Dear Veronica,

In about two weeks, I’ll know for sure (well, almost sure) what gender you are and that seems to be a monumental event to everyone but me.

In some ways, I’ve already known you as Veronica, but you could be Isaiah, and I’m wondering how that will change if I find you are a boy, or girl, or whatever.

I wish I could be more eloquent about this issue, Love, but the truth of the matter is, I don’t give a damn what GENDER you are. I just want you here safe, secure, alive, well, and breathing in my ear.

Nearly everyone but you is irritating me these days and I attribute that to my hormones. The hormones that is making my body grow hair like a gorilla, the hormones that are making me want to make love every night at least once, the hormones that make me feel depressed then ecstatic. In other words, the hormones that are making me crazy.

Having a baby seems like the most natural thing in the world. Billions of women have done this well and have survived and yet I feel like I’m the only one feeling like this. Supported, yet, deep down, I feel abandoned. I look at your father and feel this chemical dependency on him that scares me. I never knew I’d feel this way. Other days I feel like I am falling in love with him all over again as I see how his unfolding fatherhood is shaping him and his thoughts. He and I agree on so many things, it scares me. I thought we’d be in disagreement.

My parents are in town this weekend and they keep staring at my stomach, where you are, and smiling, excited for this new life to come roaring out of me. Sometimes, even though you are inside me, I feel very alone. More eyes are fixated on my stomach than on my eyes. So many people ask, “how are you feeling,” rather than, “how are you?” and I feel the difference in my sense of isolation. It’s as if people don’t see me, and only see you.

You matter. I matter. I just don’t know how it all meshes together when it feels like the only reason I matter is because you are in me, growing in matter.

I hope you can see through my jumbled thoughts, Love, and know that you are the most important thing in my life. I love you more than you or I can possibly fathom and not even my confusion and attitude can overshadow the earthquake of love I have ready to share with you. I’m human, you’ll see, full of imperfections and selfishness and stupid thoughts. It’s good that you know that upfront so you’ll understand when I screw up but will always come back and remind you that I love you.

Some days when I walk around by myself, I wish I could hear your voice. I wish we could already have a conversation. Your soul is wise, I can tell, and I know I will learn much from you.

I hope I don’t let you down as a mother. These days, my insecurities seem to be getting the best of me.

But you ARE the best of me and worth more than any fear I can harbor in my bones.

Let’s keep each other strong these next few months.

Love,
Mom

Dear Veronica,

Bloated, gassy, indigestion, and interrupted sleep. Is that you in there?

I’ll have a better idea tomorrow.

It’s almost two weeks since my little happy dance that I ovulated and your father and I are trying to keep our hopes reasonably low while I get up in the middle of the night because of gas pains and cramps.

“It could be my period, that’s all. But I really hope not.”

The wondering is torturous.

I remember in 1997, I went to one of those ridiculous fortune tellers who read my palm and told me two things. First, she said that my professional career would be diverse, that I would try many, many things before I made up my mind. She said I’d work with children, adults, in different disciplines and settings before I settled. Well she was certainly correct about that.

The other was that I would only have one child and that child would be a son.

I don’t know what these letters will look like if you turn out to be a boy, but it doesn’t really matter to me. I’ve fantasized about you, Veronica, a small piece of existence coming into the world through my body and should you turn out to be Isaiah, well, I’ll love you just as much.

It’s hard for me to focus on anything but my body right now and it’s glorious possibilities and horrendous limitations, but I keep my eyes forward. Not up, not down, just forward. I am setting my heart on hope, with a lot of strength.

Should you continue to exist only in my heart, I will continue to move forward in dreaming of what might be and being the kind of person I would have lived out as a mother – kind, stern, loving, challenging, understanding, and faithful.

Come to us. We’re waiting.

Love,
Mom

Dear Veronica,

I have high hopes for this month and trying to contain my excitement and impatience is a lot more difficult than you’d think. You’ll find that people are much more accepting of children being explosive than adults. The expectations for adults is that we should be even, controlled, and mature. That’s not what your mom is these days.

Finally, a bit of good news on the ovulation tests. It looked good and I squealed and woke up your dad to share my overflowing joy. We snuggled as I clutched the stick, two lines growing deeper in truth as each minute went by. I smiled at my body and prayed for good health and possibility.

Your father and I are Catholic and we plan to raise you that way as well. In our faith cycle, this past week was the most powerful week all year. As someone said, “It’s when the impossible becomes possible.” Funny how all this occurred during Holy Week. It felt somewhat miraculous and difficult to believe.

Faith is a choice, but also a gift. It comes in many forms, different languages, symbolism, and tradition. If you ever decide to leave the Catholic Church, which many people decide as an adult, the only thing I would encourage you to do, Love, is to stay with whatever draws you deeper in mystery and challenge. Stay with what draws you closer to a mysticism and Love of others. I found it in faith. You may find it in something else, but always keep one hand on the rail of belief because, I do believe there is more after this life. There is so much more than you and I will possibly be able to understand. That unknown used to frighten me and I tried to believe for a period of time that there was nothing else but my body, this world, our earth.

