Dear Daughter,
I am writing you this letter to honor my broken heart. I don’t know when I’ll give it to you, if ever. Maybe I just need to write it to move through the fear I’m feeling, so I can confidently move ahead, loving you in a world that needs — more than anything — more Love.
Last spring you turned 11. You are now almost as tall as me. You continue to be my greatest teacher and the sweetest Love of my Life.
People often say it’s hard to raise an adolescent child, into teenhood. Then again, people tell a lot of stories that empower suffering — pictures of victimhood and how “it’s just gonna get worse”.
While I agree that parenting well is the hardest work, Love has another story to tell.
Recently our path took what some call ‘a turn for the worst’. My mama bear hackles went on full alert. And since we do appear to be living in bodies, in a world with many layers of despicability, I feel a need to apologize to you, my precious girl.
I am sorry you were born into a world where most corporations don’t care about you.
I am sorry we’ve been running an experiment on your generation with social media, especially YouTube — treating it like a mechanical umbilical cord, seeking intimacy we’ll never find inside metal boxes without beating hearts.
I am sorry we live in something called a capitalist economy, where our days and lives are shaped around this thing called money, and it is made more important than giving children space to play, touch moss and gasp at tiny frogs leaping, learning to actually talk with each other instead of pressing your precious new eyes into screens.
To you and children all over the world, I am sorry we parents often use screens as babysitters.
This is a heartbreaking and heartbroken world, and it is the one I birthed you into.
I am sorry the creators of these products don't let their own children use them but they don't care if their products harm you. And our legal system, based far from the law of Love whose roof you were raised under, allows these hypocrisies to exist.
I am sorry we live in a world where most women don't own our power, and so we unconsciously allow harm to keep making the mirrors our children look into. We let ourselves be objectified, enslaving ourselves to societal beliefs that our primary value is our physical appearance.
At your tender 11-year-old age, I don’t expect you to understand any of this. My heart, in this moment, is broken, that this is the world you were brought into. And just as I honor your heart, I honor mine too, with this letter to you.
Part of me wishes I didn't have to create a part-time job trying to protect you from the ills of our society — that I could simply watch you play and explore in a healthy societal framework, with products created by people who actually let their own children use them, not running experiments on the rest of the world's children.
Deep breaths…
Yes, my girl, I know that the pain of the human experience has helped me grow to be a better person, and that the same is true for you.
This is the world you chose to come into, just like I chose to come into a world where people call sugar ‘a treat’ instead of acknowledging how truly good it feels when we eat real food that makes our bodies strong, creating health and not disease.
I know that we are here to be in the presence of fear in its exponentially tentacled ways.
And I am acutely aware of my extreme fortune with you as my daughter, because we are a spectacular team. You come to me with trusted information because you know that I am safe, and that you will leave feeling glad — not shamed or guilty — after we engage.
In this Love, as your mother, I am rich.
Trampoline giggles and untainted eyes were yesterday. I am saying goodbye to those years, and welcome the what-is of these, however unwelcome part of me wants them to be.
I might feel some heartbreak every day about the fact that you’re now facing adolescence and your innocent eyes are seeing things that don’t belong in a child’s sight. Things that wouldn't even exist if our world was mostly shaped…
… by Love. What the world needs most.
Yet that is what we are here to bring about, and so it is. We are being presented with yet another opportunity to remember who we are — Love — and to thereby evolve, shaping a world that is more joyful, kind and pure — for children to come.
Surrender plays a role; we are not in control, yet we are…
Awake, alive and ready to greet the presence of fear with the only thing that heals it: the Love we are.
I won’t sit back and pretend there is nothing I can do. You are only young once. Now’s the only time there is. When your mama’s body dies, I will take my last breaths knowing I gave you all that I possibly could — that I didn’t let the ills of our society have their way with you.
You came here for Love, not neglect.
You picked me and I picked you and I’m gonna love you to the far-out-galaxies of my capacity to love. Just like you loved me in my very tender weeks after brain surgery.
Here’s a song I used to sing at the top of my lungs in high school, Forever and Ever by Randy Travis. You might think it’s dorky. That’s OK. As we like to say to each other, “I might not always like you but I always love you.”
We've got this, baby girl.
Thank you for helping me to laugh and loosen up a little, not always taking things so seriously. Thank you for coming into this world and being my greatest teacher.
Love,
Mama
Parents, here is a free guide with 5 strategies for parents to make ‘the anxious generation’ less anxious. To further support my work with creating a world based more in Love than fear, ‘like’ my video and share your comments here — Loving Our Kids in a Mental Health Epidemic. Thanks!
What the World Needs Most