Beloved Others

How I'm learning to hold the beloved otherness of my children, plus a collection of delights for July

Background painting—Mother and Child by Helene Schjerfbeck

All summer long, her mouth is stained red with strawberries.

All summer long, she smells like coconut conditioner and cucumbers and sunscreen.

All summer long, she struts down the sidewalk in her pink pajamas after dinner, her strawberry-blonde bob swishing in time with her steps, still damp from her bath.

She is three now, and she must inspect every ant. Smell every flower. Point at every butterfly and bumble bee. Squeal in delight at every dog. Sing a made-up song loudly, so the whole neighborhood can hear.

She is three now, and she is a thick, chisel-tip marker. She is drawing a line with it—big and bold and black, down the middle of the paper.

I am here, she is saying.

You are there.

And sometimes, I miss the days when it was just milk and the muscle memory of her peach fuzz head in the crook of my arm, both of us rocking into the night.

She is standing on her bed, screaming at me in her pink, puffy sleep sack.

She looks like an angry, pastel marshmallow and it would be funny if I weren’t so tired. It would be funny if she wasn’t keeping the five-year-old up two hours past her bedtime. It would be funny if this weren’t the third consecutive night of eternal bedtime tantrums.

She is pointing at me, and I don’t understand anything she is saying through the sobs and the screaming, but I get the general message.

This is an indictment.

How dare you, she is saying.

You are making this worse, she is saying.

You better get over here and help me, she is saying.

Can’t you see I need you, she is saying.

I stomp back down the stairs. Scream into a dish towel.

Climb back up the stairs. Sit by her bed.

“I can’t…stop…crying,” she wails, except the word crying comes out cwyin’ in her perfect, three-year-old lilt.

“I’m right here. You will not feel this way forever,” I say to her.

Or to myself.

Or both.

When I was a kid, I used to take my baby book down from the highest shelf in my closet in search of The Letter.

I loved The Letter. I still love The Letter.

The Letter was pages and pages of yellow legal pad paper, filled with my mom’s little looping scrawl and my dad’s left-handed slant. A love letter to a baby. A kind of gushing and purity of love that felt foreign, from a different lifetime.

When I had my first baby, I recognized a similar surging—a cascade of love inside my own heart. The dam had broken open and let the river run wild.

But I also felt a cold wave of fear. I understood, even then, that it would not always feel quite like this—euphoric and miraculous and all-consuming.

And then what?

How easy it is to love a baby purely and selflessly, when they are still a writhing ball of need, wholly dependent on you, wrapped with their ear pressed to your own wild heart—when there is not yet a thick, chisel-tip line of separation between their self and your own.

The more my girls individuate—the more they grow up, draw the line thicker, harder—the more I’m compelled to ask one particular question on a regular basis.

Am I loving them only for the ways they reflect my own self back to me?

Or am I willing to smash the mirror and let them go free?

Time carries the clock numbers forward.

It’s the only beautiful, bitter guarantee I know in raising these little people.

Belly. Bassinet. Bed.

Breastmilk. Baby food. Bananas.

There will always be a new, tumultuous season they enter in which they build a cocoon around themselves and emerge weeks later looking different, somehow—older, with more grown-up mannerisms, a new skill, a new phrase rolling off their tongues.

Every time I see them take out their silk and begin to wrap themselves into their cocoons, again, I feel the weight of responsibility. I feel the weight of the choice.

I could steel myself. I could dig my heels in and demand that they put on a version of themselves that I imagined they’d be or that they used to be, or that I want them to be.

Or I can look at their otherness and learn to hold it.

I can offer a kind of love that is free and untethered.

I can say: You are not me, and I am not you and I love you not in spite of your differences, but because of them.

I can close my eyes, take a deep breath—perhaps scream into a dish towel—and see the little person in front of me not through the lens of who she is in relation to me, or who she was, or who she will become, but who she is. Period.

Maybe that’s what a family really is.

Maybe that’s how we keep loving, in spite of everything.

All of us, a bunch of beloved others, walking through the world together the best way we know how.

We are having a Sunday night family dance party in the basement.

The bass is thumping and the girls are bopping to the beat.

