To my daughter on her 14th birthday
Dear Emelyn,
I've spent a while thinking about what I wanted to write to you this year. After all, you're not little anymore. You'll remember fourteen even if you don't read this post until you're twenty. You'll see right away that whatever I wrote is through my own filter and not yours.
When you three were little and I wrote these letters, I did it to give you memories of what you were like at each age, to document your firsts, and to note how you were growing and becoming. (I can think of only one first this year--your first big role in a play. Watching you light up on stage like you light up at home was a delight. I suspect you even surprised yourself on that adventure.)
I am well aware that you do not need me to craft memories for you anymore, to document who you are. You have a voice and a will of your own. You are you now.
I decided that if I were fourteen or looking back at my fourteen year old self, I might want to know what good there was in me. What potential. Or gifts. So here you are, my dear. This is what we know in three acts.
Act III: Generous
It's the Saturday before your actual birthday. You've invited a few friends over to celebrate with smores and a campfire. Dark falls early now and you're taking advantage of a nearly full moon, a mild night, and your headlamps. You play "Go to Court" in the yard, open gifts around the campfire, roast smores. You do this all without us, and your party runs smoothly according to your own plan.
In the happy mix are your two siblings. I'm a little surprised this arrangement is okay with you, but I keep quiet, except to ask several times if someone has eyes on Kaleb in the dark. Is he being good, I ask you when you zip by the deck. "Mom, he's having a great time," you tell me. Of course he is, because his older sister is letting him crash her fourteenth birthday party. You are good natured and calm about this. You are happy to have him. He is over the moon to be welcomed.
Act II: Brave
You, Audyn and Kaleb sit huddled on the long bench seat inside the ambulance. You look at me with concern between your eyes. The EMTs weigh options with me--Plan A: wait with the family at the crash scene and see a doctor once we finally make it home. But there are still ten hours of driving ahead of us. What if the injury is more than what we see, the EMTS reason. Plan B does not appeal to me, though--I don't want to go to the ER and leave my family on the side of this highway or leave Mark to navigate all the moving pieces alone. I don't want the kids to be afraid. But they are already afraid. "Mom," you say holding my hand. "Mom, just go. We'll be fine. We would feel better if we knew you were okay." It's the first time the tables have turned and you're giving me the advice. I look at you. At your calm. Your compassion. The plead in your eyes. And I take your suggestion. I let you steer the ship in that moment, because I can see you feel strongly about Plan B. And I respect your reasoning.
Act I: Independent
We have just been told that school is closed. Coronavirus has become a pandemic. We don't really know what this means or how long it will last. We don't imagine yet that the whole world will grind to a halt for the remainder of the year. When online learning finally gets off the ground, you dive in. You rarely complain. You start competing with yourself. How fast can you finish your work each day? How soon can you get to free time?
What does free time look like? It's reading for hours, exploring outside, going for long walks and bike rides down to the reservoir, climbing trees, building your own bows and arrows and learning how to shoot them, creating a ongoing imaginary narrative with your sister containing all the complexity of a good novel. It's writing. So. much. writing. "Can I read it, yet?" I ask you often. But it's not finished, and you assure me I can read it when you're done. You write more in six months than I manage to write in a year.
About one month in to the stay at home orders you ask, "Mom, can't we do something to help? I feel like I want to be doing something." A local farm needs volunteers to take care of the horses in exchange for some lessons on horsemanship. Both you and Audyn jump at the chance. Two mornings a week, we bundle up and head for the barn. You scoop manure, groom horses, collect eggs, and blow hay out of the alley. Whatever Wenona gives you to do, you try--even when it grosses you out.
One mild morning, I hear you calling for me from the horse yard. I can't see you, but the urgency in your voice sends me running toward you. I find you face to face with an angry rooster, who launches himself, head arched forward, feathers fluffed, repeatedly at your legs, your torso, wherever he thinks he can peck you. "What do I do?"
"Kick him! Kick him hard!" cries Wenona, who has also just arrived.
"I don't want to hurt him!" you plead.
"He'll be fine. Kick him to the ground," Wenona presses.
Against your nature, you kick that nasty rooster all the way back to the coop. By the end we're all laughing. I love that you still needed me in that moment. But in the end, all I did was stand by and watch you tackle the problem yourself. That sums up perfectly what I do these days. I am support staff, standing by as you take off. You want me there, but you don't need me to do anything for you.
So it's really true. You are you. And I am opening my hand one little inch at a time. It's sad and sweet and exciting. I listen to your dreams--where you want to go to college, what you will study, the career you hope to pursue, the kind of house you'll live in someday, how much you'll travel. You have ideas about all of it, just like you always have. Except now. Now. Those dreams are not just the pretend games we play together on quiet afternoons; they're realities on the horizon.
Everyone says you look just like Dad, and it's true. You do look a lot like him. Even your mannerisms are identical. But you and I are so much alike, we sometimes drive each other crazy. Both in love with words. Both insatiably curious. Both precise and careless at the same time. Both usually lost in a day dream. Both forgetful. Both holding ourselves and others to high expectations. Both wearing the weight of things that ail our world and still always hopeful. We can really wear ourselves and each other out sometimes. :)
But I wouldn't trade you or the us we've made together as mom and daughter for some simpler version. I love us just the way we are.
Happy Birthday. Onward, sweet girl.