If I Knew Then What I Know Now

I will record a podcast interview tomorrow to discuss my book, Letters to My Unborn Children, and more broadly the role of the miscarriages in my life.  Part of the show asks this question: what advice would your older self give your younger self? In the context of miscarriage, I can talk around broad themes from the book (loving with an open hand, facing dreams in the midst of disappointment, maybe or maybe not what facing personal grief taught me about new product development). 

I'm grappling with whether or not I wish that someone had told me just how fragile this gift of parenthood is when we (okay, mostly Kristine) were bearing the brunt of the office "When are you going to have kids" banter. I actually started thinking about this a few weeks ago when discussion amongst my younger colleagues in the office turned to the "when are you going to have kids" discussion. The radio interview just adds a little more pull.

I can think of all sorts of worthless advice. You've got at least a 25% chance your child will die before birth. If that happens, don't blame yourself (right, naturally). Don't assume you'll get pregnant right away. Don't assume you'll stay pregnant if you get pregnant.  Don't buy into the social norm which makes parenthood solely the mother's responsibility.  Be present as a father.  All this is true, but I would not have wanted to hear it.  At best I would have dismissed the comments as fear mongering (the equivalent to when people now tell me to "just wait until they become teenagers").  At worst, those comments could have discouraged the secret hope I carried about becoming a parent.  I had enough things to be scared of without adding paranoid fear of everything that could go wrong.

Worthless advice aside, I wonder if there is something I wish I could have heard. Something that I can say now to others. There are some broad themes that Kristine and I have discussed many times, and which we are trying to work out in our family.  That parenthood is a gift, and not to take it for granted. That it's a dream which takes shape in many different ways. That it's important to love each other through the ups and downs of pursuing that dream. That anyone who tries to shove you into an idealized experience of pregnancy (or childbirth, or parenthood, for that matter) is selling you a load of rubbish. Yes, really, don't blame yourself.

Family painting by Kyle Ragsdale, commissioned in 2010 and completed in 2011.  The three crocuses are for our unborn children, whose fragile beauty we are still trying to weave into our family.

All this is true, but doesn't boil down to much that's concise. And truthfully, I'm not sure how much it would have stuck if I'd heard it 10 years ago.  These themes resonate with me now, in part because I have the gift of hindsight.  What could I say that would "stick" with a younger self at the various transitions and decision points I faced?  I realized while pondering this question that those points in my life involved similar themes, even though the actual transitions were very different.  Here's what I wrote for the podcast interview.  The words are to my younger self at the beginning of a major transition.  They are also words to my older self with hope that I'll look back one day and see that I took some of them to heart.

Shawn, you are 17.  You are preparing to leave Kenya and go to the US for university.  You've decided to train in engineering, even though part of you deeply loves music and liberal arts.  You're not sure if you made the right decision.  It's okay to wonder.  To be honest, you will face many times in your life when your decision isn't between right and wrong.  It's between multiple options that are all plausible.  In those moments you will feel the same tension that you feel now as you question your decision to study engineering.  Give yourself grace in those moments.  And if you can, learn to live with that tension.  Because with time you will learn to harness it, and it will begin to become a creative force in your life.

As you harness that creative force, you will find experiences and skills that make you unique.  They will be important parts of who you are, but they will never be the only thing that you are.  You may wonder, especially when it's hard to find external affirmation that your uniqueness is worth much, whether it would be easier to shut down that part of life altogether.  It's okay to wonder.  Life's ebbs and flows mean that different facets of your experience will be more or less prominent at different times.  Don't give up on those experiences, though. Keep at the hard work of  integrating them with the next steps on your life's journey.  Let them feed your dreams - the ones that take shape as you thought they would, and the ones that take shape in unexpected positive or painful ways.

Finally, it's natural to look for friendship from people who are "like you" because they share your experiences in some way.  There will be times when this is true.  There will also be times when it isn't.  Because appearances are frequently deceiving, and people experience life, even shared life, very differently.  Give yourself grace when you feel alone.  Give grace to the people who you wanted support from because they were "like you."  And give grace to the friendships that crop up from unexpected places.  Because you never know when putting your uniqueness together with someone else's uniqueness could create something special.