Photo by Colin A. Danville

Dear Children,

You need to know that tears are as much a part of this life as laughter. For the most part, your days are made up of giggles and squeals, of running and jumping, of exploring and questioning. You spend your time investigating curious ideas and constructing impromptu experiments to test out those ideas. Along the way you stumble into your discoveries and are led to ask even more questions about yourself, your family, your life, the world, and everything in it. 

You know sadness too. You know the sting of busting your head on the floor when you’re moving too fast, or having a toy unjustly yanked from your hands, or being sent to the corner for the very mean thing you said to your brother or sister. You know the disappointment that comes from not getting your way, or from having to wait until the elusive next time to get the thing you really, really want. 

But mostly, you associate crying with a phenomenon of your frustrating moments as children. Not often do you have to witness your mother’s unhappiness, but it can happen. It does happen time to time. And you need to know that this is also a normal part of life. Sometimes your mother will have tears falling down her face, and you won’t know why, and you won’t be able to make them stop with a gentle kiss on the cheek. You won’t be able to pick me up and rock me side to side as I do for you. You won’t be able to pull out a breast and soothe my woes as you nurse me to sleep. You won’t be able to strap me on your back and carry me around until I feel better. All these ways are how you’ve learned to tend to tears, and it may come as a shock to you that none of these methods will help you if you see your mother crying. 

Unlike your tears, I won’t be able to explain all of mine to you. In those moments, it’s generally very complicated. Sometimes it will be because someone else said something harsh or cruel to mommy and my feelings are hurt. Sometimes it will be about some drama in our family that’s too much for munchkin ears and brains to comprehend. Sometimes it will be because my heart is broken and it will take me a really long time to mend it and recover my joy. 

You, sweet as you are, will naturally want to help me feel better. And you may feel powerless at the realization that there is no instant remedy for mommy’s pain. One day, a long, long time from now when you are adults, you will understand what I mean by “some things take time.” Right now, you live with such raw devotion to the present moment, you can’t fully fathom this time that it takes for grown-ups to sometimes feel better. Still, in your own way, you will try to soothe me. And I will be grateful, even as I know I won’t be able to pretend everything is okay so that you feel good about your efforts to make mommy feel better. 

It’s important that I teach you how to honor all of your emotions. Some emotions are more difficult to experience, but they are as much a part of the fabric of humanity as all the lovely, feel-good feelings. I am responsible for showing you how to navigate your emotional landscape as authentically as you can. In showing you my tears, I am helping you understand that grief, loss, heartache, and despair are natural parts of the human experience. Little as you are, you too are human. And one day, you will have to grow through your own awakenings into the depths and possibilities of your emotions. Sometimes I won’t be there to pat your back or hold you in my lap while you feel the full weight of your sorrows. Sometimes your tears will overwhelm you, and the sobbing will move violently through your body, and you will have to let your storm run its course. You will have to give yourself the time and space to find your own way back to peace.

But you are a ways off from such adult labors. For now, you will experience most of your tough moments within reach of your mother’s loving support. You will be encouraged to use your words as they come to you, and as you mature, to be thorough in sorting and identifying what is really bothering you. This is a critical life skill, and as your mother, I am here to model emotional intelligence and emotional literacy for you. These are things we practice for a lifetime. As you grow, you will come to find your own truths, your own rhythms within this dance. In this way you will learn to have empathy for others, as you too will know intimately what it feels like to sometimes have to navigate the sad, lonely, devastating parts of life too. 

Tears are not something to be afraid of, is what I’m really saying. Tears bring us clarity, like how the rain washes out the old and makes room for the new to shine and bloom. Sometimes we have to cry so that we can finally admit our honest needs to ourselves. Sometimes we have to shed our tears so that we can stop resisting and censoring the thing pressing so passionately on our hearts. Sometimes we have to release our hidden dam of salty waters so that we might access the breadth of our own brilliant visions, so that we might feel the fullness of the moments we are creating with this one life we each have to live. 

So my lovelies, when you do see me crying sometimes, know that I am just expressing one of many emotions on the spectrum of feelings. One of the most essential strengths to cultivate in this life is the ability to give yourself permission to feel. When you see mommy crying, that’s what I’m doing. I’m giving myself a moment to be real with the undersides of joy. I’m taking the liberty to be whole and human, and teaching you to do the same. 

With all my love,
Mommy

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Mommy and Daddy’s first summer together, laughing during a break from my photo shoot at the same park where we met the year before. Photo by Colin A. Danville

My Dear Children,

You will hear this story told many times. It will come out differently depending on who’s doing the telling, and when the telling is being told. The story begins in multiple places, and is too layered to fully tell as a simple, chronological tale. This is why I’m taking the time to write this part down now. A story is a living thing, and over years, over decades, over lifetimes it changes and grows in some ways, waivers and recedes in others. For me this story of how I met your father is an essential thread of who you are, of how you came to exist as you know yourself to be. 

