The Letter

My daughter turns three this week. So amidst my many-listed chores and preparations, I
have one daunting task to accomplish. The Letter.

Reflecting on the task at hand, I pull up the First Letter. I read. I marvel. I have forgotten
many things.

In some ways this blog of ours accomplishes a similar idea to The Letter. This blog
could be, in essence, a legacy for our children, for when they are curious about who
were these women, these mothers, who became so hardened in their ways, or so
unrelenting, or magnificent, or kind, or ill, or perhaps gone altogether. Let’s hope they
have questions, and that we may provide insight into their early days, and our bared little
mama souls.

Here is a very pared-down version of that first letter I wrote back in the spring of 2011.

Portrait of Your Mother during the First Year of Your Life
Chapter 1
April 8, 2011

Hi [Guppins]. You will be 18 today. Or perhaps this will surface some other way, some
other time. I am trying hard to picture you. Today I have a strong image of you walking
into our apartment as a grown woman (I will be surprised if we still live there, but you
never know): tall, short-haired, good-humoured, confident. Not complicated. Maybe
some secret complications that are only yours... (I am making stuff up now because
how can I know? You are just a sleeping baby as I write this.) What I mean to get
across is the feeling I have, imagining you now, and how it astonishes me. I have lived
my life intuitively. Maybe not made the best choices, or plotted things out, particularly
financially, so to have pulled off growing a young woman — at my age, of all things (I
am 41 writing this), is...well, it is a miracle. You are a miracle to me. Your existence has
taught me some very affirming things about myself. I know it may seem silly — women
have babies all the time — but still…to me, the growing-a-life thing basically put to right
some shady ideas I had about myself, my abilities, my normalcy. You have helped make
me feel normal, and capable, and able to love. You, my Dear Daughter, have sorted me
out.

This idea was given me by a playwright by the name of David Young. He said to me at
a New Years’ Day party, “Give her a yearly portrait of you as a woman. Every year ’til
she’s eighteen — write it until she’s eighteen — then give her the first on her eighteenth
birthday. Give her that.”

First of all, I am fairly narcissistic, so this idea does seem a tad…narcissistic. But then, I
thought — am thinking — well, what if I die? Something dreadful like that. I don’t know…
So I am going with it.

Portrait of a Woman: A Year in [Drama Mama]

Mother. Mother is new to me. Never have I been defined as Mother. Many, many years
of not being seen as Mother. And here I am. And it is fitting…my being cast in this role.
One of the things that has happened during your first year of life is I have been cast
to play Hermione in The Winter’s Tale. It is so…timely. Hermione begins the play on
the cusp of giving birth to a baby girl named Perdita. Perdita is lost to Hermione for the
first sixteen years of her life. And you might now be somehow lost to me. Growing up
does this. So you are my Perdita as you read this. When mother and daughter re-unite,
Hermione says:

Oh You Gods
From your Sacred Vials pour your Graces upon my daughter’s head.
Tell me, mine own.
Where hast thou been preserved? Where liv’d? How found thy father’s court?
For thou shalt hear that I, knowing by Paulina that the Oracle gave hope thou was’t in
being,
have preserved My Self to see the issue…

And so my darling [Guppins],

I call you Perdita.

(No matter where we are to each other, my heart is open to you, and I wish only to be
waiting in our private garden for when you return, and wish that all the world fills you with
grace, forever.)

Your loving mother.

-Drama Mama