Letters For My Daughter

To My Dear Daughter, Well, whole books can be and have been written about self esteem.  How to re-say those things without sounding like a broken record? There is not much that parents, and especially a mom, can say to a teenage daughter to make her feel good about herself, I know. We see so much that you cannot; we see the goodness, and we see the beauty, and we see the way your friends laugh and smile when you are around. But more than what we see, is what we parents know in our hearts. And the knowledge we have, is that the importance of outward stuff truly fades over time. It is without a doubt 100% true, although it is cliche and your generation no doubt gets tired of hearing it, that the social media ubiquity has a totally destructive influence on how your generation perceives themselves and feels about themselves. There are scientific studies that prove mood lowers after being on social media. Which is another reason why I think it's important as heck(!) to take brea...

Dear daughter, Although it seems like a really strange segue to my letters to you, to suddenly start talking about cancer in the second letter, I think it's important mostly because I want to get it out of the way.  The day you were diagnosed with leukemia (March 19th, 2003, by the way...) has cast a long shadow on our lives. There has been absolutely no worse day in my life, or Daddy's life, than the day I took you to Children's Hospital at your pediatrician's recommendation for bloodwork, met the man in the blood draw room who would later be your oncologist for the next 12 years until his retirement, and heard him say he thinks my almost-two-year-old has "a form of blood cancer called Acute Lymphatic Leukemia. Come back first thing in the morning, we need to do a bone marrow test."  Although he had no choice (it was about 4:30 pm and operations at the hospital were closing up for the day), sending me home with you was a cruelty. I wanted to stay there, i...

Dear daughter, Your 16th birthday is looming.  In fact, it is only a couple of days away.  I have been contemplating a blog for weeks, as a way to send you messages, to send you long letters. Your first question is probably: Why?  Mommy, why would you need to send me messages or write me letters?  You live with me, after all.  You see me several hours a day, at least, when you get home from work.  You can text me; you can tag me on Instagram; you can send me a Snapchat message.  Why in the world would you blog at me? Well, the best way I know to answer that question is to just tell you, I have a lot of things in my heart and in my brain that I want to share with you.  The heart->brain->mouth connection doesn't always work that well for me.  Sometimes I am embarrassed to come across as too mushy to you. Sometimes I am irritable or tired or angry, and I don't really want to talk, even though there are things to be said.  S...