On making the biggest pie together, lax joints and all

Sunday Letter-Writing Series

Today we continue a beloved Sunday letter-writing project between my dear friend Emily Smith and me, with Em’s latest letter below responding to my last letter, How Friendship Helps my Chronic Pain. You’ll find links to our previous Em & Sara letters linked at the end of this piece.

Because these letters are an intimate glimpse into our lives, we’re sharing these Sunday letters with paid subscribers, though everyone gets a sneak peak below. Thank you from our hearts for supporting this work—it moves us toward making this work our livelihood, for which we’re so grateful. If you feel seen and cared for in the work we put out, and believe in compensating mothers for their work, please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Lastly, if you haven’t already, check out the inner child meditation course Em and I created together to help our own reparenting journey, which plays a big role in our co-evolution.

Dear Sara,

I wish you could see out my window as I type this. Yesterday, the child and I were dreaming about daffodils and today it is white and fluffy as a flannel sheet from sky to ground, with big wispy gusts blowing enthusiastically past my window. He says the cold is refreshing and the snow is enchanting and I’m reminded to love the world the way he loves it, seeing it for the first time each time.

I’ve been thinking about your wandering rib and all of your suffering that I cannot see and have not really known and can never fully know. While writing this, I’m bouncing back and forth to my family texts keeping everyone updated on a loved one in ICU with an uncertain outcome. My wobbly SI joint has not loved the idea of me sleeping this week. Being human is, finally, a naked and solo endeavor. As close as we can get to each other, there are still unchartable chasms between us. Anyone who’s tried to close the chasm by merging with someone knows that only deepens the cleft.

I’m appreciating the courage it takes for us humans to be here– to really be here. I love all of us, whether we meet this reality with terror, numbing, service, despair, busyness, accomplishment, love, community, practices of transcendence, or something else.

I’m also celebrating you and your weeping. I’m celebrating that you let the tears come, that you felt your pain, that you named why they were coming, and that your family system responded with such tenderness and care. I’m also feeling a deep satisfaction hearing that my own tale of “publicly” scheduling a weep in my family helped you carve this space for yourself. It reflects back to me the work I’ve done to create emotional safety and honesty in my home. More importantly, it reminds me that I’ve finally learned to cry and to know when I need it. Trauma’s old siren calls of isolation and energetic impotence no longer have that same pull on me or the same ability to freeze me in a moment long past.

We matter! And in mattering we have entered into this regenerative loop with each other where through reflection, wrestling, questioning, challenging, softening, strengthening, and loosening we co-evolve and come out transformed. We can surprise each other and ourselves with new facets of ourselves and say, “am I this, too?” Our identities are, themselves, emergent.

Hmm, I’m realizing when I just wrote the word “loosening” that I immediately tensed up ever so slightly in my body. Do you relate to this? We hypermobile creatures live in fear of loosening and in the daily pain of tightening. We contain these diametric opposites because our muscles are always trying to stabilize us while our connective tissue hangs onto the bone like some stretched out like old gum (I’m taking liberties based on how it feels, this is not medically accurate). To relax and especially to stretch, then, becomes dangerous.

How does weeping relate?