As mother-rooted as I am, your life would not be possible if it weren’t for the generous collaboration of your father. His contributions initiated your sacred transformation from human potential as eggs in my ovaries to human beings in their earliest form as zygotes seeking a deep and warm welcoming within my uterine wall. For my part, you’ve all been with me since my mother conceived me in her womb 10 moons before I was born. You have each survived so much to be who you are today. You began as one of two million opportunities of the future. It is extremely magical, holy, and amazing that you are here, as you are. I celebrate the miracle of your life every moment of everyday. 

As I grew from baby, to girlchild, to young lady, to grown-up woman, to artist woman, to invisible mother, to new mommy, to breastfeeding mother, to dancing mother, to mother mother—I gained more and more conscious awareness of our physical, spiritual, and emotional connections as mother and children. I believe you all played a significant role in leading me to intersect life paths with your father when I did. We actually met a year before we became involved. We were introduced to each other on Easter Sunday at the drum circle at Malcolm X Park in Washington, DC by a mutual friend. I didn’t know at the time but your father had previously been in a relationship with that same friend. She and I weren’t particularly close, but we were friendly, and I’d known her as an artist in the community for a few years by then. 

A few weeks after our first introduction we were both attending that mutual friend’s thesis defense at Howard University. It was another sunny, spring Sunday afternoon. I was very late to the defense, having procrastinated all morning and moving slowly to get out the house. Your father walked in moments after me. The place was packed; our friend didn’t realize we were so late. It was a festive moment. She passed with great feedback from her advisory committee. Her paintings were hung up all over the walls and people took in the depth of her work over delicious plates of appetizers. It was in front of one of these paintings that your father and I had our first real private conversation. We talked about the colors, the shapes, the meanings, the possibilities and implications of interpretations of the story illustrated in the painting. 

Seemingly trying to make up for our mutual guilt at being so late, we both stayed to help clean up and were two of the last people to leave. We ended up walking together to the African American Civil War Memorial where I was going to dance. Your father offered to walk with me since he was about to go and train at his capoeira school a few blocks away. A warmth, organic and light, was budding between your father and I. It was not something intentionally sought after, on either of our parts, but there it was spreading by its own will anyway. I thought it only decent to inform your father that I was actually in a relationship with someone else at the moment. Still I gave him my card so that he would hopefully call me to follow-up about leading a wellness stretch session that he said would be good for me as a dancer. We couldn’t technically exchange numbers because he had no cell phone. This was truly bizarre because everyone and their grandmother had a cell phone by this point, but your father—well by now you’ve figured out he’s not like everyone else, especially when it comes to modern technology—he never called me, of course. Instead, being ever thoughtful, he posted my business card up in his favorite coffee shop on the message board in case anyone was looking for a dancer. (Ironically, no one ever took my card off of the board and a long time later, after we were in a relationship, he went back to retrieve my business card and finally put it in his wallet, which was where I’d thought it had been all along.)

We unexpectedly saw each other once more months later in October, a few weeks before I was leaving for my dance residency in Trinidad. I was facilitating a public space movement workshop for international artists in different spots around town. Your father was a bike courier then and magically ran into our group twice. There’s a famous photo he took of us at Dupont Circle to document the day. It was really a special moment because the person I was dating then was supposed to come to the park to see me teach my class, but he somehow couldn’t find a large group of dancing people after being there for two hours, so he said. Meanwhile, your father found me quite easily, two times at that. I thought it was telling, in many ways. 

In April of the next year when I was back in DC after living in Trinidad & Tobago for four months, your father and I bumped into each other again downtown on L Street. By now he actually had a cell phone. I was pleasantly shocked as we exchanged numbers for real that time. That rainy Friday in mid-April is the day we mark as the beginning of our partnership. L Street, as we like to call it, is a whole other point from which we could start this story. I’ve written about L Street many times, and will no doubt write about it on more occasions as the years go by. Remember, the story is a living thing. It grows as we grow, changes as we change, more details revealed or lost each time.

It was not “love at first sight” all those years ago that Easter Sunday at the park. But perhaps the necessary roots of warmth, openness, and curiosity that can just as well anchor a spirited seed of love through its rough and awkward beginnings were present enough. From that fleeting introduction grew something very tangible and lasting. Here we are, nearly a decade since that initial encounter, a whole tribe of munchkins to our name, a family business, and a long list of shared dreams that will take us all around the world.

So, my little lovelies, as you witness this perpetual dance between your father and I, as you watch us continue to stumble and grow, to fall and rise, to laugh and cry, inside these relentless labors of familymaking, and parenting, and being artists—all the while raising a lively band of bright beings—I hope you come into your own understandings of where and how you each began. I hope in time you choose to find your own way into the telling of these stories, adding your memories to the expanding whole, remembering all the particulars that we might one day forget to mention ourselves.

Love All Ways,

Mommy

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