every clever story with a life nugget tucked inside? I hope I’ve done my share of story unspooling, but as it turns out, my first instinct about the letters never left.

There are a few reasons why. Letters capture a moment in time, and the best ones transcend the moment. Like an elegant monologue from a play, an uncommon letter stubbornly takes a scene from each of our own dramas and has something to teach us, or encourage us, even years later.

You’ll develop an eye to spot these letters as you continue to push out into the world. Hold on to them. Many hold lines of magic you’ll embrace a decade from a now. Good letters endure.

When I first got sick, I went looking around for contemporary books written by moms who had navigated both the shock of divorce and cancer. Surely, there must be millions of us, I thought. Basically I was looking for a long letter written for me. And, I found … nothing. Maybe I didn’t look hard enough. But I came up empty.

So I started writing. First, this blog. And also letters to the two of you. And eventually this became The Brave In-Between.

This post is a letter for the two of you because I want to acknowledge the leap from my first instinct in a hospital room to write you letters to an actual book for everybody is, well, massive.

In the book, I tell stories about our lives — the hardest parts of the woods the three of us learned to navigate, to some of the most joyous moments we’ve shared. Many of these stories pointed me to a set of virtues —lanterns, really — that illuminated many of our days.

Why in the world did the three of us get summoned into hard parts of the woods? The obvious answer is that each of us will move through woodsy chapters, so we just got called in a little earlier than some. The less obvious answer is that maybe three of us have found new lights — even the kind that flicker like a firefly for the briefest moment — that we can tell others about.

Many of these stories are simple. But don’t mistake simplicity with marvelous. The best stories, as you both know, appear unexceptional, and yet they inch us closer to a new truth, or more often, a reaffirmation of a truth that heals.

Some of the stories are harder; soon they’ll be out there in the public square. And for reasons I’m still trying to sort out, once you put your stories out into the public square some souls will feel good and right about hurling insults and admonishments and even a tomato or two your way. What is this about. Who knows. I wonder if mainly it’s about how we live in a time where our culture is a bit over-indexed on what category a person might appear to belong to, and how maybe that can free up unbridled complaints. I hope we’ll learn to laugh when wiping the occasional squirt of tomato juice out of our eyes.

More important, I hope we’ll discover that this book — and some of our stories — will create a new kinship with other woodsy trekkers. These lanterns we’ve learned to hold to light our path? They come from our stories. If we tell our stories well, the braver we become.

Last note here. You know how it’s common to say, “Ah yes, I get my sense of humor from my mom,” or “Yes actually, my deep and abiding curiosity is a trait for sure from my mom” and so many other examples? True enough.

But in our case, If I’ve developed one remarkable trait over these past five years it’s something I’ve learned from the two of you. I call it the Bounce Back.

As I recover from a lousy April, every day I’m reminded, “Ah yes, the bounce back. I learned this from Lucy and Connor.” You, my beloveds, have shown me in a million different ways how to bounce back. How to get up, dust yourself off, dream something new, deal with something mundane, notice a fresh vantage point, ask a question that gets to the heart of the matter, try.

Soon others will know some of your bounce back moments. They are miracles cleverly disguised as stories. They are why I’m happily still here.

Love,

Mom