During the days after Hurricane Helene, when we had no cell service or internet, a technology-starved Sylvia resorted to reading old blogs offline on my Google drive.
“Will you please write a blog about me?” she asked. “I don’t mind, really. I want you to!”
I stopped blogging about the kids years ago. It seemed one thing to write about their escapades— like smearing poop on the walls or pushing library books off the shelf— when they were toddlers and another to write about their personal struggles as burgeoning adolescents, when anything I wrote publicly was easily accessible to their peers. But I understand Sylvia’s desire to see herself in print. I’m reminded of Jason from The Good Place, as he listens to Eleanor describing every member of their foursome: “What about me? Describe me now!”
At the Meet the Teacher event in August, before the first day of school, one of Sylvia’s teachers gave every parent a colorful post-it note on which to write the one word that best described their kid. When Don and I posted our notes, they were identical. Both had the same single word: cheerful. We laughed, but I was not surprised. Sylvia’s good cheer is legendary. When we went a week with no internet service after Helene, Sylvia took it in stride. “It’s my technology detox!” she said. When I serve a meal that Clayton and Danny pick at, Sylvia digs in. “Hashtag delicious!” she says. When a rainy Saturday gets everyone else down, she snuggles up with a book and a blanket on the porch. “I’ve had the best morning!”
Sylvia has a knack for finding the silver lining, but that does not mean that she is immune to Pandora’s inadvertent gifts. When her best friend and her mom got tickets to Swift’s Eras tour, Sylvia was green with envy. Still, she still oohed and awed over her friend’s concert dress and gushed over every digitally shared moment of her experience.
“It’s not fair,” she vented privately. “I liked Taylor Swift first!”
But Sylvia’s is too attuned to others’ feelings to dampen their experience with her own darkness. Last year, we arranged for Sylvia’s twin brother to skip eighth grade and start high school a year early. This proved a positive change for Danny but left Sylvia to endure a final year of middle school on her own. There are a dozen ways to see the worst in this arrangement, and I know that, at times, Sylvia must feel left behind or left out or both. But Sylvia is heart-warmingly supportive of her twin and chooses to focus on the upside. She will get to go on the eighth grade trip to DC, the chorus trip to Chattanooga, the eighth grade dance. After a lifetime of sharing every important milestone with her twin, she will now experience them on her own.
Sylvia has a brightness to her. Describing her, I am immediately reduced to metaphor. Sylvia is every warm and shining thing: the sun, a candle, fire. Being in her company is like stepping into a light-filled room. When I am with her, the heaviness of the world lightens, the darkness lifts. At times I worry that this quality might be both her gift and her burden. In a family that struggles with depression, does she feel some unspoken pressure to always be okay? Sylvia is our light— and how we love her for it— but I want her to know that brightness is not her duty. We are blessed that she shares her light with us, but she does not owe it to us.
Sadly, Sylvia’s optimism and high spirits do not protect her from the baser elements of humanity so often on display in middle school. When Sylvia and her friends were targeted with sexual harassment earlier this year, Sylvia alone took the perpetrators to task. Having come of age in the eighties, I worried that Sylvia might feel some shame in coming forward. Would she simply be told “boys will be boys” and be labeled a snitch or a tattletail?
But Sylvia’s moral compass is strong; she never second guessed what she knew was the right thing to do, even when it meant reliving the experience in tears in front of administrators and officers. Sylvia was not shamed; it was the boys and their parents who ought to be ashamed. In true Sylvia fashion— and despite her embarrassment and rage— she found the upside in the whole awful mess.
“It felt so good to get those boys in trouble,” she confided in me. “I felt like I was having my feminist moment.”
We joke that she is dismantling the patriarchy one middle school idiot at a time. But shouldn’t the patriarchy have been dismantled by now? I couldn’t believe that after all the MeToo discourse of the last few decades, she is being victimized by this kind of harassment. When I said as much to a sympathetic friend, she didn’t share my disbelief. The difference, she wisely observed, is that, post-MeToo, Sylvia is taken seriously.
Reading this, do not assume that Sylvia evades the darker elements of being human. She faces the same hard questions that confront us all. Am I good enough? Will I find love? Will my future be what I dream of? She worries that she won’t get into college if she’s not great at math, or that high school will offer her no opportunity to experience the kind of love she reads about in her romance novels. She worries that the innocence of her kids’ lives will be threatened by technology and that her own adulthood will be bereft of the joy and magic of her childhood. When she asks me if I still feel the magic (and by this I take her to mean if life still feels exciting and joyful and fun) I feel newly resolved to cast off the heaviness that has overtaken me in middle age.
I need not look any further than her example. Sylvia is an expert at making the ordinary occurrences of daily life into occasions for delight: a picture-perfect mug of hot chocolate with whipped cream and sprinkles; a morning spent in pajamas, journaling on the porch; a solo walk in the neighborhood listening to her favorite tunes. She is as content with a day in her room, chatting with her friend and reading a good book, as with an out-of-the-ordinary adventure. And she finds joy in the details that are so easily overlooked: our dog’s shiny lower lip, the scent of my lotion, the comfort in a cup of tea. Sylvia knows how joy is spread; she loves to compliment strangers because she knows how good it feels to receive those unexpected compliments. And why not make someone’s day?
Last night, Don showed us a video of a young man with OCD at a poetry slam. It was a moving poem of love found and then lost and, predictably, I was reduced to tears. Sylvia lept from the couch to take me in her arms. “It’s okay, Ma,” she said, laughing and compassionate all at once. “It’s okay.” This is my daughter’s gift, to turn towards pain with love, to transform tearful moments into joyful ones. This is her gift to us all.
