My How You Have Grown… Please, Please Slow Down

I am writing this letter to you, Dorian, my beautiful and miraculous daughter. You are over one, and I began this blog to share your life with others, but truly, I began it so that you could have something that you can look back on when you are older. It is a documentation of your life. It is your life. It is you. It is the essence of your personality, which is ever growing. Every passing day, you grow. You get bigger, you get more confident, you show new talents.

You are a bright light, so blinding that I can hardly comprehend it. You are a gift. You are a blessing. You are my life. You are your father’s life. You are loved. You always will be loved and supported by both of us, and you will always know love. Not a day goes by that you have not, and not a day goes by as long as we are living and breathing (and even after, dear, we are still beside you for all of your days).

You are our last. We are raising four beautiful, intelligent, wonderful people, and you are the last of those. We have the privilege to see small people become bigger ones, to become more self-assured, to become… adults. That is why I am writing you. You are now one, only one year old. You will, though, be two before I blink, then three, then four. You will walk. You will speak in complete and well-constructed sentences (I am an English instructor, so you are assured of this as I am a grammatical perfectionist). You will learn history, science, math, English, art. You will have a favorite. You will have favorite teachers and favorite music. You will dream. You will dream of what you can be, and you will yearn to achieve what you wish for most. I hope nothing more than for you to get it. All of it… the world in the palm of your hands. You are a ball of potential, and you have the Earth as a canvas in front of you for you to create what you wish from it. You do, and will, make the world more beautiful because you are in it.

You will hurt. You will fall, you will bleed, you will get bruised. You will cry from that pain, and inside I will hurt each time that you do. You will hurt on the inside, deep down in places where no one can really see, but I will see it, and I will hurt with you. You will be heartbroken, you will suffer loss, you will have disappointment. That kind of hurt is so much more painful than when you fall—and I will want to protect you, but I won’t be able to. I can’t shield you from the world. You have not suffered these things yet, but you will. Your Dad and I will be right there with you, and I can promise that we will hurt more than you each and every time. You may not always choose to see it, but we will be there right behind you, holding you up.

You will grow. Despite your father’s and my best efforts, you will grow faster than I can comprehend. You already are. Your personality shows in everything that you do—you gorgeous and blindingly beautiful girl—and you are well established already in your ability to see the world for what it truly is… and it is a beautiful world if you look through all of the ugly presented to us each day.

Please, my sweet girl, please don’t grow too fast. I look at you every day with joy and happiness, with a love that is so deep and engrained in my soul that it hurts sometimes. Your Dad and I can do many, many things, but one thing that we can’t do is to slow time down. I wish more than anything that we could. My wonder, my life, my child… if I have one piece of advice for you, it is to slow down, when you can, when you know the difference between acting as a child and acting as an adult. Slow down and continue the path of innocence. The life you lead as an adult will be waiting for you, but the life you had as a child you can never, ever get back once you walk past it.

I love you with every single piece of me… not one speck left.

Love always and always and always,
Mama