My Beloved Emily

Today there is a new baby in the Coppock family -- Mark's great niece, Josephine Ruth, born this morning. And I started the day off having coffee with a young mother who's son will be two next week. And all this has put me in touch with thoughts of my firstborn: my beloved Emily.

Emily is 15 now. She lives with her father. Our relationship is VERY troubled and has been for the last three years. She speaks to me almost exclusively in obsenities. I very rarely even get to lay eyes on her. She says she's done with me for good. My heart breaks every single day.

This place I find myself in now is SO far from where we started! Emily was my very planned, very wanted, very doted-on firstborn. She came easily -- we were pregnant on the first try, I had an easy pregnancy and a nice delivery. I had just finished grad school and was starting my parenting with a brand new Master's degree in clinical psychology. I felt I couldn't be more well-prepared. I had all that babysitting and baby brothers and college and grad school and graduate level child development under my belt. I thought I was going to be SUCH a good mom. I wanted every moment of everything to be perfect and wonderful for her. I wanted her to feel only loved and nurtured. I wanted the perfect, charmed, abundant life for her. Mostly, I just wanted her to be happy.

The day she was born was the most glorious of my life (matched only by the births of her sisters later on). I'll never forget that moment in the delivery room when they handed her to me for the first time and my whole world changed in that instant! There is no greater magic!

The first thing I learned about Emily in the first minute after she was born was that she would cry if I didn't hold her tightly. This began a our relationship: a mix of close and far, give and take, good and bad. Just like any relationship, I guess -- only SO much more profound than any I'd ever known before.

Looking back, it seems to me that everything has been a struggle for Emily. Life has not been the easy, happy ride that I had wanted for her.

She had the WORST colic -- for 3-4 hours a day for MONTHS. I walked her for MILES and sang a thousand verses of "My Girl" (now that I think of it, maybe my really BAD singing is responsible for a few things!).

When we brought her out of the hospital the day after she was born to take her home and put her in her car seat for the first time, she cried so violently she turned purple. My first parenting failure: we drove home with her on my lap. How could I let my newborn be deprived of oxygen from crying so hard?

She continued to hate her car seat always. This was particularly difficult since we lived 25 minutes from town! I spent MANY hours on the side of the road trying to get her to sleep and/or into her car seat so we could drive the rest of the way home. She still rebels about wearing a seat belt to this day -- even after being in a pretty bad wreck not too long ago. I pray she wears her seatbelt in my absence and only refuses it in my presence just to stick it to me in one more place that she can.

Emily hated all things baby: car seat, stroller, walker, bottle, pacifier, bib, cradle, crib (except that bouncer!). She even hated clothes! From the time she was physically able to pull off her clothes, at 8 months old, she would. She did her best to be naked until she was 5. For years she would only wear one type of shorts in the summer and one type of pants in the winter and only the most comfortable shirts. She wouldn't wear socks, jeans, underwear, turtlenecks, tights -- anything uncomfortable, anything with tags. Even CLOTHES, that we all wear every day, were hard for her!

Emily was a mama's girl from day one. When she was two weeks old my birthmother came to meet her for a few days. At one point during that visit I asked the new grandmother to hold Emily for 15 minutes while I took a much-needed shower. Emily screamed the entire time. When I came out of the shower and took her back she immediately quieted -- seemingly relieved that her long period of suffering was over.

That was the nature of our relationship for the next 12 years. She was the clingiest child I have ever met. We were completely enmeshed for the first dozen years of her life. She didn't even want to be left with her daddy. I didn't have much opportunity to leave her with anyone even for short periods because of our geographical isolation (we lived in the house my mother had left me on Lake Tenkiller in rural Oklahoma).

Starting preschool was traumatic. Starting Kindergarten was traumatic. She didn't want to be in a different room from me or (God fobid) on a different floor of the house. There was a year I couldn't leave the house without her or she'd plaster herself on the hood of my car. I didn't leave her overnight until she was 10 1/2. Maybe it was pathological, but at least then she LIKED me!

School was always a challenge. Emily didn't do well with groups or schedules which is what school IS. She wasn't a morning person. She didn't want to be away from me. She was so competative that she wouldn't do anything that involved competition because she was afraid she might not win. I sat in the hall outside her classroom for two weeks in first grade. I home schooled her for several years. I sat outside her classroom all day every day for SIX MONTHS in 5th grade because that was the only way I could keep her in school. Some mornings we had to chase her around the neighborhood and drag her kicking and screaming and crying to school. Every day she would just fall apart the minute she walked out of school at the end of the day and then start dreading the next day before we even got to the car to go home.

My poor, poor baby. This was the baby that was supposed to have the charmed life. And everything was so hard for her. I could never seem to make it better for her.

Maybe that's where I made some of my biggest mistakes: I didn't let her skin her knees enough. I think I probably saved her from all the things she was supposed to learn the hard way -- which were the things she probably most needed to learn!

