In a fireproof drawer under my will and our passports lies an unassuming folded piece of paper. I unfold it and study the typed font from time to time. It reads in part…
Dear Grace and Ella
You are already more than I could have ever dreamed of being. You are brave, curious, creative and imperfect. You bring me rapturous joy every time you lean in close to say I love you or kiss me goodnight.
Girls, you are not alone. Every woman feels alone and has for generations. We look in the windows of other homes and think, ‘she got it right.’ We sit silently with our thoughts of inadequacy. Their houses are full of the same thoughts. They too feel inadequate – their plates are too full, the days are too short and their hips are too wide.
I no longer remember the exact circumstances that motivated me to articulate this to my five and nine year old daughters, but in 2013 I had a sense that life was getting the best of me. That’s a funny expression, isn’t it? Life was getting the best of me… and as far as I could tell, everyone wanted more.
I didn’t want my daughters to feel this way. Ever. As if writing them a letter could change it…
These walks touch a similar nerve for everyone. I have heard the same line time and again – “I’m not sure what I have to add to the conversation…” or one of two questions have been posed, “Who am I to offer advice?” …”Was that good?” …
I am beginning to think the sense of being an imposter or inadequate is ubiquitous – who we know we are doesn’t match with the ways we are seen … we are doing the best we can while trying to live up to false expectations without shared definitions of roles. What makes a good leader? A good doctor? A good communicator? A good mother? A good walk?
I won’t pretend to have the definition for any of them but I have found one through line… be present in the moment to truly listen. If you can do that, you can let the person in front of you be seen more authentically. The greatest challenge to that was choosing to walk with my daughters: the two individuals who have inspired me to be my best and who I worry I am failing the most. The narrative journal of Grace and Ella has been so much more difficult than expected. Their authenticity requires me to shed all judgment, all expectation, all worry, all regret …not to mention it is rooted in my own feeling of not being a good enough mother.
Liz: My own imposter syndrome is at its worst when it comes to parenthood. It is the single most trigger for where I believe I failed.
Grace: How do you think you fail?
Liz: There’s no manual to parenting, but there are expectations for the word mother that I’m not sure ever get agreed upon either. I mean, clearly not between parents and children, but even among parents. What does it mean to be a mother? Nobody even has that conversation. But what we have is almost unrealistic expectations of what “good mother” means.
Grace: There’s no one size fits all way to parenting because every relationship is different and every experience is different. Just like it’s your kid’s first time doing everything while you’re parenting them, it’s your first time being a parent – you work to learn from your mistakes. And I don’t think you of all people should consider that failure if you’re able to learn from the mistakes that you make. You’ve never been expected to be perfect the first time you do anything.
Grace: And in the same way that you don’t know the perfect way to be a mother, we don’t know the perfect way for you to be a mother either.
Liz: Right.
Grace: If I say something that you do that I don’t like, that doesn’t mean that it’s wrong.
Liz: You just don’t like it.
Grace: Yeah. That doesn’t mean, like, my expectations for motherhood and your expectations for motherhood. There’s no black and white. There’s no right or wrong.

You can hear the wise counsel from my oldest daughter as she walks with me. There is no black and white, no right or wrong. Just mother and daughters doing the best they can. On all of my walks, the other person has teared up. On the walks with my daughters, I cried.
Grace: You’re so emotionally attached to motherhood that it’s hard to hear that you’re doing things wrong because it’s not just a business decision that you have to fix. It’s a relationship. And that’s so much harder when it’s two of the most important people in your life.
They are…the two most important people in my life. I am… emotionally attached. They have no idea how hard it was for me to become a mother. And they shouldn’t. I could not have children naturally. If it weren’t for the gentle guidance of Dr. Fernando Giustini I don’t think I would have had the stamina to make it through failed rounds of IVF. One morning while visiting my own mother in Ocean City, MD, I surrendered. I went for a sunrise walk on the beach and started telling God how ready I was to usher children into and through this world. I talked out loud to the curious looks of passers by – about teaching them to walk, to whistle, to bike, to bunt, to dive, and so on. I talked about braiding their hair and holding their forehead. I talked about holding their hands to cross the street and letting them go to run ahead. I was pregnant two months later and I have done all of those things in almost twenty-one years.
In that time I have learned to be their safe landing. I am the one place they get to try on their very worst parts of themselves. With me they can be dismissive, sloppy, rebellious, disrespectful..oh wait…I shouldn’t keep adding to the list. You get what I mean and it is just as it should be. I love them unconditionally – foibles and all, so I need to see and love all the foibles, and I don’t need to comment on them. “Everything doesn’t have to be a teaching moment, Mom.” Ella reminds me.
There is an analogy that good parenting of adolescents is like being the side of the swimming pool. There to hitch an arm over to rest and feel safe and there to push off to live her intended life independent of me. I watch Ella swim as often as twice a week. I love the long reach of her arms. She makes it look effortless as she moves through the water. Then as she nears the end of each 25 meter length, I look forward to the push off the wall – the way it will propel her into the next lap. That’s me – I’m the wall.
What I didn’t know that day on the beach was that finally being pregnant was not the end of the battle to be a mom. It was only the beginning. There was a lot of heartache ahead on this journey – mine and theirs. Our lived experiences are very different and we carry it quietly in our daily lives.

