Showing posts with label daughter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label daughter. Show all posts

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

My Daughter Graduates This Weekend-An Open Letter To Her

My daughter graduates this weekend. From UCLA.

Dear Sweet Pea,

I'm so proud of you. Words will never be able to express the depth of my feelings of love and pride and happiness at seeing the kind of young woman you have grown into. You have always been an amazing person and you continue to amaze me. You have been a self-starter since elementary school. The kind of kid who makes everybody around you look good, by virtue of your competence and reliability. You still make your dad and I look like great parents, basking in your glow.

Life is fragile and I appreciate all of the time we have together. Every moment is a treasure. You have always been a jewel in my life. A kindred spirit, sharing the same, secret wavelength. We even laugh at the same silly jokes. I love sharing those moments with you.

And I admire you for your independence. To be able to graduate and have a job and apartment lined up already is every parent's dream of success for their child. Especially in these tough economic times, it is a feat approaching miraculous. But I know all of this is the result of long years of hard work and dedication. These things don't happen by accident. Even if you do manage to make it look easy.

My best wish for you is that you continue to have a life warmed by the love of friends and family, as you do today. You have absorbed the best lessons of your upbringing and improved the mix through your experience. I learn from you now. Thank you for being a great daughter. I could never have asked for a better one.

Love,

Mom

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Old blog re-post, "Ode to DD"

Here is a post from my prior blog, August 2006. There are some posts from the old blog that I want to save in my blog archives, so I will be posting some of them before I delete my old blog in a few weeks.

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I am thinking about my DD today. One of my favorite topics. She is one of my favorite people in the whole wide world, and not just because she is my daughter.

She has many wonderful qualities. When I went to work yesterday almost everybody on the crew came up to me and said how much they enjoyed working with her and how much they will miss her. They were amazed that someone as young as her could be so responsible and professional. I told them that she was born responsible. Even in first and second grade, I have never had to ask her about her homework. She always did it and always got good grades. The agreement over the years was that if she keeps getting good grades, we would continue not to hassle her. She got ambitious in high school and took so many AP courses and passed them with high scores that now at UCLA she is already a sophomore without even having started yet. As a toddler she amazed me one morning when she sat on my lap and asked me about my feelings. I always thought that kids her age were too immature to think of others in that way, and I realized that her sensitivity extended to being sensitive to the feelings of others. She has always been thoughtful and sensitive of others. Physically she is beautiful, and has a figure that J Lo would be glad to walk with down the red carpet with. She has been blessed with brains and beauty, but she has not sat back and relied on those, but she is willing to work hard and apply herself. Right now she is going into engineering, which I think will be great. But I also told her that going to UCLA is wonderful because the school is so diverse, she can switch majors and go in any direction she wants if she decides that engineering is not for her.

She has done all of these things despite having had a difficult life. I split up from her dad when she was age 4. I don't think her dad was a bonded with her emotionally as I was, as he was almost never home for the first 4 years of her life. She told me recently that she realized that when I tell stories about when she was young, I tell her good things about herself. When her dad tells her stories, he always tells her how bad she was and what a selfish person she is. What kind of person does that to their own child? I don't get it! Even if he doesn't like her as much as DS, does he have to try to destroy her emotionally? WHO DOES THAT!!!!!! I have been stewing about this for years. I think DD lately has finally been able to sort through some of the emotional garbage she has had to deal with over the years. Like the stepmom who slashes the clothes in her closet. I recently took a beautiful black dress that I had bought her to the tailor to get the obvious scissors cuts sewn back together. We worked really hard this year not to leave her prom dress over there for even one night.

So I give DD all the credit. She has risen above. She doesn't dwell on the negative. She moves on with her life in a positive direction. She says that to get down about things would be to let the negative people win, and she will not give them that power over her. BRAVO! WHAT A GIRL!

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Update: She is doing fine at UCLA, but will probably change her major. I'm just sitting back and enjoying watching her in her young adulthood.