To my girls,
You have been living with me this long and before you are old enough to read any of what I write, you will have been living with me many more years. After all of this living with me, you probably notice that I have a few… um… obsessive compulsive tendencies. This is nothing new.
I remember when I was in sixth grade, I got one of those pens that had four colors of ink in them. This was pretty cool because it meant that I could write my homework in any of those colors that I wanted. So I took all of my science notes for the entire year, and I rewrote them all in green. It looked awesome.
Then I started to look at other people’s notes. One girl had the perfect handwriting – the kind that seems to only appear in handwriting text books. And it fit her. She was very cautious and serious. And her handwriting reflected that. I wanted to be cautious and conscientious and perfect. So I ripped out all of those notebook pages again, and I rewrote them in handwriting that was just like hers. I looked through my pages, and I thought they looked remarkable.
Until then I saw someone else’s notebook. She had her notes written in bubbly letters and instead of punctuating her letter I with a period, she used a heart. “Wow. That looks like something from Saved by the Bell,” I thought. And yet again, I ripped out all of those pages and I copied my notes in her handwriting. It seemed young and cheerful and just really cool, a lot like the girl who wrote like that.
And this continued for years, I’m embarrassed to say. Perhaps it’s because we wore uniforms and couldn’t really express ourselves in how we dressed that handwriting stood out to me. For years when I would remember these note taking escapades I would laugh and think that yup, that’s OCD at its finest.
But then I start to wonder.
While it’s not pleasant to admit, I do have to admit that I will go into someone’s house and I will love their decor, and part of me will wish my house looked like that. I want that style, and that floor plan, and that couch. Whether the house is traditional or eclectic or just thrown together, I will look at how the house reflects the inhabitant, and I will wish those qualities for myself and that style for my house.
The same goes with a lot of other things. The way people dress, the kind of car they drive, the books they read, their vocabulary, the types of pictures they post on Facebook…
We just read A Bad Case of Stripes by David Shannon, and that book spoke to me because in a way, I was always the main character, changing my stripes depending upon which version of a human being I wanted to be that day.
And then I look at you three…
Magoo, you are so intelligent and creative and compassionate and sensitive.
Goose, you are so passionate and excitable and intuitive and determined.
And Mae, you are so peaceful and goofy and gentle and communicative.
I look at you, and I want to beg you to never try to be another person’s version of yourself.
The world will have a lot of things it will want to make you. It will want to make you look different and act different, smile different and laugh different. It will try to mold you into its version of you.
But the secret is that the world can’t mold you into something you don’t want it to. So the trick isn’t exactly to build walls to keep the world out but rather to build fences to keep yourself in.
It’s hard being a chameleon, but what’s even harder is living with the state inside of you that makes you want to be a chameleon in the first place. We don’t get like that by accident. We get like that because we focus too much on the outside and we forget what we have on the inside. We negate our offerings to the world and we instead what to give the offerings of another.
But the truly remarkable thing is that once you decide you won’t live that way anymore, once you decide to determine who you really are and live by what you really want, there is a peace and a contentment and a passion that will come over you that will make you not want to be that chameleon any longer.
There are multiple reasons why I started this blog a few years ago. One is because I need to write like most people need to breathe. If I’m not writing, I’m not thinking well. Another is that I wanted a written legacy to you three. I wanted you to be able to know the me that existed before your conscious memories did.
But another part of me started this blog so that I could finally claim who I was. I would stop hiding behind silence or our front door or other people’s opinions. This space made me take a stance. It made me figure out who I am and what I wanted. It made me be me and it made me own that loud and clear.
And I can tell you that going down that path can only bring you peace. It will allow you to stop running and fighting and fretting and comparing. Because once you decide to be yourself, there is no one to compare yourself to. You are the only you, and that’s all there is to that.
So to my three baby girls, when you do finally read this, I pray you take these words and you live them — be yourself. Be only yourself. It’s who you were created to be, and you have contributions to make to this world that no one else ever will be able to.
Perhaps I’m slightly biased as your mother, but I couldn’t imagine three greater gifts that I could give the world that the three of you. Own it. Please.