And I yelled at her a lot. Emily says I yelled at her every day of her childhood. I did. But yelling was never my first reaction -- it was what happened on the eighth stab at whatever we were struggling with. Emily was strong-willed. She was stronger than I was. She could out-last me on everything. I finally learned that it was only by about 2 seconds that she could out-last me but she could still out-last me because I didn't have that last 2 seconds worth of strength. So she won a lot of battles that she probably shouldn't have. And I lost my mind WAY too many times in the struggle and the frustration and the panic of it all.

I know the flaws in my parenting. I was too soft-hearted. I should have corrected her on the first whatever-it-was rather than asking nicely and trying to reason with her and then losing my mind the eighth time whatever-it-was happened. I just always thought that we could work out a solution. My mistake was that I expected her to be reasonable. She was just a little person, she had no idea how to just be reasonable.

The best example of this was the day she decided it was funny to run across the street. She was probably 2 or 3. She decided to joyfully run across the street in front of our house just for sheer thrill of it -- or maybe the fun of rebelling against me or watching me turn white as a sheet in terror. Luckily, our street is only lightly travelled so she wasn't in as much danger as she would have been in heavy traffic but STILL! Small children need to learn not to run into the street, right? I told her NO and explained to her why it was massively dangerous to run into the street. She laughted in my face and kept doing it -- laughing all the while as I grew more and more panicked and terrified.

Finally, on the eighth run, I resorted to something I didn't believe in and had been taught against in grad school: spanking. I picked her up out of the street and spanked her. Her immediate reaction was to slap me across the face, saying "DON'T HIT ME!". I burst into tears. I had just taught my child to hit and made her feel abused in the process and she still hadn't learned about the street. That's why spanking isn't good, in my mind. But that wasn't the only time I spanked her -- later desperation led to trying anything I could think of. But I was usually short on ideas.

I think Emily also blames me for the divorce which disrupted her whole world. I don't blame her for being angry. It did rip up her world. And I know she probably thinks I left her dad for Mark. That's NOT what happened. For the record, I hadn't seen Mark in nearly 20 years when I decided to divorce Matt. The divorce was about me and Matt and no one else. And I wish she could know how much the divorce was about me wanting the best for everyone -- especially Matt. I wanted happiness for him and I knew that I couldn't give him the happiness I thought he deserved. SO much soul-searching went into that decision. I'm still sure that, in the grand scheme of things, I did the right thing. I only hope someday she can understand.

I love Emily more that words can say. She is an AMAZING person. She is a wonderful, creative soul with great passion for animals and great talent in art. She has a wisdom about her that that speaks of an old soul. Not too long ago she completely blossomed from a beautiful chubby kid who hated herself into a gorgeous young woman whom I hope can see, appreciate, and enjoy all the incredible things about herself. She has those wonderful exotic eyes, that beautiful cinnamon-vanilla skin, Mark says she has my arms, I see my legs and hips on her. She is wonderfully loving but firm with children (probably a lot more like what I should have been with her than I was). She has the most incredible sense of humor. She can be the best big sister when she wants to be. She lovingly looks after her dad. She's real, accepting, supportive, and good to her friends. She's incredibly, incredibly strong and very brave. She's so many things that I am SO, SO proud of. And, despite all the school-related challenges her soul has been through, today she goes to school, wearing JEANS even!, and she makes terrific grades and her teachers think she's wonderful and wish they had a whole classroom full of Emilys! And I breathe a huge sigh of relief that things are finally starting to be easier for her.

When she was little I lived every moment in awareness of her. I breathed every breath with her. I empathized every emotion with her. Now I miss her so very extremely desperately.

I LOVE just to get to LOOK at her which is rare because she will not permit photos to be taken of her, I've had to hide all of the old photos of her off of the premesis because she'll take or destroy them (she doesn't like the way she used to look), and I don't get to see her often because of the way she feels about me right now.

It's become my realization that she's better off without me right now because I bring up her demons. She won't take my calls. She blocks my texts. She won't read the letters I've given her. I would love to call her daily or sent her a text or a note every day but I suspect she would just yell at me. To "respect" her wishes and just leave her alone feels like I'm ignoring and abandoning her. I feel like I've lost a child. And I grieve her every day.

I pray she outgrows all this. If she never does, at least I know she's alive and healthy and walks the earth. And I hope she knows (as I've told her more than once) that I'm here with open arms any time she's ready to start working on making all this better.

My secret wish is that it will all be better in time for me to be there to send her off to the prom. That's reasonable, isn't it? And, when she's 22 and realizes that I'm maybe not so bad after all and that maybe I was right about a few things, I don't have the heart to want her to regret everything she's put me through or all the hurt she's given me. I just want my baby back. I just want to have her in my life -- happy and healthy and MINE!