Day 924: A Letter to My Daughter on Her Fifth Birthday

As I have been trying to help promote this year's Listen To Your Mother--Chicago show (submissions are due January 15!), I thought it would be a good idea to include the text of the piece that I performed in the 2012 show; this piece, in this exact form, hasn't been posted here yet. You can see the video on youtube (turn up the volume!), read the producers' feelings about it, or ponder my own thoughts about what the experience meant, but maybe the most useful thing would be to show you what I said. And yes, I mean said, not read. Because Lenny was in the audience, and I said this to her.



A Letter to My Daughter on Her Fifth Birthday

by Katy Jacob

Dear Lenny:

Today you are five years old, and I am writing you a letter. In some ways this entire breast cancer blog of mine is a long letter to you and your brother. I write it with the selfish hope that if I don’t survive, you will know something about me, other than that I loved you and cooked good dinners and made you laugh. It seems to me that almost everything about how a parent loves a child is selfish. We want things for you, we steep ourselves in denial for you, but really we do those things for ourselves, because you have taught us how short our lives really are. You make us wince with your innocent curiosity: “When I am grown will I still see you every day?” “How old will you be when I’m grandma’s age?” “Will I have long hair, or do you think I will get cancer and my hair will fall out?”

And it is upon hearing those questions that we make choices. We make the choice to acknowledge the imminence of separation, illness, and death, and then to just let it go. If I could make any choice, I would go into the future so that I could know you as a grown woman, and see the answers to your questions for myself.

In the meantime, I am astounded by you, by how you are such a…Lenny. Parents like to say that their children are a part of them. That is simply not true. Take, for example, your memory. You remember all of the things we say, all of the things you’ve seen, all of the people you’ve known. That’s just a part of you, like so many other things. We did not make you smart, or fragile, or funny. We did not make you shy around people and comfortable on a stage. We might have taught you empathy but could not teach you the appropriate times to use it. We did not make you fussy, or willful, or contrary.

We might have given you your looks, but we did not tell you how to handle them. I still laugh when I think of that birthday party we attended when you were three, after the fourth or fifth father told you how beautiful you were and you looked him right in the eye and said, “I know that. Are there cupcakes?” As you get older, I know how weary it will make you as the questions turn into propositions and the appreciative glances turn into unwanted stares.

I wish I could make a different world for you. When you ask how old you will be when this happens, or that happens, you are really asking, “Mom, what will I be like? What will the world be like?” And the answer is that the world will be the same, but you will not, because that is what happens with people who live in the world. I can remember being five, being as happy and friendly and shy as you are today. What I don’t remember is when that was lost, when I learned how to be mean, to fight with my fists, to run and not stop running. In the scheme of things I wasn’t that much older than you.

I want so desperately to protect you, even though I know I might not be there to do that. On some level you know that too. That knowledge is a burden that I gave you, but I didn’t tell you how to deal with it, because I really didn’t know how. I realize now that all I could do was deal with my burden myself, and that you would learn from me how to deal with yours.

I only wore a wig for a few weeks, and only for a few minutes a day when I walked you to school, because I didn’t want you to have to answer questions about cancer. I spent close to a thousand dollars on hair, and then spent six months just walking around bald. And that is the lesson I was teaching you, though it was hard for me to see it at first, until I learned that you were giving preschool cancer tutorials, telling everyone: “My mom is on chemo. It’s medicine for people with cancer that you get through a needle in your arm. It made her lose her hair and it can make her sick. Soon she won’t have to do it and she will feel better on radiation.”

As with many things over the last five years, I just didn’t see that one coming. That is the gift you have given me—the gift of being continuously surprised. It is difficult to find a way to thank you for that, or to repay you. So what would I give you if I could give you anything on this day? I could be trite, and tell you to be yourself, to enjoy life, to have no regrets, to find something that you love to do, to be a part of improving the world. But the truth is I just want to know that you’re there.

Perhaps that is what I am trying to pass on to you, this strange ability to be a comfort just by being. It might be a better way to walk through life than any other. Or maybe I tell myself that to make it seem acceptable that I am not the things that I am not. I am not the perfect nurturer. I have been stern, and angry, and busy, and sick, and scary. I often read the newspaper and ignore you. I am the reason we watch sports on TV, not cartoons. I leave the house a lot to exercise. I cook and clean and collapse on the couch and I rarely get down on the floor to play with you.

I want to offer to you the one thing that I can’t promise you: I want to still be there. I want to see and talk to you every day. Someone once told me that if he didn’t see me all of the time, it would make him sad, but he wouldn’t miss me, because he knew he would see me again. I will always remember how he paused before he said, but even if I didn’t, it’s enough to know that you’re out there in the world, and that you’re all right. Lenny, if I ever get to a point where that’s all I can ask for, and the last thing I know is that you and your brother are there and that you’re all right, it will be enough. Happy Birthday, honey. I love you.

