An Open Letter to My Daughter in Love

First of all, I hope you will forgive me for writing this open letter. Something that is expected to be an exchange between two individuals, made public to the world. I hope you will understand. This is so much about you, about me, and about the universal experience of loving someone and its effects on us.

For the last few weeks, I have been watching you as you have began your journey of romantic love. A casual outing to the movies, turning into more frequent visits and conversations, and then into a relationship. I have never felt such a "Mother" as I have since you have brought someone into our lives. I had never felt so old as I now feel, experiencing this dance of leaving the center stage to let you in. It is odd, perhaps, you may think. But I cannot escape the thought that, for this person, I am the mother of the girl he likes.

Shadow of cisgender couple holding hands.

I do not know if you notice how you are changing and blooming under the umbrella of this new love. You are trying new things. You even woke up early one day and went on a walk with me. It had been years since you've done that! How lucky I felt! I see you growing up, still trying to find your place in the world but with less hesitation and an emergent bravery I had not seen.

I must confess that I feel jealous sometimes of the ways in which you choose to share your inner life with him. Until not too long ago, I was the person you would come to share things that excited you or that you found interesting. What a gift it is to be allowed into the world of another! To be invited to be part of their unfolding.This is part of life, I know, and your happiness makes me happy. I am excited for you to discover this new dimension of life and am grateful that I get to witness it.

Mija, may the felt blessing of love you now experience never leave you.

Seeing you falling in love reminds me of the times I fell in love, too. So yes, my perception of your experience is informed by my own. If I'm wrong, I hope there will be a moment in which you can sit by my side and tell me how this falling in love is for you.

For me, falling in love has always been an opening and an expansion of myself. Love makes us feel beautiful. There is a beauty that comes from feeling like the eyes that look at your own can decipher your inner world, that they get you. There is a lightness to life that comes with love. And the good chemistry happening in our brain make us feel capable of some many good things. Looking at ourselves in the mirror, we like the image we see. We craft with our hands goods and gifts for the other person. We remember the things they love and bring them offerings. The quick morning and evening messages become a way of saying I am thinking about you.

The feelings can certainly blur our vision and make us think that we do all that we do and that we see all that we see because the other person. If we fall into this fallacy, a break up can be devastating. I don't want to talk about break ups now, I want to go back to the good feelings that come with falling in love. I want to stay there a little longer, don't we all?

Here's why. I never knew that feeling beautiful and interesting and lovable was not the only the effect of having someone loving me, but a revelation of my own capacity for love. This, my dear child, is what I want you to remember. You have always been and will always be all of those things: beautiful, interesting, and lovable...and so much more. And what you are experiencing is the revelation that you have and will always have, within you, this ability to know these truths deeply. Falling in love makes them more easily accessible and my hope is that you will love someone who loves you deeply. But, more than anything, I hope that you will hold on to what you have already discovered about yourself and about love.

Love breaks us open in beautiful and unexpected ways. Love increases our ability to take on the beauty of life; it is an opening to the vastness and abundance of life. Love is the source of our being and our destination.

May you know love, not only romantic love, but the Greater Love that has sustained you always. And may you know how to love yourself in every part of your life's journey. Above all, may you know, deep in your bones and in every cell of your body that you are the embodiment of love.

Con amor eterno,

Mom