My husband has gone all out: disco ball on the television, glow sticks sprinkled all over the carpet, pop music blaring through the speakers.

Halfway through the Kidz Bop rendition of Waffle House, I turn to my husband.

“Where on earth did our girls learn to dance like this?”

He smirks, shrugs, continues to dance mostly with his hands, both of us a jumble of elbows and feet.

All I know is the girls didn’t get it from us.

All I know is whatever freedom they feel in their own bodies, in how they move through the world…?

Well, that is all them.

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July Delights:

Currently reading:

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett—I am hooked so far. What an engrossing, timeless read.

Splinters by Leslie Jamison—one of the best books I’ve read in 2024. Full stop. The writing is phenomenal. This is one of those books I had to hold with my teeth while I scrambled for a legal pad and pen to scribble down some of the lines.

Tom Lake by Ann Patchett has been sitting on my nightstand all summer and I can’t wait to dive into it soon.

A few things I’ve been loving lately:

I run a lot (ok fine, a couple of miles at a time, a few times a week) in the summer and this gua sha muscle scraping tool is so helpful for post-runs.

I have an old, gray Joylab sweatshirt from Target that is my absolute favorite and has been for years, but it’s starting to wear out and isn’t sold anymore. Enter this sweatshirt from Quince. It is exactly the same only thicker and more durable and reminiscent of those vintage college fleeces. I love it.

A few things the kids have been loving lately:

This slip and slide has been maybe one of the best purchases of the summer. The kids are obsessed, and I’m obsessed because I get to sit and read a few pages of my book and for one brief moment, we are all living the summer dream.

We started reading The Wild Robot in preparation for the movie coming out this fall, and it is so darn good. Even my three-year-old is following along more than I imagined she would!

We are in a Where’s Waldo / I Spy / Wonderbooks phase over here, and I am here for it. We get all of these from the library. The kids will sit together on the couch and listen to a Wonderbook or search for Waldo or I Spy objects for hours. Praise be.

A few good eats:

We have been on a steady diet of Mom Refuses to Cook Anything Difficult (AKA taco salad, quesadillas, spaghetti, and breakfast for dinner on repeat).

It is July. It is hot. Mom is tired.

That being said, I did make this easy sausage and pepper sheet pan dinner which went over nicely with 3/4 of our family (three-year-olds are a special breed).

I like to stock the freezer with a couple homemade things for the kids for breakfasts/lunches, when I have time (emphasis on this last part). This month it was chocolate chip baked oatmeal and these banana chocolate chip muffins.

Watching + listening:

Simone Biles: Rising was such a lovely, intimate look at Simone’s return to the Olympics as she wrestles with her mental health, personal life, and rigorous training schedule.

Ben Rector’s new single, Wreck. Do the girls and I already have it memorized? We sure do. Everybody has an artist they feel like they “grew up with” and I know for a lot of people it’s Taylor Swift, but for me and Joe—from the ages of 18-30—it’s been Ben Rector.

Pod Save America has been keeping me sane, informed, and laughing during what will be possibly the most insane election year of my lifetime. (Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have also been keeping me laughing; thank God for funny people).

This re-play episode of Everything Happens where Kate Bowler interviews Suleika Jaouad is fantastic. They talk about illness, suffering, mercy, and love and it was a true balm for my soul.

Some good writing:

Faith Dwight

wrote a manifesto for being human, and she’s calling it her “Humanifesto”. It was such a powerful, lyrical read. I’ll be coming back to this one.

Tresta Payne

wrote this piece on the labels we use for art, choosing books for our kids, and what we call “good” and why. It was incredibly refreshing to see so much of what I’ve so often thought about laid out so expertly and neatly, here.

Katie Blackburn

’s piece on letting herself be sad, and letting her faith be what it is in an impossibly difficult time. This beautiful essay is honest, hopeful, gritty, and powerful. Katie always leads with her heart and this piece is no different.

ICYMI:

I wrote this essay on being a “good lifeboat” and rowing back to the parts of ourselves we’ve left behind.

Part-Time Poets’ fifteenth issue (!!) comes out tomorrow, where I share a poem about breaking news and what is truly urgent.

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That’s it, friends!

Here’s to our beloved otherness—yours and mine—and learning to hold one another with tenderness.

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