One more thing

Dear Sally,

I think maybe you will someday read this blog, and if you are a new mother, I hope that my honesty, my writing about what motherhood is really like, my posts that make it so that sometimes the top google search for my blog is “I hate being a mother” — I hope that what I have said here will help you feel better about your own mothering.

But I would be dishonest if I did not write to tell you that the last few weeks (since you turned eight) have been some of the happiest of my life. Because of you.

You make me happy.

I have always loved you. Ever since I made your father walk to the drug store in the rain to read the back of the pregnancy test box to me at work to confirm that yes, two lines really did mean I was pregnant with you, I have loved you.

All of your firsts have been my firsts too. The first time you huddled on my heaving, trembling heart, the first time you breastfed, the first time you started school, the first time you made a playdate. The first time you rode your bike, and roller skated, and kart-wheeled across the living room. The first time you read a book that I have not read. The first time you ran up to hug my grandmother, and the first time you slept over at my mother’s house by yourself. The first time you smiled shyly at my great-grandmother, just a few years before she died.

I love the way you laugh out loud at movies at the dollar theater, and how you help your sisters get booster seats, without my asking. I love that you cheerfully look out for them, even when you are distracted by your friends. I love how you run upstairs five times in a row to get me something I desperately need, like my Mountain Dew cup or the book on my nightstand.

I love how you got yourself all ready for school the other day when the carpool was picking you up. I had no idea it was so late, and I rushed down the stairs as I heard you yell, “Bye Mom, I love you be safe” as you opened the front door. I caught just a glimpse of you; you looked back up at me, and I vowed to get up earlier.

You may not need me anymore to get you dressed or pour your cereal or brush your hair or remind you about your backpack and coat and library book, but I need to see your face before you leave. I need to touch your cheek and tickle your side and make sure that the last thing you hear before you go out there is that I love you more than a good book and a warm bed on a cold morning.

This Saturday you were my first child to get baptized. I felt old. And it humbled me when you asked that I give the talk about baptism. I thought you would request your Grandma (who sewed you a dress out of fabric leftover from my wedding dress eleven years ago) or your Aunt Karin, or maybe even Grandpa or Aunt Marcy.

I thought you would be tired of hearing what I have to say, as you do roll your eyes whenever I repeat myself for emphasis. I told you, and the two other kids getting baptized, and all of the families gathered, that baptism is a big choice, the second big choice you have ever made. And I know that most of why you chose to get baptized this week was because we wanted it for you. We’ve been talking about it for years, and telling the story of Jesus and John the Baptist, and Alma at the Waters of Mormon.

Some people think that an eight-year old is too young to understand the significance of baptism and confirmation. I’ve been sympathetic to this view. I feel like my own conversion to the gospel matured when I was nineteen, and again when I was twenty-one.

But I was surprised by how ready and prepared you were. You know all the doctrinal answers, and you sparkle. You love your family and your friends with a guileless, unselfish affection, and you believe absolutely that God loves you.

Today you took the sacrament for the first time that it actually meant something. You and your sisters have been reaching for the bread and water as Dad and I do for years. But today it was a renewal of your new, shiny covenant. I cried, and I remembered the first time I took the sacrament again after not taking it for a while, about a year before I met your father.

There is one more thing I need to teach you before you grow up and leave our home for more than a day at school.

And that thing is that God loves you even when you make mistakes. Especially then, with a love that begs you to return to Him. So even though we made a big deal about how now you are clean and pure, even though you were clean and pure before your baptism, so clean and pure and fresh and innocent it hurts me to think of it, and to think of you going out into that world every day, God loves you even when you are not quite so clean and pure, and there is nothing on this earth that you could ever, ever do to make Him stop loving you or to make your Savior regret giving His life for you.

And if sometimes I wonder what I am doing with my life, all I need do is look in your blue, blue eyes, at your dear heart-shaped freckle face, to know that I am doing something right.

Because there is one more thing I need you to know, to learn, to believe. And that is that I love you too. Always, forever, no matter what you do or where you go or how often you insist that you hate me when you’re thirteen and I won’t let you wear that skirt.

I will always love you.

love,

Mommy