Sixteen

Birthday Letter To My Daughter


My darling,

You most likely won’t see this - I know you despair of my sentimentality. That’s because you’re sixteen and you are safe enough within my love to feel able to sigh indulgently at me. You’re allowed to - it’s your job. But it’s my job to love you, to ache with love for you, to feel (as I read once) as if my heart is walking around outside my body.

It’s your birthday and I know you want it to pass with no fuss and not too much ceremony. You are your mother’s daughter and there’s never any need for you to explain. I can read you like I read my own thoughts. You are open and vivid to me, even through the veneer of adolescence. I have known you since the sperm met the egg - since before that.

Before you were here, I walked past a house one day. There was a blonde-haired child in a high chair through the window and I felt my heart twist with longing. I’d had the ghosts of images in my mind for so long - since my own childhood - and this child almost embodied them. This child seemed to be the physical representation of my strongest heart’s desire. I felt the phantom of my own yet-to-be baby materialise in my soul. I knew you before you were created - the blueprint was always there in my being. And then I met your Dad. And it was the beginning of the point of my life. At last.

There was a long time when I never thought I’d know you. I thought you’d always be a bittersweet dream. I’d reached a wistful acceptance of my lot. And then before I knew it, there were the little blue lines on the stick and that was you - actual real chemical evidence of you - growing in me like the most exciting thing, like Christmas Eve at 5 years old. The greatest gift the Universe could give me. I fell in love with you like a crazed woman and I lived every second of carrying you inside my bloated, rivuleted belly in a mess of brooding anticipation and fretting ecstasy.

Since day one, you have been all I could ever have hoped for. All I dreamed of when a girl - lost in longing. Being your mother turned out to be my destiny and every moment has been right:- the difficult, worrisome, vexing mothering and the searing joy, the daft hilarity, the affable companionship, the simple everyday life we have lived with each other. You are my darling, my shining light, my deepest concern and my pride and delight. I have loved you with such zeal and such ambition and such greatness. It amazes me I’m not sucked dry by my own emotion - that every day I rise with a heart filled fresh and with energy enough to be passionate about you and your burgeoning adulthood. Ah, my nearly-woman of a girl. You are the quintessence of a little girl’s hopes and dreams and I thank that fickle Universe for lending you to me.

Your Mum.