“Now Anne, don’t look as if you were trying to understand. Seventeen can’t understand.”
In L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, Miss Lavendar explained to Anne her inability at age seventeen to understand Miss Lavendar’s life as a spinster at forty-five. This is curious especially to me, at not quite forty-five, while my daughter is turning seventeen. Seventeen years ago this wrinkly, crying, precious, dark-haired girl entered my world and turned it on its head. When I laid eyes on her for the first time, I had a very real epiphany. In that first moment when our eyes met in the delivery room, I suddenly had great understanding of everything my parents ever did in an attempt to raise me into a good person. In that moment, I came to understand unconditional love and intense vulnerability. The most important part of your life is now outside your body, it’s not you any more. It’s this little person and I made a silent and solemn vow to do everything in my power to protect and nurture this tiny creature.
I’ve watched this girl of mine grow in inspiring ways. Physically of course, she’s no longer the chubby toddler with the China doll face who pattered around clutching “Blankie” in true Linus fashion. She depended on me for her every need. She’s tall now, looking me in the eyes, and beautiful. She teaches me. I don’t think she knows that. But I’ve learned from her strength and her intellect. She has an old soul, a fact I noted when she was barely old enough to read. Compassion and insight have always been two of her most unique qualities. It is a true honor to witness her becoming. I remind her that she has an amazing fresh life ahead of her. The slate is clean, the canvas is blank, and she can paint her life with the most brilliant colors and adventures.
I admire who she has chosen to be. Her faith in God is steadfast. She has had plenty of reason to wonder what He’s up to and why, but she’s held on to what she knows and Who. She has had to let go of two critically important men in her life…my father and her own dad. She has a courage she shouldn’t have needed by this age. She and her brother, they are my champions. But I wonder if she knows when my eyes fill with tears when she talks about college and life beyond this house, that it’s part sadness and part joy and pride so overwhelming that it spills from my eyes. She may not understand that when I wax nostalgic about the little girl who loved Polly Pocket, finger paint, and hated having her hair brushed, that I’m happily reminiscing but also trying to hold onto that little girl in purple overalls a bit longer.
I’ve watched her own the basketball court and lately, take the stage with her love of theatre. She’s a protective big sister and a not afraid to speak up for what is right, even if it’s not popular. She has elegance and beauty that emanate from within, displaying the loveliness of her heart. She won’t understand how undeniably beautiful, how sassy and brilliant, how perfectly unique I know she is…not until she looks into the eyes of her own child someday. Then she will see what I see.
Happy Birthday to my stunning, sunny girl. You have such a bold future, full of cleverness and grand thrills. I love you fiercely. Don’t just dream your dreams. Live them, sweet girl.
