Coming to terms with vulnerability

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A while ago, I walked down the hall of my boys’ elementary school heading to one of their classes. As I turned the corner, I was startled by the impact of many emotions hitting me at once as I saw two rows of profile cut-outs on black paper with inscriptions below each. I realized these were profiles of each of the 1st graders, and, suddenly teary-eyed and short of breath, I rushed to find the twins’ among the different first grade classes on the wall. I realized that the inscription below each profile was that particular student’s own words about who he or she is. I couldn’t wait to read what Javi and Dominic had written about themselves, and I couldn’t believe how uncomposed I had become.
I need to back up for a second and explain that there have been certain impactful moments (good, bad, and just telling in some way) in my life that I still feel at a cellular level for different reasons. I suppose most people can be transported back to certain moments with just a smell, a sound, a sight, a touch… something that ties them to a particular memory or experience. Such was encountering this hallway full of profile cut-outs.
It is my hope and goal that when my kids are grown, they are the kind of people that say things like “I wish I could go back and be a kid again” or “those days were the best!”. I’m sort of mesmerized by people who feel that way, and I very much want the kinds of feelings and memories that provoke that sort of longing to be a part of my kids’ grown-up worlds. I’m not someone who has ever felt that way… closer to the truth was that I couldn’t grow up fast enough for myself. I think a lot about just why that was… there were many reasons, I suppose, but there was something deep in my psyche at a very young age that was self-conscious and self-loathing… I wanted so badly to feel deeply loved and utterly cherished (it's still what I want most!), and, even now, I sometimes feel very sad for the little girl that is still somewhere deep inside me. I can still vividly recall how she felt about herself back then… I wish she could have shed all of those feelings of inadequacy and could have just “been”… just lived, just played, just been a carefree girl without the weight of the world on her shoulders. From time to time, I will come across a little kid in whom I recognize something about myself at that age, and I wonder, “Why? How did this happen? How does this child already feel such a strong sense of self-awareness? And why does it manifest itself in this child as somehow being an insufficient little person in some way? Who is loving this child and are there enough hugs and self-esteem building going on in his/her life?” And then I wonder if anyone in that child’s close circle even sees this and realizes it’s there… because I think most parents are doing the best they can with what they've got. I often wonder if I am missing anything in my own kids that may be obvious to others.
I had a lot of friends who, to this day, tell me I seemed so happy when we were in elementary school, which is really when all this started for me. People would say I was popular among friends, and that it appeared from the outside that I had it all. As for my own feelings about myself, on one hand, I knew I was a good person with a good heart. My heart bled for animals and for people and for doing the right thing even when it wasn't the easiest thing. On the inside, I was incredibly lonely, and I cared way too much whether or not someone liked me. I hated so badly that I was so sensitive and cried very easily. People would tell me I was pretty, and I couldn't reconcile it with how ugly and awkward I felt. I worried whether I was annoying someone by just breathing. I felt incredibly self-conscious on every level. There were some significant losses in my life at a young age, and I won’t pretend they didn’t contribute to my sense of unworthiness. When I had breaks from these feelings was when I was focused on practicing something… piano, sports, etc… and part of me thinks that I immersed myself in as many activities as possible to get away from myself… to get out of my head.
So getting back to the reason the profiles of the first graders at my boys’ school affected me so much… I hated certain aspects of my face, and my profile basically spotlighted one of my biggest insecurities. This is such an insanely ridiculous thing for a kid to even think about - I mean, why would it even occur to a kid to hate how they looked from the side? And yet, I did, and, while I won’t go into it here, deep down I do think I know unequivocally why. But, moving on, I remember the day our teacher had each of us stand up against a chalkboard with the lights out and a projector light shining towards us so that she could draw an outline of our profiles on some construction paper that we would then cut out, and I remember the anxiety I felt waiting my turn, the nausea from the embarrassment I felt at having this permanent record of it in a cut-out. When it was done, I could barely look at it. I felt humiliated.
All of this must seem crazy to be reading, but what I will say is that I think every child sort of needs something different, and they don’t always know how to communicate it, and they don’t always know how to find the words to describe any of this. Further, there are words, events, and experiences that - no matter how big or small - can sometimes take root in a person, and they can be like an invasive weed. I was a jumbled-up bunch of emotions on the inside, and I was a calm, friendly smile on the outside. Who could have known what all was going on inside my heart and head? I didn’t dare speak of it to anyone and risk someone making light of it later, and so it just stayed inside me and was compounded by other events in my life while growing up. It left emotional scars that I still feel today but that show me how far I’ve come in my own personal journey just as everyone has their own difficult journeys to overcome. 
