What is one thing that you would like to tell your daughter about yourself?
Again, I going to cheat and tell my daughters two things. First I want them to know just how frightening life is for me sometime.
This has nothing to do with my task in raising and nurturing them.
Rather it relates to achieving goals I have set forth for myself.
Second, I’d like them to know how much their presence(s) in my life, give m hope.
Looking back on my childhood, with the wisdom of my own experience at motherhood, I now realize that my mother struggled with her own fears.
And why would she not. She was human.
But in many ways I think she held shame around the fact that she was afraid.
Like so many of my fellow mothers, my age, younger and a bit older, I think my mother, and I am going to include myself in this too, felt she should hold the answers to all things.
What I have discovered, and much to my surprise, is that ascertaining answers for my daughters often proves much easier than going this for myself.
One’s relationship with self resembles the experience of being at the turbulent center of a great storm more often then not.
Looking upon the storm-laden challenges of my daughters allows me the distance of time and experience.
Yet my own life remains one of growth, evolution and uncertainty.
And so goes the fear as with us all.
My daughters give me hope, not simply in their presence and the faith they hold in me, but their smiles and for having allowed me the opportunities to revisit my own childhood, reconnect with my own inner child, the little girl living inside me, that often wishes to remain hidden.
In that I have developed the skills to see two of our daughters into adulthood, and in a manner where they count me as friend and share their adult experiences with me, I know, even in the darkest of hours when I wonder about myself, and my ability to achieve the dreams, hopes and wishes of my heart as an individual, that the answers to the questions I encounter and that my worries conjure lie within me.
And if they do not, then I will find them.
What will you like to say to your daughter(s) before the end of this day, that lets her know you a little better?