A Letter to My Children
Stomping Ground
A Letter to My Children
Becoming a Lolli (because a Shylah cannot be a grandma) has already been quite the struggle for me, and she is two days old.
Not the baby part. The baby part is easy. It is the part where I am trying to figure out where I fit in this new life we have all just stepped into. I like to think it is a “we.” I hope it is a “we.” You always hear it takes a village, but nobody tells you the village does not always know you need them. The village is standing right there waiting to be asked, and half the time it does not know if it is welcome.
This is mostly for the two of you and the tiny person you blessed us with two days ago. But it is also for you, Tootie, even though you are not anywhere near that part of life yet. Everything in here is already yours. You do not have to have a baby to have a village.
I want to tell you how I got here.
Somewhere around 45, give or take, the losses started stacking up. 2025 and 2026 took a lot from us. A young niece. A dear friend who was waiting on her second grandbaby. My father. Extended family, one after another. And with every one of them, my own mortality moved a little closer to the front of the room until it was the only thing I could see.
So I did what I do. I took stock. I looked at my life so far and asked what it was all for.
All those years spent trying to make a life for our family. Perpetual school. Working nonstop. Being away from my kids to try to build something for my kids. And now that you are grown, I have nothing but time. Back then all I wanted was time. Now I have endless time to think about all the time I lost. All the time I squandered. All the time I rushed through to get to the next thing. I would give anything for some of those seconds back.
A lot of it goes to the ways I failed you. All the times I showed up as a terrible version of myself. All the things I want to apologize for and need to apologize for.
Here is something I have learned, and it is a hard one. The things I carry the most shame about, you often do not remember at all. They are mine to hold, not yours, and it is hard to apologize for something that only lives in my head. Meanwhile the things that actually landed on you, the ones that carried a real punch, I never even registered. I did not know they hurt. That is the part I have to sit with. I do not get to decide what mattered. You do.
So I asked myself what I want the rest of my life to look like.
There is a line from Mary Oliver’s “The Summer Day” that I have kept in mind for the last fifteen or so years. Over a decade ago I bought each of you a little card with it printed on it so you would have it too.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day,” from House of Light (Beacon Press, 1990)
And every time I come back to it, the answer is the same.
What I want most for you is for you to be happy. I do not care about accomplishments. I do not care about possessions or status or titles or any of that. I will be most proud when I get to watch you live a life you actually enjoy. Being happy as a middle finger to the status quo. Happiness and showing up fully in your own story are the whole point. Everything else is noise.
So what am I going to fill this next stretch of life with? What could possibly hold a candle to what we gave up to get where we are?
I came to something. I do not have a clean word for it. Not a feeling, more like a certainty that set up in me like cement.
What would make my life good is your happiness. Not the highlight reel kind. The kind that happens during the years that are hard. During the build. The years that are coming, when you will be tired and stretched and doing it anyway, because that is exactly where I was when I was at my worst.
Nobody wants their kids to struggle. Well, some people do. Builds character, I guess. My kids have an exorbitant amount of character already. Struggle. Defeat. Hopelessness. That does not build character. That breaks it from the inside. I have watched it happen and I have felt it happen and I am not interested in you collecting any more of it in the name of growth.
I want to provide the space for you to actually enjoy being parents. To feel like you have the capability and the capacity to fill the role in a way that offers contentment, not just completion. I do not want you to parent while surviving. I did that. I know what it is to parent from the bottom of the tank, to show up for your kids the way you have to instead of the way you want to, broken and bruised by life. I do not want that for you. I want you to have what we did not have enough of, which was somebody standing in the gap so you could stay in the room.
You have a village. Not the kind that shows up when it is convenient. The kind that shows up when it is ugly.
We will fill in the gaps. Your dad and I. Your partners. The people who love you. I call our little family the island of misfit toys. Some of us got here by birth. Some of us were your friends who needed a place to land, and we made room. We are a family because we want to be, not out of obligation.
As a parent, it is socially acceptable to ask someone to watch the baby so you can go to dinner, or a movie, or the grocery store. What is not socially acceptable, what nobody admits to needing, is reaching out at 2:37 in the morning or 2:37 in the afternoon just to have one moment where nothing is needed from you. That is the ask nobody makes. That is the one I want you to make.
At 7:12 am or so, after you have cleaned two blowouts and stripped the crib for the third time since midnight on no sleep. When you have both tagged out so many times that neither of you has any idea how defeated the other one feels, because your hearts and your eyes are too heavy to look. That is where you will find us. In the moments where asking for help feels like an overreaction. Where you feel whiny for struggling with something that “should” be easy and is “just part of being a parent.” Where the thing stopping you from picking up the phone is not pride. It is the fear of being judged. The fear that someone will look at the two of you and think you are bad parents. Nobody in your village thinks that. Nobody in your village will ever think that. That is exactly the moment I am talking about.
Will it ever be an inconvenience for us? Absolutely. That is real life. That is human. But I would rather take a minor inconvenience that ends with me loving on my sweet little nugget, which will usually be exactly what I needed anyway, than have one of you feel alone or feel like you have failed somehow. And one thing I always want you to keep in mind: parents who are actually failing do not generally lie awake worrying that they are failing. The worry is the tell. It means you are paying attention.
And I mean generous with more than my time. I mean money too. I never want you deciding which bill to skip this month. Letting the electricity slide because it is current and the water is the one about to get shut off. Robbing one thing to cover another and calling it a plan. I know that math. I lived that math. It feels good, later, to say it was the two of you against the world and you figured it out together. And you will. You have each other, and that is not nothing. But even with a good partner beside you, it can get lonely up there. Difficult and desolate. Sometimes it feels like quicksand, and the two of you are sinking side by side with nobody else in sight. I never want desperation or desertion to set in.
Your village has the rope to pull you out. The soft place to land. Whatever it takes to show you the way out.
I know I cannot change the past. I am not naive to that. This is not a do over. I have seen the reels that say trauma passes from generation to generation until someone is finally willing to feel it. I felt it. I truly hope the dragons I slayed only show up in your world as those cute tiny lizards we used to see on vacation. If my chaos leads to your calm. If my confusion leads to your wonder. If my pain leads to your growth. If my mistakes lead to your grace, then I can quiet some of the mom guilt with the knowledge that none of it was wasted.
So I am not asking to fix what I broke. I am asking to be useful now, in the years that count, in the way I wish someone had been useful to us. Tell us what you need. Tell me when I am too much and when I am not enough. I will not always get it right, but we will keep showing up, and this time I will be paying attention.
So you see, this is not the same old trope of a mother living through her kids. Quite the opposite. I want you to live through me. You can always come home. There will always be a home to come to, even if that home has to come to you.
Because to me, home is not a location. Home is consistency. Home is validation. Home is understanding. Home is where you sit as you look around with your heart full, knowing you are safe and cared for. It is where you breathe in the moment and know you are exactly where you are meant to be. That is what I want to be for you. All three of you, and the one who just got here.
Love,
Lolli
Building a life and a family at the same time is heavy. You do not have to carry it alone.
Meet the Ala Therapy Collective clinicianstherapy for an expansive life
Shylah Ridgway, LCSW, LICSW is the founder of Ala Therapy Collective and a Board Approved Supervisor. Her practice focuses on immigration evaluations and LCSW supervision. Stomping Ground is where she writes about the rest of it.