Over the course of my teenage years, as I worked through the questions of “who am I and what is my deal?”, I adapted this attitude that if I didn’t like something, I needed to find a way to fix it or change the way I looked at it… which is why that quote from Maya Angelou has always spoken to me so deeply. So as an 18 year old, knowing how much I hated that I allowed people to see my vulnerability, I got to work on that… I started working towards being tougher and not letting the tears fall… I had started building a pretty sturdy wall as a younger kid to protect myself, and this gave way to an even taller, thicker one… However, who I am at my core is someone who wants to be honest with myself and others about my feelings, and so, while I trained myself not to cry so easily and not to openly discuss my feelings with just anyone, when I really trusted someone, I would open up. Not fully. But it still felt very vulnerable for me.
When I fast forward to today, March 29, 2017, a LOT has happened since then. And I can look back and see how my approach affected times and areas in my life, and I can see where I overcorrected here and there until I leveled out and found a balance I could live with. I can see how my approach of building a protective shield over myself saved me in some areas - truly - and how I learned in other experiences that it wasn’t as impenetrable as I thought - truly. I can look back and see how some people know me and my layers very personally and others know me very ostensibly. I am genuine but some times guarded with my feelings. I am more open with some people than others. I am more sharing in my writing than I am in day to day conversation. I think this is probably true for most or at least a lot of people. All in all, I'm an introspective person with enough life lessons and experience to dole out decent advice but still be able to recognize that I don't know what I don't know. Other folks have demons that are different from my own. Mine were rooted in a deep sense of less-than and inadequacy. But where my strengths have always lain were in areas of drive and tenacity, stamina and goal orientation. And those things drove the broken pieces of me in a direction that ultimately led me to the person I am today, more solid than ever, all of my glued pieces still in place… there are some crumbly spots in between some of the pieces, but the outer shell more fixed and becoming stronger by the year the way a large chunk of fossil becomes more embedded in the rock around it.
Now, as I walk down a hall full of cut-out profiles, I am thinking about what I would have written about myself had we had to write inscriptions of our own. I honestly don’t know if I would have known what to write. I didn’t know my place in my world, and, if I had, I don’t think I would have trusted having that information out there for all to see. How sad. 
But. 
My kids feel loved, they show that they feel secure, they show that they feel open to talk about their feelings, they show that they feel insecurities and are able to express them openly with us. And for whatever struggles they will have in their lives, I hope each of these things provides them a foundation for feeling their individual significance and contribution, what they have to offer the world and its value. I hope they never worry about superficial things like what their profile looks like (it’s beautiful) or whether they should be ashamed or embarrassed about who they are (they’re amazing). Hopefully their challenges are further up the chain so that they can reach further than even I did. And hopefully they are able to recognize someone else drowning in self doubt and instinctively extend a hand and encourage that person to see their own value.
What all of this has taught me is that I have been a constant work in progress, and that for all of my hard work to mould myself into someone who is tough and unbreakable, the older I get - and post-child bearing - the more I revert back to some of the qualities I originally possessed. I cry easily again, and I don’t hate that about myself anymore. I wish I could hold my shit together a little better, but when something touches me either sentimentally or poignantly, the tears often start to fall before I can even get a word out. While Jose and I don’t get a lot of one on one time, when we do and I get the chance to tell him about something that I saw or experienced or read or thought about, more often than not, my eyes fill up with tears and I think, “Damn it!” But Jose has stopped asking me to wait until later to talk about it so I don’t cry all over my dinner (thanks, babe) and the people in the restaurant don't think he's some ass that made me cry. 😂 I guess he just realizes this is me now. He never knew me when this was the old me. But I did. I can say I knew her, that I felt sad for her, but that the strength I have today came from her. So my easy-falling tears today are a tribute to her and her goodness, to her profile cut-out that was just as deserving as any of the other students’ and whose inscription should have been easy to write. I guess I can say I’m living vicariously through my boys’ profile cutouts and their confidence now, and I. Feel. Such. Pride... and Excitement... because somehow this former internal-mess-of-a-person-with-good-intentions is raising confident, caring kids who will hopefully not only see their challenges but also - and this is important - *concurrently* see their strengths - and in shorter order than their mom did of her own.

​My heart is full.