I want them to know it has been good.
Not in spite of everything. Not by managing to find the good alongside the hard. Actually, straightforwardly good, in the way that things are good when you finally stop waiting for them and start inhabiting them. Good in the mornings and good in the garden and good in the long walks and the writing and the ceramics class where I am bad at the ceramics and do not mind being bad because being bad at something while still doing it is its own kind of freedom, which I had forgotten, which the years of being required to be competent had made it easy to forget.
I want them to know I am not just fine.
I know they ask and I say fine and they hear the fine as reassurance rather than as the full account. I say fine because I do not want them to worry and because fine is faster and because the full account would require them to understand something about this season of life that they cannot yet understand because they are not yet in it, the way I could not understand what my mother was in when I was their age and she was mine. The full account is: I am better than fine. I am, in ways I did not anticipate and would not have predicted during the hardest years, at the beginning of the best part.
I want them to know the hard years were worth it.
Not because suffering is valuable. It is not. Not because difficulty makes you stronger in the simple way the saying implies, because it does not always, because sometimes it just makes you tired. But because the life I have now, the capacity I have now to be present in a morning or a garden or a conversation, was built in the hard years, was built out of what I had to learn in order to survive them, and I would not have this morning without those years and I am glad to be in this morning and so, therefore and despite everything, I am glad to have been in those years.
I want them to know that it gets better.
Not as platitude. As the plain testimony of a woman who did not always believe it and is now living the evidence. You come through. The coming-through is not the same as arriving somewhere final, there is no final, there is just the next stretch of the ongoing, but the next stretch can be genuinely, not-in-spite-of-anything good. I am in it. I want them to know I am in it. I want them to see it, so that when they are here themselves, they know it is possible. So that they remember their mother was here and she was, improbably, glad.