But deep, deep inside, in the cavernous echo of my heart, I always believed there was something Else out there.

Years ago, when I worked in the University, I often laughed at bumper stickers on the backs of cars with which I was stuck in traffic. There was this one I never forgot. On the right side of the bumper it said, “Militant Agnostic.” The other side read, “I don’t know and neither do you.”

Precisely!

No one knows for sure…which is why it’s called faith.

It might be a toss of a coin and I might be wrong about everything I believe. But if I, your old farty Mom, lives a good life where I can help improve this planet, where I create something that brings joy to others, or work on behalf of those who are in need – and if my faith is the backbone of those actions – than even if I’m wrong, I’m still in a good place.

I take in what energizes me to live a decent life. Faith is the oxygen to that action.

When you come to us, you will have moments where you hate what we tell you, you’ll be bored and angry when you want to do something else and make you learn what we have grown to love so passionately. But, I will tell you that I understand your frustration and I do.

You’ll wonder why in the world I’m teaching you things that seemingly do not translate to your life and I will tell you to stay with it, to revisit the stories and keep thinking. You’ll resent how I will tell you to ponder mystery and move forward with no easy or clear answers. I’m sure you’ll even leave for a while or express disinterest for the things I find so critical to your faith development. Even with all of that, I am so excited to pass this gift to you.

It’s messy and hairy and full of contradiction and ambiguity, but you’ll find, dear Child, that the challenge and reward of faith is a reflection of the deepest way to live life, your life. You need not come with answers, only a willingness to love.

Love,
Mom

Dear Veronica,

I wish there was a way to explain the world to you in a somewhat simple manner. Most days, I feel after thirty years of observing it myself, I am no closer to a resolution than when I first asked as a little girl.

I remember when I was seven and I slept on the bottom half of a bunk bed, on a blue mattress with white and yellow rockets on them. I woke up one Saturday afternoon from a nap and wondered for the first time, “What if my whole life is a dream?” I waited for the day when I was going to wake up from the real bunk bed of life and discover that I am really a sophisticated genius, dreaming I was seven years old.

In some ways, I think I am still waiting for that wake-up call.

I’ve been thinking about the pain I am physically in from all the different medications I am taking to ready my body for a pregnancy, hopefully. I’ve closed down any pathways for alcohol, steer clear of anyone who breathes out cigarette smoke, and try to get some form of physical activity once a day to rejuvenate my spirit. Vitamins, pills, appointments. This morning, I woke to a stomach full of cramps, gripping and squeezing my lower abdomen. Another cycle.

I’ve finished reading a book called, “The Shack,” and your Dad and I discuss all the ways we agree and disagree with it. The book is about faith. It’s about God and tragedy, but most of all, the book is about redemption.

I thought of how I might explain redemption to you someday and it almost made me laugh. You, an innocent oval of joy rolling around in my head with nothing resembling a stain or mark of evil or oppression on your skin, would know nothing of redemption because you know nothing of death or pain yet.

Redemption is about making something new, the bursting through of darkness with transformation and purpose. It is a lovely concept, but not many people believe in it. I think it’s an odd word, something foreign. I think I put space in my vocabulary from that word because I know it can only come through the despair of tragedy. Redemption is inherently tied to some sort of wrong. I hate wrong.

“The Shack” will be a thing of the past, a dusting on the walls of your books when you learn to read and I am confident there will be a hundred other New York Times frenzies for you to consume. But this book, this particular book came to me in a time where I have been thinking about the possibility of tragedy. My tragedy would not be loss, it would be tragedy of nothingness. Not having you, not seeing you and admitting all the darkest fears in my heart.

A strong confession left my heart and onto a kitchen table with friends as I let out some of my deepest fears of pregnancy and fertility. One of women, one of the wisest I’ve ever known, turned to look quietly into my face, the face of fear, “You need to come to grips with all that you are hoping and wishing. You need to face all the possibilities of having children and not having children and what that means to you. We’ll be here. We’re not going anywhere.”

Veronica, I couldn’t place whether I am more scared to have you in this world with me or to be without you and never experience giving birth to a soul within my soul, light from my cervix, a throbbing bubble of life in the space between my ribs. I am terrified to face the fear that my body may not be capable of the longest desire I’ve ever known. I am out of my mind frightened at the possibility to bring life into a world that doesn’t know anything about redemption except in the contours of novels and films.

Most of all, I’m scared what I will hear within my own mind for the rest of my life if I am infertile, if I am not able to hold life in my body. I am most scared of this small phrase that nearly every single human being thinks and feels, but loathes to admit: I am scared to fail.

