Welcome back!
It’s time to celebrate! Eight years ago this week, my first daughter came wailing into the world. In the weeks leading to her birth, I was repeatedly told that her arrival would “change everything.”
Sometimes I nodded sagely as though I understood. Other times I blinked, uable to comprehend just what that might mean.
I had no idea.
Looking back, I see the profound changes that awaited me. In the years following her birth, I have transformed my entire way of being in the world. It’s not that I am a fundamentally different person. I have always loved deeply, sought out the beauty that surrounds us and cared passionately about enriching people’s lives. But my commitment to modeling a healthy way of being, my capacity to sit compassionately with myself, and my ability to relish the precious moments that make life worth living has exponentially increased. In a very real sense, I have been in the process of uncovering, integrating, and yes, birthing long dormant aspects of my personality.
My daughter’s birth may have thrown me into two years of postpartum depression, a fate I would never wish on another soul. There were moments I didn’t know if I would survive, or even if I cared to. But I was not a victim. Like the Velveteen Rabbit, I emerged “REAL.”
In honor of the births of all our children, and of the unfolding process that is parenthood done right, I offer you this exerpt from Margery Williams’ The Velveteen Rabbit:
“What is REAL?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”
“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”
“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.
“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”
“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in your joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
May you read this and know the beauty that you are. Thank you for being.
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