On Christmas we acknowledge it all. There are two special ornaments we hang. One is a picture of a baby we adopted whose mother changed her mind ten days later just before Christmas. The other is the only picture we have of Nicolas, Grace’s twin brother. While I am not raising those two children, I am their mother – no matter how briefly. And without those babies we would not have the life we do. We hang those red frames to remember we are blessed.
This Christmas I thought I would also tell a little bit about our stories so others who silently carry similar stories might find solace in the company of strangers.
Liz: Do you ever think about our relationship because you’re adopted?
Ella: I do. I have before. Sometimes I still do. I haven’t in a while. Sometimes I do.
Liz: Care to share?
Ella: Sometimes I feel that. Not that our relationship is less, but sometimes I just feel like there’s more of a connection sometimes between you and Grace. But sometimes I also feel like that’s because she’s older.
I also feel like sometimes I feel a bit of, like, emptiness because, I don’t know. I mean, what of me is out there?
I mean, I wouldn’t change it. Like, I love our family, and I love my life, and I appreciate everything that I’ve been given. And I don’t think I would be the same person that I am if I was stuck in the awful situation that I was as a baby. But, you know, sometimes I still think about it.
Can you hear how often she says “sometimes?” can you hear her hesitations? She doesn’t want to hurt my feelings. She chooses words and stammers to temper the way the words may land on me. Do you hear her empathy and her ache? There is something she wants to say but to not to me and not at my expense.
Liz: What was it like to going back to Texas (where she was born)? Did it have any impact?
Ella: It was weird. It wasn’t like I didn’t get emotional, but it was weird because, like, I knew that that’s where I would have been if you didn’t come find me. And I would have… I wouldn’t have been living like, our trip. I would have probably been in an awful situation or in a foster home somewhere.
Liz: You know, you stopped me and thanked me for things on that trip more than you typically do on a trip.
Ella: Because I was thinking about it. I was thinking about my life if you never adopted me. I was thinking of my life if my birth mom never gave me up. And I wouldn’t have had the same life. I think I’m very fortunate, and I wouldn’t have been the same if I wasn’t adopted.
Ella has always known she was adopted – born of my heart we like to say. We had a choice and we chose each other. She was worth the wait. I cannot change…fix…control the ache she feels, but I will be by her side when she wants explore it.
Liz: How often do you think about your brother?
Grace: Very often.
Liz: What’s it like?
Grace: I think throughout my life, I’ve slowly gone through the seven stages of grief. Is it seven? Or is it nine? Seven stages of grief? In the sense that for a while, thinking about it, all I could do was cry because. And part of it was survivors’ guilt.
Liz: Yeah.
Grace: And part of it was also just mourning the loss.
Liz: Yeah.
Grace: And then I think for a while, especially before you and dad got divorced, there was a little bit of anger in the sense that I just kept wondering what it would have been like to have someone to go through those things with. I had Ella, obviously, but it would have been a little bit different because we would have had all the same. Not all the same experience, but more of the same experiences. And, I mean, there’s always, always been a part of me that wonders, like, what life would have been like.
And I think now I’m more at a point where I am grateful to have that kind… To feel that kind of bond so strongly with something that I don’t even really know. And I’m grateful to have, like, feel like I have almost a guardian angel watching over me. And in a lot of ways, I think subconsciously, no consciously, a lot of what I’ve done has been almost. I see it as, like, a mix of myself and what could have been Nicolas, especially with my interest in athletics.
Liz: It doesn’t have to be, you know. You don’t owe him anything.
Grace: I know. And I think, especially since mom-mom died, I’ve really started to appreciate the guardian angel aspect of it, because I see them both as such influential people in my life.
For twenty years, I get in the car and hear two other doors shut and feel like we are missing someone. We are. The girls sometimes wonder what their lives would have been like if … but I don’t. I can’t let myself think about living this life without them. At some point on Christmas morning I will touch those other two ornaments and send up a prayer of gratitude – an annual epilogue to that 2003 walk on the beach.
Liz: Is there anything else you want the world to know about motherhood or leadership or learning differences?
Ella: It’s okay to learn differently. I mean, just because you learn differently doesn’t make you stupid or slow or anything. It just means differently, not simply.
Liz: Do you have any memories of your time with Theresa?
Ella: I hated it, but, I mean, it worked.
Grace: Don’t be afraid to let people in. Not everybody is supposed to be a main character in your life. Sometimes people are there for a lesson and not a lifetime. And as much as it hurts and as much as it sucks in the moment, you’ll become a better person because of it. And you can’t let one shitty person stop you from needing a bunch of wonderful people in your life.
This is Grace and Ella… brave, curious, creative and imperfect…my heart walking around outside my body.

Dear Grace and Ella, You bring me rapturous joy every time you lean in close to say I love you or kiss me goodnight. And that is enough. You are enough… just as you are. As am I. If the ache is ever too much to bear on your own, I’ll be here. Come hitch your arm and rest until you are ready to push off again. You are already more than I could have ever dreamed of.
Merry Christmas.