Mirror

Every year, although sometimes belated, I sit down and write a love letter to my daughters for their birthday. This year I have started and stopped on these teens’ letters so many times. Teens are hard to capture. They change– their looks, their problems, their habits, their friends, their interests, their challenges, their moods– in a ways that are both steady and surefooted, but also in ways that give you whiplash.

Yet, despite the challenge, we embrace, sometimes begrudgingly, the struggle of it.

Dear M,

I started this on your last day being twelve. It now is a few months later, but I’m still here thinking about you as a person and all the ways I get to witness your life.

Here is the thing: You are sharp edged in ways I have never been. It is funny how the world will give you love. You are a mirror that helps me see the world in lenses I never had before you were here. The way you talk about things, the world is often two toned for you in ways that make it very clear and crisp. Your mama often sees the same situations in a many and varied color base. Often, my outlook can change and grow based on who I’m looking at it with. You’re definitiveness is something that demands I sometimes make things black and white– which is a good exercise in stretching myself and growing. I hope my shades of grays and layers help you understand how sometimes you have to see the world from other’s perspective to make progress or grow a relationship. I hope our differences will make us both more stronger people in a world that requires strength more often than we wish.

You like what you like without apology– which is part privledge, part bravery, and part being steadfast in knowing who you are. It is a great gift to just know yourself the way you do, M. Half of us waste a lot of life trying to figure out what makes us feel like we’re home in our own skin. You have come with a gift of self and that hopefully will lead you to waste less of the precious time we have in life.

We’re still in the midst of many things externally as you cross to the next milestone: the end of our second year in a worldwide pandemic, a war in Ukraine, climate change, middle school which is wonderful and awful all at once, and the family Dad made for you fell apart with him in pieces with it. It was challenging, but normal in the sense– life always has heartbreak and unfairness. I can not keep it from you, but I hope you never have to live through it alone.

We gave you people to walk through life with. Now, with great joy and a little apprehension, I watch you add your own, new people to fill out your life. For someone who held a small worry they would have no friends, the irony is very apparent to your mother. You life is full– all different and all interesting and all teaching you different ways they are in the world. I hope they will help you temper your very definitive ways of being. I hope you help them be surefooted when they are plagued with doubt. I don’t know which faces will stay in life as the years tick by, but I know you will have people to go through all the complexities, joys, and struggles of life with. I am grateful because I think the hardest part of life is when you simply don’t have anyone to share it with.

I don’t worry about your heart finding out that sometimes friend turns out to be someone who doesn’t deserve your time and loyalty. I know you have no qualms about burning bridges if needed. Yet, this piece of you is tempered by the fact you hold the difficult skill of building them as well. In the meantime, I watch you leave my house for familiar second homes you’ve grown up in, I shuttle new faces from practice to their abodes, drop you off to school functions to meet people I know by name only, and I watch you have a full life in ways that will matter in all the stages from now till death. It is an adjustment to just hear about things and not witness them first hand, but I think this is how you leaving us for your own life begins.

I have worried about the way you stand so firmly and, in the same breath, been filled with awe over it. I worry you’ll be callous with other people’s thoughts and feelings– but seen you be wise and sensitive saying the things others’ needed to hear. So I have hope some of the nonsense you spew when it’s just us will fall off to the abyss as you shed your petulant youth the next few years. You have both wisdom and apathy for someone so new to the world.

I hope you learn to be disciplined to overcome the struggle of imperfection. You have this way of burying your head in the sand when things don’t come easily or interest you enough to strive for better. That piece of you is all too familiar, M. I hope you grow into it. Discomfort and disdain are important to sit through. You get well versed in it and you learn that the other side has a certain satisfaction of a earning proficiency. I hope you find that feeling and chase it. It’ll be a long few years if you don’t and you’ll cheat yourself out of some moments and passions that come with patience and effort. Its okay to have life be easy… but there’s something to be said for learning things that aren’t natural or enjoyable.

You make me proud. Protect your light from candle blower outers. Learn to be soft as often as your sharp. Keep chasing the things that light you. Keep filling your life with faces that will walk you through life.

You are still the one I’ve long the longest.

Thank you for all the ways to expand the world here. I love you more than croissants and baby goats and Glee.

Welcome to the teen years. I hope they are filled with more good than anything else.

Love,

Mom