My body might fail me. Your father might fail us. I might fail you. You might fail the world. God might fail me. I know I’ve failed God.

Fail.

Fail.

I’m afraid of failing.

So powerful is this fear that I don’t know how else to elaborate its meaning. It’s all there in one damning, one syllable word. Fail.

The shame of failure and the perceptions that dance around a dead dream haunt me everyday. The measure of womanhood is often by her body, her health, her decisions, career, family, relationships, mind, spirit. And children. I’m afraid of being seen as a failure, being seen as dry in the soil where life is supposed to thrive. I’m afraid that I have no garden inside me.

I have all the intuition in the world and I still cannot feel where I am headed. I hope, I suppose, toward my own redemption.

And so, even with all those dimming lights, the sadness and trembling, I continue to plow my land, I dig in the areas where the ground is soft, working to create this garden. I loosen the dirt, readying it for rain, seeds, and love. Readying it for you.

Love,
Mama

Dear Veronica,

The dream to someday look into your eyes is holding steady, it’s constant beat both calming and excruciating. I just finished my first cycle of ovulation medication, to stimulate the eggs, and it was not successful.

Dr. Liu, in his ever strange ways, seems cheery when I call him, asking him what our next step should be, “Well, just wait until day 35 of the cycle and take a pregnancy test. If you’re not pregnant, we’ll just up the dosage.”

In other words, as he has said it before: quit worrying.

But I am worried.

The face I put on for others is a face of hope and optimism. The words come out of my mouth as I say that I will not be devastated if I cannot have biological children, but the truth is, my darling daughter unborn, I am afraid I will slip into a darkness that will shade me for the rest of my days if that happens. The reality is that life is given to you and there are portions of it which you can exercise control. Most parts, though, are handed to you, as is, and what you do with those parts, what you choose to create or act with it, is entirely up to you. I have trouble coping with that reality.

Someday, I hope, you will sit next to me and we will go over these letters together. I’m sure I will need some prompting about what I was thinking at 29 years of age, and I hope that these words will open a door of memories that will help guide you in your path of choices.

I want to include a picture with this letter. This is a picture of me, your old Mama at twenty years young, with another little girl. Her name is Veronica and she is the little girl you are named after. Taken in 2000, Veronica, now, is around fourteen years old and probably still in barrio Nueva Vida in Managua, Nicaragua.

Back in the old college days, I decided to live in Nicaragua for three months and work in areas that would challenge my ways of thinking. Nicaragua – Veronica – succeeded.

You see, darling, this child in the photo is a living breathing creature, beautiful in skin and hopelessly stubborn in manner. She insisted on sitting on my lap, not allowing any other child in the barrio to sit on her thrown, and when I coaxed embraces from other children, she growled at me and said, “No te hablo.” I’m not talking to you. Mhm! She had a temper.

And nearly every day, for years, I thought of her. Ways to help her, buy her a tricycle, give her family food, ensure her health. The problems, though, are too big for me, or any one person to handle. Today, on the cusp of turning thirty with almost a decade that has passed since I last held her, I don’t even know if she is alive. I think or hope or pray she is. I have to.

Your name, Veronica, is very special and someday I will tell you all the reasons why this name has burned its letters onto my heart. For now, though, this picture is all you need.

I want you to remember something, my child, in case you ever forget yourself: all children are created equal and therefore you will all grow into women that are equal. This world will tell you different. It will tell you that since you were born in a certain country with privileges, education, and industry, you are worth more. The world will tell you that your place in society is measured by the size of your wallet, the space of your house, the shine of your car, the interest rates of your stocks, the gleam of your hair, the smell of your breath, the shade of your skin, the mobility of your legs, the speed of your mind.

Remember this picture, dear, and remember that my desire for you came from a love of her. So, Veronica and you are, actually, sisters. You share a mother – me – who wants both of you to understand the world will attempt to define you or kill you. It will beat you to your knees with shame and labels.

I am here, living and writing, to tell you they are wrong and you are wrong if you believe them.

There is nothing greater in this world than the measure of what you will do for liberation and for how far you will go to bring a sense of peace to the places that will never know the quiet of stars because their skies are filled with the noise of bombs and bullets.

I make you sisters and gently remind you to care for one another, even if you never meet. Even if you are separated by everything and you find nothing in common, you are sisters. You are binded by my realization that I cannot sacrifice one without sacrificing the other. You need each other in every sense of the word survival.

You will be different in every way – sound, language, speech, and opportunity. But you both are precious in my eyes.

Veronica, my unborn daughter, someday I want you to charge into the world and question it as I did. I hope you turn in desperation, searching for some damn piece of truth that causes you to shake with disbelief and passion. I pray you will find another human being to whom you are accountable and holds you to a sense of humanity and humility far outreaching what you think you are capable. For you, I wish nothing but the most pure sense of life and experience.

That is what I searched for at twenty and that is when I found Veronica.

I found you.

Love,
Mom