If you rifle through the hangers in my closet, you'll find a navy blue polo I bought at the Gap a few weeks after graduating from high school. As Gap shirts go, it didn't suck up my entire $4.25/hour paycheck earned as a meager A&W carhop, but it came close. There is nothing particularly remarkable about this well-worn shirt, aside from its age; it was purchased in 1997. It was also the shirt I chose to throw over my burgeoning belly before walking out into that crisp, predawn morning on my way to the hospital to have you plucked from my stomach like clockwork.
My thoughts should probably have been on you, but they were tangled up in a shirt. That my thoughts weren't on you didn't mean I didn't love you, it just meant I was terribly nervous to go under the knife, the only way my body lets babies enter this world.
You see, I have loved you every second of every day since you burst onto our scene. But there will be times you doubt that. You will be huddled on a bed around a giggly, intertwined mess of limbs at a slumber party years from now, and someone will inevitably pull out their baby book.
You don't have one. Not for your first year and not for a single year after that. The one you flip through might make you long for a perfectly pasted trip down memory lane like your friends have, all bound and stickered and exacto'd to perfection. That you won't have one doesn't mean I didn't love you, it just means I was not a Pinterest mom and there is little hope you will be either. Like mother, like daughter. You're welcome.
Your memories will be pictures stuffed in a box, not sorted, some edges stuck together. And that is if you get lucky enough to catch me on a good day when I finally remember my Shutterfly password and order some prints. Otherwise, they will stay hidden on a thumb drive that you may have to take down to some ancient computer store and beg the bored store clerk to help you salvage, since I'm assuming thumb drives will be obsolete by then.
Well, you don't. Because you're 9. But you will, sweet child. One day, when you are bouncing a small sprite of your own on your spit-up riddled knee and wondering what you ever did to deserve a child who cries as if to mock you, well, then you will know. And I will take that beautiful child off your hands when you call grandma to the rescue, but I will also be glad you know. Wanting you to know doesn't mean I don't love you, it just means I want all the very best things in life for you, and I know that sometimes struggling is the only way to make you strong enough to receive them.
I might be mean sometimes. I might binge watch Friday Night Lights instead of playing another round of Trouble with you. I might make you eat your green beans and never buy you Ramen. Or I might buy you high-fructose-coated breakfast cereal because I'm too lazy to make you pancakes. It doesn't mean I don't love you, it simply means we are on this journey together, you and I. I've never been your mother before and I don't really know how to do it best, do it right.
But I love you. Man, how I love you. I love you for the way you still, all 9 years of you, crawl into my lap and curl your head beneath the safety of my chin. I love how playful you are and how your giggle ricochets off your bedroom door when you are reading past lights out. And then how you stay perfectly still and silent, taking in every word of anger I throw at you when I discover your book sneaking ways. I love how eager you are for adventure and how you love to destroy the kitchen with a failed audition tape for Cupcake Wars.
I love you even when you make me crazy. I love you even when you exhaust me. I love you even when I am threatening to send you to your room until your 18th birthday.
Every mistake. Every joy. Every misstep. It's you and me kid. I will love you through it all.
Promise.
Heaps of love to you my sparkly 9-year-old,
Mommy
