a letter.

dear Baby Girl,

i hope you never look at the world through a tinted vision that makes you think that you are anything other than beautiful and wonderful, and i sincerely hope your definition of beautiful has nothing whatsoever to do with a kardashian sister or a digitally modified version of a starving runway model.

i hope you never hear me say anything other than something positive about my body. though i'm sure that i will certainly fail at this (moms are human, too, and yours is definitely still learning), i hope you see from the way that i try to balance that sometimes, healthy is hard work. i hope you see that it's worth it.

i hope that i get to somehow tell you, even if it's just through you reading what i wrote while i was pregnant, that the human body is a magical, wondrous, eternally splendid thing. i hope you come to respect yours the way that you being with me has helped me to love mine even more.

i hope you like vegetables. if you don't, i hope you at least have an adventurous spirit.

i hope you love to run. even if it means i'm chasing after you, wanting to light my own hair on fire, i hope you love to run.  i hope you love to dance. i hope you love to sing songs at the top of your voice and talk to imaginary friends and find refuge in the stories you create yourself.

i hope i learn quickly to just let you be you.

i hope i have the courage to always do right by you in all the ways that i want to, from the way i feed you to the way i teach you about the world, even though i might be tired. i'm not always as courageous with myself. i hope you inspire me to be otherwise.

i hope you like football. fall will be long if you don't.

i hope on days that are sunshiney and blue sky-y, we will take walks and look at animals and be outside.  i'd like to see the wonder of it, again, through your eyes.

i hope tv is never the friend to you that it was to me.

i hope the road rises up to meet you, that the rain never falls on your head, that friends are always kind to you and that your heart will always be untouched by injustice. i know this won't happen, but i hope you always believe in a world where it could.

i hope i always remember, come what may, that the sum total of all of the experiences that i had before you, all the ones that i thought could never be overcome, all the failures that i thought shouldn't have happened, all of the successes that i didn't understand, shaped me into who i am today and helped us bring you here.

i hope i always tell you what a miracle you are to me.   it's a great, beautiful, scary, tumultuous, magical, amazing world.  i'm so excited to see you take it by storm.

love,
mommy.