Line upon Line

I have a little pink book with a compilation of columns I wrote when I was a young mother. This essay is one of them and what I learned trying to teach my children.

My daughter came home from school with that look on her face every parent hopes never to see: crushed, pelted, the light doused. You hope when they are little that you can protect them from such feelings. You tell her she is beautiful. You cheer for every A. You make a complete fool of yourself at her first piano recital by taking three rolls of photographs during “The Minute Waltz.”

You hope that she will have the experiences growing up so that she will see in herself what you see. She is unique, irreplaceable, the most precious child ever born. “Let her know how wonderful she is,” you ask the Lord. You want to empower her to live with courage and happiness.

At first it looked good. On Halloween, when she was five, she dressed up as a princess and shouted to everybody as she went up and down the street trick-or-treating, “I am the prettiest little princess in all the world.” But something happens to prettiest little princesses as they grow up. Somebody tells them their nose is too big, they don’t understand how to do long division and wonder if they are stupid, and the girl next door invites someone else to her birthday party. Soon your wonderful daughter believes she is not a princess at all, but a frog. It is an inevitable loss, a stain that comes with earth, but every mother thinks that for her child, she can deflect it.

This was one of those times when I could not protect my daughter. It had been the day of her big school roller skating party; and when it was the boys’ turn to choose the girls, she hadn’t been picked. I knew how she felt. I remembered the first big dance of high school. “Everybody who’s anybody is going to the football dance,” my friend had assured me in study hall. I nodded as if I agreed; but all the time, I was filled with secret doubts. The days passed. The phone didn’t ring. “Any messages for me?” I asked with studied nonchalance. No calls. No invitation. I cried the night of the football dance—hard. In fact I remember looking at my face in the mirror all red and blotchy, thinking I didn’t blame anyone for not wanting to take me to the dance It wasn’t the dance itself so much I missed. It was the having been scrutinized and passed over.

Couldn’t anyone see something shining in me? I didn’t know then how many dances were ahead, that someone would sing to me and send me flowers and one day I wouldn’t still feel passed over.

So I was ready with words of comfort for my daughter. “Life has this kind of rhythm about it,” I said. “I wish I could promise that you will always be chosen, that everything will work together to make you feel good. I wish I could throw a cloak of protection around you to always keep you from the cold. But even my love is not enough to do that for you.

“There will be days like this—when you are not picked for the things that matter to you, and then there will be days when it will all work out. And though you may not believe it now, you may value the times of not being chosen as much as the times you’re picked. There’s a deepening of the soul, an enlarging of understanding to begin to comprehend the sorrows of humanity.

“Loss plays its part in the educating of the human heart, that triumph never can.”

She looked at me after my speech with a blank, miserable stare, and I realized that I had said the wrong thing. She didn’t want to know that it was good for you to sometimes not get picked. She wanted me to hug her and say, “There, there,” and tell her that the boys at her school needed glasses. She wanted me to tell her that she was just blooming, and everybody who didn’t get to skate with her this year would be heartsick when they saw who she really was.

I had thought as a parent I could make life easy for my children by giving them what I know, but I realized then that wisdom cannot be passed on like a grandmother’s pearls. How many years had it taken me to value loss as well as gain, sorrow as well as satisfaction? A very long time. How long had it taken me to learn that life has its cycles, and that when you are dry and down, it is not permanent? We learn most of life’s lessons in the crucible of experience, the vision dawning on us in small pieces, over time.

Yet, I had tried to pass the understanding on to her in a neat prescription, an undigested chunk which, of course, she could not comprehend. Oh, she could echo my words back to me. They might even stand in memory for a time when experience had taught her some meaning, but I cannot do much to shortcut that process.

Adlai Stevenson said, “What a man knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty is, for the most part incommunicable…. The laws, the aphorisms, the generalizations, the universal truths, the parables and the old laws—all the observations about life which can be communicated in handy verbal packages—are as well known to a man at twenty as at fifty. He has been told them all, he has read them all, and he has probably repeated them all before he graduates—but he has not lived them.

“What he knows at fifty that he did not know at twenty boils down to something like this:

“The knowledge he has acquired with age is not a knowledge of formulas or forms or words, but of people, places, actions; a knowledge gained not by words, but by touch, sight, sound, victories, failures, sleeplessness, devotions, love—the human experience and emotions of this earth and of one’s self and other men. Perhaps, too, a little reverence for things you cannot see.”

I look at my daughter, sad from not getting picked, and I would like to make things better for her in an easy phrase instead of letting her face the experiences that will give her wisdom.

Yet many of the things we come to know are the result of a dialogue between our personality and life’s experiences. We are a collection of awakenings—when the mist still hovered over the earth, when we tasted warm wheat bread, heard the sound of the wind whipping up a storm, overheard all the mornings and evenings we have ever lived and the thoughts which came at the right time to finally connect with us.

We all know more than we can share.

So I will tell my child what I have come to learn in life’s hard and wonderful school, but I will not be surprised if she must learn it in her own way and time. I will tell her she is intelligent, noble, beautiful in every way; but I will understand if she cannot take my word for it. Along the way there will be real losses, a testing and sifting of her that may be hard for me to bear. But, if she is lucky, there will come her own kind of wisdom, and a knowledge of her beauty and courage which I cannot give to her. Only experience can.