03/02/2026
My daughter was in the living room with my three-year-old granddaughter reading books when I heard a crash, and then Kele said - Go tell grandma what just happened.
I heard little barefeet walking on the hardwood floor past the library and through the dining room and into the kitchen where Mika hid her small body in the stalks of my legs.
Hello, my love, I said, with my fingers in her golden hair. - Did you break something?
She shook her head up and down against my thigh.
Do you think I’m going to be mad?
She shook her head yes again, and I got down on my knees so my hazel eyes could meet her Caribbean blue eyes, and I held the palm of my hand out.
Put your hand in my hand, I said, and she did, her tiny hand splayed out on top of mine.
See how big my hand is compared to yours, and see how long my fingers are?
She shook her head yes again.
I break things, I said, and my hand is big compared to your hand, so you will probably break more things than me for a while, and that’s okay. Do you want to tell me what you broke now?
The Buddha’s arms came off, she said, I dropped him on the floor.
I laughed, and my laughter surprised her.
Well, I said, most of the Buddha statues I’ve seen around the world are missing arms, who knows why, and now mine is missing them too!
She began laughing with me, not sure what was so funny about Buddha's without arms.
I picked Mika up and walked into the living room with her on my hip. My daughter who had been listening said Who ARE you today and where did my mother go?
I knew what she meant.
She doesn’t think I was as good a mother with her as I am a grandmother now, and of course she's right. She is my witness that I’ve softened into love in a new way, and I could tell she felt she missed out on the me that was now pouring into her daughter.
I’m telling you this story because we are all evolving in the ways we love and understand each other, and it’s not an easy journey. Ellen Bass once wrote about her own daughter in a poem:
You dug me out like a well. You lit
the deadwood of my heart. You pinned me
to the earth with the points of stars.
Twenty-nine years ago I was a very different person than I am today. It’s hard to hear an echo of my previous self across the field of memory. Our children were our teachers as much as we were their teachers, and now we get to pour those hard earned lessons of love into our grandchildren, or anyone in our life we have learned to love in a whole new way.
We all stood that day in my living room - three generations - looking at the Buddha's arms, and we considered gluing them back on. In the end I decided to keep him broken, to remind me of what matters - the people I love, and not my things.
This is why I'm telling you about my broken Buddha -
Things break.
Bodies Break.
Countries break.
Hearts break.
Seeds break open, and spread.
It’s all part of our personal and collective evolution.
Kristie Stout said “We must break to become anything different than what we are. Whether it’s a broken bone, a broken habit, a broken marriage or a broken heart, something must be destroyed before something new can be created.”
Today I want to remind you that we are all growing beside each other and into each other and sometimes in opposition to each other. We learn to love differently as the years pass and evolve into a deeper version of loving, and I’m so happy to be on this brazen and wild ride with all of you, today and every day.
❤ Laura Lentz
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Stories like this appear in my book Freeing the Turkeys and on my free Substack Writing at Red Lights, where I also feature stories from writers in our writing community.
