This week you will have your 17th birthday and yet I can still remember so clearly setting you on the floor in your portable car seat the night that your dad and I brought you home from the hospital.
I remember thinking, "I don't know what in the fuck I'm doing."
And 17 years still later, I still don't know what in the fuck I'm doing.
You change and I change and life changes around us.
What hasn't changed is that I'm still winging it.
You never really got to celebrate your 16th birthday because your birthday always comes in the thick of Girl Scout cookie booth season (late Feb-mid March).
By the time that was ending last year, COVID had hit, and we were quarantining.
This was your cupcake when we finally got to celebrate with family.
Your 16th birthday gift was to see Elton John in concert, which was canceled and is "supposed" to happen in spring 2022.
We shall see.
Your field hockey season was weird.
Your junior year of high school has been weird.
And on top of all that, we've dealt with Pa's cancer, surgeries, and treatment.
I can't say this has been an especially easy year for our family.
I have been thinking a lot about being a mother to you as I'm also thinking about being a daughter to my own parents.
As I'm seeing you grow up, I'm seeing them grow old.
[I realize I'm talking about me at the moment which is SO NOT COOL in a birthday letter but bear with me.]
It occurred to me one day recently that having a child means subjecting that child to loss.
Yes, I know, this is a DUH moment because life is all about loss and sadness but that is not at all what people think about when they find out they are having a wanted child.
But a big loss/sadness is watching your parents become older, become different from the strong people they used to be. They are still themselves but smaller, weaker, more fatigued, more fragile.
Having a child means subjecting that child to having to become an adult, and even though your dad and I had you and bought a house and have bank accounts and do grown-up stuff, we're still children as long as our parents are around.
So in thinking about when you were born, I thought about how we made the decision (unknowingly) that you would suffer, be sad, experience loss.
As I'm watching my parents get older, I'm looking at you and feeling thankful that I see my beautiful and funny and kind and a little-bit-weird daughter who helps balance out the sadness I feel in my own role as a daughter right now.
Today, when I sat chatting with Nana, she told me about her own mom getting older years and years ago. Grandma's eyes were so poor she had the thickest glasses the eye doctor could make plus a magnifying glass to read the paper.
Nana told me that her mom said to her, "What if I go blind?"
And Nana said, "Well, I guess you'll just bump into stuff."
And I laughed.
Nana didn't say that to her mom really (those were her thoughts at the time), but it sounded like something I would say, and it occurred to me that, unfortunately (or maybe fortunately) for you, you come from at least 2 generations of women who are funny and have close relationships with their own moms.
I hope that this 17th year is as happy as it can be given all the crap going on around us.
Your life will not be always happy and joyous which is what every parent imagines their baby's life will be on the night they bring them home from the hospital.
Every parent expects the world to crack wide open for their child and every parent experiences the harsh realization that this will not happen.
Their child will be human; flawed and full of foibles.
The world will not always or even often be kind.
Your life will be happy and sad and frustrating and easy at all different times and in lots of different ways.
I hope that throughout your life you are able to enjoy the happy and easy and sit with the sad and frustrating, knowing that all of these things will ebb and flow.
I hope throughout your life you know I have always loved you.
Momma
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