Buried Treasures

Copyright © 2022 Shannon Loucks.

All rights reserved. This book is protected by copyright. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including as photocopies or scanned-in or other electronic copies, or utilized by any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the copyright owner.

Printed in the United States of America.

ISBN: 979-8-9868998-1-7 (paperback)

ISBN: 979-8-9868998-0-0 (ebook)

Edited by Speak Write Play LLC

Cover art by Cassidy Baillie

Interior design by FormattedBooks

Dedicated to all the women in my life who have shown me how to mother from a place of love and deep reflection. Thank you for holding me, inspiring me but most of all for knowing I could do it.

CONTENTS

To You, Dear Reader

Why I’m Writing to You, My Children

THE EARLY YEARS

Pregnant in Paris

Embracing Motherhood

What I Love about Being Your Mom

Babies Don’t Come with Manuals

Freedom from the Body Police

Parenting Is Who I Am

Ditching Diapers

Musical Beds

You Cannot Spoil a Child with Love and Attention

Trusting You from the Beginning

A Style of Your Own

Learning Doesn’t Happen in a Straight Line

Heartbreak and Grief Are Inevitable

MIDDLE YEARS

Let’s Talk about Tech, Baby

All-Access Online Pass

Leaving Home and Chasing Dreams

Examining the Flaws of Do as I Say

Realizing I Can’t Be Everything You Need

Listen More, Talk Less

An Unconventional Path

You Always Have a Choice

Please, Can We Not Be a Judgy Family

Tending a Mind Is a Precious Thing

It’s an Unjust World

Knowing You and Healing Me

I’m a Recovering Perfectionist

You Are Enough

Authority over Your Body

Losing Grandparents

Choosing to Do Better

TEENS AND YOUNG ADULTS

Systemic Flaws

Tending to the Unimaginable

Pandemic: The Real-Life Version

Resiliency and Moving Boxes

Spending Your Unearned Bank Account

The Great Vaccine Debate

Lessons in Hardship

Your First Job

For the Love of the Game

You Were Fired

Growing into an Adult

Mom Is My Favorite Title

Thank You

TO YOU, DEAR READER

Hello Dear Reader,

Parenting isn’t Hallmark’s version of love. It’s actually unconditional love with all its thorns and delicious roses. Shortly after my first child was born, I sat weeping in the bathtub. It was the guttural sort of weeping one does in the throes of grief. I was not expecting it at all. I had watched enough A Baby Story on TLC to know that motherhood was supposed to be a wonderful blessing filled with joy at welcoming a child into the world. Don’t get me wrong, I was profoundly joyful at meeting my son, but I could not ignore the ache that came alongside it. At that moment, I believe I began to understand that parenting is built on the foundation of great love, which always includes joy and sorrow. It is like the moment a child takes their first steps and the onlookers’ eyes fill with tears—tears of celebration for the now toddling child, with a hint of nostalgia for the baby they will never be again.

It was no longer just about me; it was also about the tiny human I had welcomed into the world. This book began with reflections on what it took along the way to undo parts of myself to be present for my children.

Before we begin, let me thank you for loving that child of yours in a way that puts the space between you as the highest priority. I know it is not easy to walk in a world that both undervalues children and the parents who are raising them. I see you over there unpacking your preconceived ideas of parenting as you read this. I see you showing up in your best version of yourself to tend to your precious children. I am there with you in the messy place of growth and change that calls us to transform over and over again with each new phase our children enter. You are not alone, and you have what it takes to trust the unique connection that exists between you and your child. Lean into the love and watch it grow you both into the humans the world needs.

This unique connection we have with our children is what makes us push through each challenge and commit again to the unconditional love between us. It is within the letters to my children in this book that I give you a sneak peek into that very connection and how it served me on my mothering journey.

This book does not need to be read cover to cover. In fact, I invite you to find the letters that call to you and flip right to them. Your life is full enough already, so just take them in one letter at a time as you need to fill your own love bucket.

WHY I’M WRITING TO YOU, MY CHILDREN

Hello My Loves,

Every time I sit down in front of the screen to gather my thoughts to tell you of what it is to be your mother, I find myself at a loss for words. This will likely make you both laugh considering I am the wordiest amongst us all. I thought instead I would write you a series of love letters, and perhaps when you look at them through the lens that is my eyes, you might come to understand how it is I became your mother.

There are so many lessons you have taught me throughout our journey together—through the demons you had me face, the love that rushed to the surface, the examples you set, or the literal words you spoke to me while we lived side by side.

Throughout my own life, writing has been a deep source of healing—a way I could connect with a part of my brain that was generally inaccessible through the noise of daily demands. I wrote my first poem at nine years of age. It was to my grandad who had died; I was missing him terribly. When I look back now, I realize it was a love letter.

