Seventeen
Dearest Lauren -
Whew, Child.
It’s your seventeenth birthday. Momentous enough in and of itself. But also your second during a pandemic.
In addition to the palpable collective grief that is omnipresent, you’re also quietly (very very very quietly) holding your own personal grief about feeling the loss of a “normal” sixteen year old’s year and a sense of foreboding dread that seventeen may not be altogether different.
I’m noticing that I feel some kind of melancholy as I write these words.. When I said to Staci during last Friday’s coffee date that you were a little sad, she said: Are you sure it’s not YOU that’s sad, Tanya?
Busted.
I AM sad.
This was to be the year you took charge of your own birthday. But as the COVID cases continue to climb, there won’t be any parties, nor picnics, nor hugs. It will only be your father and me belting out Dancing Queen with you in the kitchen.
Oof and sigh.
Layer up the fact that you are, I repeat, SEVENTEEN in the blink of an eye and LoveLove? I’m fit to be tied.
So I decided to shake off the melancholy by dipping into my “Lauren-isms” file that I started when you were around three years old. Funnily enough, I noticed it was SEVENTEEN pages long.
Seventeen pages of funny, profound, irreverent, heart-wrenching, poetic, ridiculous, thoughtful things you have said and done over the past seventeen years.
Wise observations and invitations like “Make every Sunday count...there are only so many in a lifetime" (you were nine).
Ponderings about food, like a baguette, “I like the crunch. It tastes like a yummy fire” (you were seven) or how an owl’s feather feels “a soft gumdrop” (you were five).
Brainteasers like: “What’s the opposite of today? Tomorrow or yesterday?” (you were seven).
Notes about kind things you’ve done for others and smart things you’ve done for you. Notes about the times you challenged yourself to rise higher and do better. And when you challenged authority around you to do the same. Including us. Thank you for loving us enough to hold us accountable and to a higher standard.
Try as I have, on your eighth, ninth, tenth, eleventh, twelfth, thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth birthdays, I feel once again that I have not sufficiently nor adequately articulated the ALL and the EVERYTHING that you are.
And I suspect I never will.
Because there are facets of you that are still revealing themselves. Bright and brilliant and exquisitely beautiful.
One thing I know: I’ve never loved you more than I do right now in all of your hilarious hair-flipping glory.
And as you pointed out to me when you were just six years old:
We have right now.
It IS what we have.
And it’s all and it’s everything.
Just like you.
Love,
Mama.
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