DO YOU SEE ME >>

Each night I have my girls, we talk to each other as they are going to bed. One is in 8th grade, the other in 5th. They are best friends, although they have vastly different personalities.  Our nightly ritual is to read or to look through their old yearbooks.  They love seeing how their friends have changed over time.  I usually lie on the bed next to them and just listen to their banter back and forth. The other night, my older daughter was reading something different.  She found her younger sister’s diary from several years ago–this was apparently ok with the younger one who was in the other room getting ready for bed.

She stopped reading to herself and said, “This page says to name a time when you were very mad or sad and explain why.” What she said next was something very personal to all of us. Our family changed that year and a 2nd grader’s diary entry took my breath away. I had never heard her words in that diary or in that way. She walked in from the other room and laid down on the bed next to me as if to say, “Mama, do you hear me?”

Ironically, there was a poem folded up and stuck in between those same breathless pages.  The oldest one had written this poem around the same time as the diary entry, and somehow it ended up in her younger sister’s diary.  It was called “Hello.”

She took the poem and said, “Oh I remember writing this. This is dumb. I think I’ll just rip it up.” Then, she stopped, for just a fraction of a second. Her eyes shifted to mine and immediately darted away as if to say, “Should I? Do you want to read this, mama? Do you see me, mama?” I took the poem from her and asked if I could read it. A tiny smile flashed through sad eyes, and then it was gone. The poem spoke of the impact the word hello has upon a person, as well as the meaningful implications.  She also noted that it was “the opposite of good bye.”

Do you know the times in life when you are so happy that your heart is bursting and you think, “How can my heart grow any bigger?” I love those times. This was not one of them.

This was a time that I wished I didn’t have a heart, or rather, one that felt. I wished I were heartless. That’s how I felt hearing the words from the diary and reading the hello poem. The girls needed a distraction from old feelings and quickly moved on to new topics in the diary.  I did not. I was still lying next to them trying to send them silent messages from my heartless heart: “Your mama feels you, I promise.”

Nothing about changing families is fair to kids. Just because their yearbook images reflect change doesn’t mean they get any better at dealing with it. They just get better at hiding the fact that they are still dealing. You simply must be able to live at their level of awareness and within their reality. This is a very powerful, innate gift as a mother. It may be more convenient for my heart to be heartless rather than to burst with real pain and emotion, but I can not ignore the pleas behind the poems or read the lines in the diary rather than reading in between them.  I can not simply see a smile without noticing the sad eyes behind it.

I hear, see, and feel it all–and all of those things bring me to my knees. But if my girls end up knowing what it means to hear and be heard, to see and be seen, to feel and be felt, then that is worth something. It is understanding and that means love.