And when Gramps (my dad) started to work in another city, I wrote him notes for each day that he was away. I would tuck them in his suitcase for him to discover. Upon his death, I found each one of those notes hidden inside a green box with my twelve-year-old handwriting on it. Once again, I discovered these were love letters to him from a daughter finding her way through young adolescence.

Since then, even my Uncle Gerry has returned letters to me that I wrote to him while I was growing up. At her wedding, Cousin Marie read from one of the letters I had sent her as a young girl. So, I suppose I have been writing love letters my entire life. The letters, I now know, were as much for me as they were for the people I sent them to.

I have been far from a perfect mother. What I am, and continue to be, is a mother committed to letting our relationship be more important than the stress balls that threaten to come between us.

You two have been ridiculously gracious in the ways you have let me tell our stories to others who might stand a chance of learning something about their own way of raising humans. I hope these letters might help you to understand why that felt so deeply important to me.

Yours in love,

Mama

THE EARLY YEARS

Hello again, Dear Reader,

Let’s get started with the early years of parenting. Shortly after I gave birth to my first child, I went to the grocery store.

The cashier said to me, Oh, you had the baby. You must be so happy that he is here.

I nodded and smiled, then gave a socially acceptable response. While internally I thought, he was a lot easier to take care of on the inside.

From feeding to sleeping and everything in between, we are called to pull up new skills while feeling exhausted and vulnerable. Nowhere else in our world are we asked to do a critically important job without any on-the-job training or how-to manuals.

Join me in the following pages as we delve into these big topics and how liberally applying unconditional love kept me focused on the connection I was building with my children.

PREGNANT IN PARIS

Hello My Loves,

I feel like I met you the moment I knew you were growing inside of me. With you, my firstborn, it started with a trip to Paris.

Dad and I landed at Charles de Galle Airport late on the evening of September 10, 2001. Walking through the gates, past empty luggage belts, and out into the street, we were certain we had somehow entered the country illegally. We had never experienced such an easy immigration process. It is true that it was before 9/11 and that we were both limited in our experience of entering other countries.

We swung our matching blue Mountain Equipment backpacks, freshly stitched with Canadian flags, onto our backs before hitting the dark streets in search of a taxi to take us to our hotel. Even though we both had to take a great deal of French when we were in school, it did not prepare us for the fast pace of the actual spoken language coming at our tired ears. It’s important to remember this was before cellular phones with pocket-sized maps. Our faith and fumbled French led us to the hotel our co-worker recommended.

We unpacked our well-stuffed bags before falling exhausted into bed. I learned for this trip that Dad is an expert packer and could get twice as much stuff into the same space as I could. You’ve both inherited or learned from his mad clothing folding skills.

On our first day in Paris, we did the top touristy thing to do. We grabbed our fanny packs, turned to the front to keep our passports safe and cash ready, and walked to climb the Eiffel Tower. En route, we passed the American Embassy, heavily guarded by men with machine guns. We made jokes about Americans, their love of guns, and their misplaced sense of importance.

It was at the base of the Eiffel Tower that I began a frustrating relationship with toilets in Europe. You had to pay to pee and I, for a reason unknown to me yet, had begun to pee at a rate far higher than any I had experienced in my life. I thought maybe it was the nerves of traveling to a new place, but the urgency is what had me confused.

We found our way to the top of the tower, where we took our first picture with you, my firstborn son. It’s the one you’ve seen of an unrecognizable young version of your dear parents, french fries poised in our hands, obliviously smiling as the landscape of the world forever changed around us.

We were making this trek to the top of the iconic Eiffel Tower on September 11, 2001. Those heavily armed guards were standing watch as planes crashed into the Twin Towers in New York City. And the space my bladder had previously inhabited was shrinking due to my growing uterus, which would be your home for the coming nine months.

Dad really wanted me to take a pregnancy test in Paris.

He stood outside a pharmacy saying, Come on, wouldn’t that be such a great story? My hormone-flooded body only wanted to get to the airport and begin our trek back home. We had been gone over seventeen days of news broadcasts about terrorists and coming attacks. I’d packed and unpacked tampons at every stop and my damned hair was doing some wild thing that left it limp and unresponsive on my head. Food was no longer appealing; I longed for the comfort of a country whose rules I knew and trusted. I wasn’t up for another uncomfortable interaction of partial words and animated arms. I refused. True to form, this did not dampen your father’s spirit. Instead, he broke into song in the streets of Paris chanting, You’re pregnant, over and over until I broke into a smile and a tiny part of my mind relaxed.

It was upon our return to Vancouver Island that I took a pregnancy test that quickly confirmed what Dad had been declaring in the streets of Paris—I was pregnant. This was the same day I started a brand-new job as a preschool teacher. Walking out the door for the first time knowing you were growing in my womb, I felt a sense of concern. It was like I was tending to something so fragile that I already loved, and