Life, Unconfined

Dear Mom and all your aliases: Bubbles (earned for personality), Mama Dukes (to set you apart), and Kilowatt Queen (that one is a long story)

I'm supposed to confess something you didn't know, it's not an easy feat. A mother's intuition is scarily refined, like when you were at work and somehow knew that your eldest daughter fell out of a tree. With six unruly kids to look after, co-parenting, and a full-time job, there has to be something I could confess you don't already know.

Let's start somewhere in the 80's...

There was a time before the responsibilities and the messes of children needing attention constantly. Time before the long nights of worry in our teen years when you were young and causing your mother worry too. She especially worried when you signed up for the U.S. Army right after graduation.

You were a bright-eyed bushy-tailed kid ready to take on the world. You didn't realize it then, but the hard-earned lessons, 5 a.m. wake-up calls, and drill sergeants would hold significant value to you for the rest of your life.

The unsteadiness that's commonplace in youth was replaced with a proud, capable woman. If your life had an events timeline, it would look like this:

At the age of 26, you gave birth to your firstborn son. His sudden arrival meant you married in the hospital room. That's right - in the hospital room. A small ceremony was put together while you were recovering.

At the age of 28, you gave birth to your firstborn daughter. Followed by a bad break-up in which you moved to another state, kids in tow. You must have felt a fresh outlook and a new hope painted as palm trees, sunny days, and dreamy skies.

At 29, I came along. I was so excited I came months ahead of schedule. (That's precisely why I'm always late now, Mom.)

At 35, you met someone special and your third daughter was born.

At 37, you had your second son. You seemed happy with your relationship and had a two-income household too.

Although that relationship ended, you eventually found love again. Last and spoiled, your youngest son came. You were 42 and glowing!

So in short, you went from a wild child teen (your words), turned Army Veteran turned Mom of six in less than two decades. We all called ourselves, "The Brady Bunch". The trick is to have more kids so that the oldest takes care of the youngest, right?

That's not to say everything was as peachy as the T.V. show. Like most families that size crammed into relatively small spaces for long periods, we put the "fun" in dysfunction. The point of my letter is not to make a display of our toughest moments as a family. I'm getting to my confession.

Viewed this way, as if to sum up a life, you begin to see a picture of who someone truly is. Or so you think. Many obituaries are laid out similarly to state facts. When a person was born, when they died, and an in-between paragraph. An obituary is choosing a single esteemed snapshot out of dozens of albums of art, you could never do a collection justice based on one snapshot. You can't sum up a life in 150 characters.

These facts of your life do give insights and have contributed to you in part. Although, the essence of who you are as a person goes beyond any list. Understanding the complexities of people takes certain wisdom and that comes with age. When I didn't have the wits of an almost 30-year-old and instead had the mule-headed rage of a 15-year-old, we both felt disconnected.

My confession is that I misjudged you as a person.

A lot of drama could've been avoided if I hadn't projected my inner insecurity on you so I could feel less responsible for the negativity in my life. Blaming you felt easier than facing my issues.

In true ignorant youthful fashion, I remember feeling as though I knew exactly who you were. I had you measured and scaled and placed into a cabinet to stay forever. I wanted to keep you within the limits of my understanding. I wanted to be able to pull you out of the cabinet, blame you for everything, then discard you back out of sight. The reason I use that analogy is that people often hold their parents accountable for everything wrong in their lives. I convinced myself to redirect blame to you, so I didn't need to accept accountability.

Out of all the things I could've written about, I chose this because even though the animosity of my teenage drama has ended and we've both moved forward. I want you to know that I understand you are a person and not just my Mom. That you lived for 29 long years before I came along, years filled with self-discoveries and memories I may never hear the story about. It's not that we don't want to hear them, Mom. It's that we're so carried away by our own lives that we forget to stop and ask you about yours. I can speak for all of the kids when I say we'd love to hear more about you! It makes us happy to see your happiness when you stop in your tracks to detail a memory from long ago.

There are a lot of unanswered questions we're dying to know!

Back then I was so convinced I knew you, Mom. I couldn't see that you were trying to navigate the world as much as I was. You've fought and won battles never spoken of, cried through heartbreak, loved and lost, tried your best, moved jobs and houses countless times, tried again, never gave up, and instilled into your kids how to love one another deeply.

I can never understand everything about you and you can't understand me completely. There's something beautiful in that we can't box people and keep them there. Our nature is to change, shift, evolve, and radically move in a direction. The difference is giving each other room to "be human".

Here's to a lifetime of deeper love and understanding,

-Dani, (clearly the middle child)

143, I love you