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or my daughter, Sarah, on her thirteenth birthday.
I hereby recognize that you are no longer a child. To this end, I promise:
To have faith in your good sense, intelligence, ability to make good decisions and your good heart, no matter what you do. I will interfere sometimes because I also trust my own good sense, and I know that you are not yet grown, but I will never doubt that you are doing the best you can. Deep down, I trust you.
I will respect and love whoever you are at any given time, knowing that you are doing what you need to do. You can count on me to support your growing, learning and discovering who you are in any way that I can. I know that you will be changing many times before you can discover who you are, that it may be painful for both of us, and that there will be joy in it, too.
I will not rely on you for friendship, for sharing my life with, or for being a child when I need one around, although I will always be glad to spend time with you. Thank you for being a wonderful buddy for the last twelve years. I look forward to being buddies again sometime in the future. In the meantime I will not burden you with my needing you - you have enough to worry about on your own.
You do not need to take care of me, feel guilty about how you feel about me or lie to me to make me feel better. I don’t want to add to your pain or confusion. Any doubts I have about if I was a good mother of a child, I will keep to myself. I can’t make up for the past, but I can try to do the right thing in the present.
When you were a child, I tried hard to help you become self-reliant and resourceful, and it may have seemed to you that I refused to help, to give rides, make arrangements, etc., when I could have. Now I think you have become a self-reliant, resourceful person, and I will help you whenever I can.
I will require that you be as honest as you can be, that you will ask for help when you need it, that you tell me what is going on with you as much as you can, that you take responsibilities that you are ready for and that you not take the ones that you are not ready for, and that we never lose sight of the fact that we are just two human beings trying to play this game as well as we can. I’ll be the mother, you be the daughter, and we’ll do our best.
As you travel through these next six years, you can count on me to be here, to love you, respect you, to guide you whenever you need it. I will be available to talk about anything, any time, without condemning you. I will not act like your therapist or your teacher. I will try to talk more about things that should be talked about in case you don’t quite dare ask. If I do something stupid, or break any of these promises, you can tell me. Good luck!
I am looking forward to knowing the beautiful, intelligent, capable, loving woman that you are becoming.
- Rebecca Reid
Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy;they are the gardeners who make our souls blossom.
- Marcel Proust