--Mom

Day 672: Turning Six

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Today my daughter is six years old. For as long as I can remember, I wanted to have a daughter named Lenny, even when I didn’t know if I wanted to have any daughters or sons at all. If it was good enough for Stevie Ray Vaughan’s guitar (or more accurately, if he had the good sense to marry a woman named Lenny and then rightly name his guitar after her), it was good enough for me. There would always be a song for her, this unborn daughter, a song full of tranquility and romance and joy. Luckily, I had the good sense to marry a man who was all right with this reasoning, and then, on March 8, 2006, after hours of torturous pushing and more than a month of frightening bed rest, I became Lenny's mother. And as every parent knows, at that moment the world turned upside down.

Last year, I wrote Lenny a letter for her birthday, a letter I have yet to allow her to read. I was still steeped in the notion that I might not be there to witness many more birthdays, and so I said many of the things that I wanted to say, many of the things I wanted to be sure to tell her if I didn’t otherwise have the chance. And then, a year passed, so quickly and seamlessly it was as if we were floating across water.

Of course, it wasn’t really like that. The last year was full of change, full of surprises. Right around this time last year I came out of chemo-induced menopause just as suddenly as I was thrown into it. A few months later, we bought a new house. We began to live as if that’s what we were doing, living a young family’s life. And then, all of a sudden, my tiny girl turned six. Six! The age I was when I was diagnosed with epilepsy, when I tried to find religion and failed, when I befriended a little girl who became my soul mate and then moved all the way across the globe.

Six is an age that should be simple in a world that is always complicated. For adults, time and change are amorphous creatures. I think about the big events, and those mark time for me. But for a child, it’s different. I mean, at what point did my daughter become obsessed with weather? When did she learn the location of every country in the world? How did she suddenly know how to do division and sodoku? Is it possible that my little girl was able to fall in love with a boy five years older, and that it would be something approaching real love, full of looking wistfully out the window and awkward giggles and misplaced enthusiasm?

These things happened so quickly and so gradually that it just seems as if they have always been. It seems perfectly natural for me to hand my daughter the newspaper and have her tell me, “mom, I think the winds are going to be strong out of the southwest today.” Lenny has become the calm one, the rational one, the one who follows instructions and is thoughtful about things and careful with other people’s feelings. She has tried to create order where her brother has created chaos. And I already find myself wondering who she really is, whether she has created multiple Lennys for a variety of situations, and if she is only choosing to show one of those Lennys to me.

In some ways, that is what we all do. I know when I was a child, I kept so many things to myself that my interior life probably bore little resemblance to the face I showed the world. I rarely asked for assistance of my parents, rarely related the tough situations that happened at school or in the neighborhood to them. Thinking back, I rarely even discussed those things with my best friends. It was as if I needed to be able to take care of myself, and I didn’t want others to have to look out for me, so the world was wider and wilder than it needed to be.

Oh Lenny, how I hope it isn’t like that for you, and yet how I hope you know how to handle yourself if it is. This world today, even on this International Women’s Day, is so hard for little girls who will one day grow up to be women. It always has been, but we give ourselves this hope that things will change, that things cannot possibly be as difficult for our daughters as they were for us, and by God surely they can’t be worse. I find myself getting angry for you in the strangest of circumstances:

--in department stores, where I find hip-huggers for three year old girls and t-shirts for toddler boys that warn parents to hide their daughters

--in doctor’s offices, where I am often treated as if I am your age

--at meetings and conferences, when I am one of a handful of women in a room full of men (and I notice that I am the only one wearing a skirt and I wonder if that somehow makes a difference)

--at home, when I see you cleaning up after your brother when you don’t clean up after yourself

--on the street, when I notice cars slowing down to look at me, or, worse, at you

--at the pediatrician’s, when the doctor remarks at how smart you are, how above the curve you are in almost every sense, until he weighs you and remarks that perhaps we should be concerned, you are only 2nd percentile (so am I Doc, what do you want?)

--in bed, when your father reaches for a condom and I wonder if you will ever have to fight with a man to get him to do that

--at the gym or the pool, where so many women seem self-conscious, in such stark opposition to you, a girl who is just happy to be moving, playing, swimming

--in my office, when I get ready to leave at 4 so that I can see you, knowing that I have sacrificed some lifelong earnings for that privilege

--on the train, when I read the news, and I see how women’s bodies dominate our collective thoughts

--at the dinner table, when you flex your little biceps and I laugh and am proud of you and then I think about how I never want you to have to use those muscles to protect yourself, knowing all the while that you will

--in the park, when boys get away with inexcusable behavior because they are boys, and other parents look objectionably as you do flips on the bars in your dress

--in your room, where you constantly ask me what everything means, even if you already know, and I begin to wonder how I will ever explain certain concepts to you in the way I would like you to understand them (e.g. so-called "virginity:" Lenny, shake my hand. Now look, you can’t have it back. That’s right, that’s ridiculous. What do you have that you can give away and can’t have back? Nothing. You can’t give away a part of yourself. You can just decide who to share it with, and when, and how.)

--in the shower, when I feel my left breast and rinse my short unruly hair and hope against hope you never have to do what I’ve done over the last two years.

And so it goes. There isn’t much left to do but turn anger into hope, and turn resignation into faith in your abilities to adapt and thrive. So for my daughter, a brilliant and funny and empathetic and beautiful little six year old girl, I wish for the best of birthdays and a hundred more. I wish for the opportunity to spend many more of those birthdays with you. I wish the world was an easier place. In the last six years, you have definitely made it a better one.