Dear Baby,
One year ago tonight your father got down on one knee and asked me to marry him. It’s hard to believe that it was only a year ago. So much has happened since then.
Marrying your father was something I was sure about since the very beginning of our relationship. My feelings for him were immediately so different than any man I’d ever known; I couldn’t stand the idea of just being his girlfriend. We were so much more than that from the very start.
Finding the love that I did with your father was something I never imagined, yet always expected. I know that’s a contradictory sentence, but it’s the only way I can explain it. Intellectually, I didn’t really believe that there was one great love out there, waiting to be discovered. Yet, when I met Greg and fell in love with him, I realized that it was exactly what I’d been seeking and secretly hoping to find my entire life.
The amazing thing was that we seemed to be right on par with each other, both of us coming to similar realizations about love and life and where we wanted to go with the relationship – all of that only serving as further indication that this was the real thing, the right thing.
You’ll be in so many relationships before you meet the right person. Be gentle with yourself and with others as you explore the precarious world of love. It’s easy to get hurt and it’s easy to hurt. It’s also inevitable. But the deeper you can explore yourself in the context of others, the closer you’ll come to finding the person that complements you.
My mother wrote to me once, “Don’t marry anyone because of money, name, class, need of any kind. Be so much in touch with who you really are and what you really want and then it will happen – your complement will appear. Find yourself and you’ll find your other self.”
And when I found your father I knew that what she had written was true. I understood, more intrinsically than I’ve ever understood anything, that everything I’d done in my life had led up to me being able to meet him. Every relationship I’d ever been in, good and bad, every decision I’d made about how to move forward in my life, every time I worked to rearrange who I wanted to be, enabled me to move that much closer to meeting the person that would ultimately make me feel more complete than I ever imagined I could be.
I wish that for you, dear child. But know that it’s a long way off. There are many things you’ll do in your life before this becomes important. There will be many times when you’ll think you’ve found what you’re looking for, only to realize that you that the path you’re on hasn’t quite come to an end.
Don’t be afraid to love though. Don’t be afraid to give of yourself and to take in the experience of knowing another. It’s the most powerful way to discover who you are and it’s the surest way to glimpse beauty in this world.
Know that your father and I are here to help you navigate through it all. We already love you in a way that no one else ever will. Use that as your base from which to move forward, knowing that our love will never disappear.
Love,
Mom


