A Letter To My Future Teenage Girls

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To my Future Teenage Girls,

I was once where you are now. It’s probably hard to picture your mom (or stepmom) as a young person such as yourself, without the added lines to my face or stern furrow to my brow that can creep up when one of you have done or said something I don’t approve of. I was young and bright and new. I had my entire life ahead of me; a blank whiteboard waiting to be filled with the writings of my life. Where would my destiny take me?  Little did I know I was destined to be your mother.

Sweethearts, I want you to experience life to the fullest with every inch of my being. There’s nothing more right I can do as a parent but to guide you in a direction that will hopefully lead you to your fullest potential, or at least set you in that direction. Just like any mom, I want your life to be happy and comfortable. I want you to end up doing something you love, no matter what it is. I want you to find love, no matter who with. I want you to love yourself and who you grow up to be. What I do not want for you, my loves is to make some of the choices I made when I was walking in your shoes.

Your mother was a smart girl, a great student, had a good head on her shoulders, listened to her parents, never did drugs…but she thought she knew everything. She thought she was “done”. She thought she’d reached her full maturation. 

Girls, I couldn’t have been more wrong. All I can do is be completely upfront and honest with you about everything I have ever experienced and how I learned from those experiences. I will gladly be upfront and honest with you about everything. I will not hold back. You can ask me about anything and I will tell you the unedited version, how it affected my life and how it molded me into the person you guys know today.

There are so many things I want for you. So many. It’s countless. I can’t even begin to know where to begin with the amount of stuff that goes through my head involving you and all the worries I have about the things you may or may not do. I worry you might follow in some of my not so proud footsteps. It’s probably silly to speculate or worry. You guys have to make your own mistakes and those mistakes have to shape you. That’s how it works for every one of us on this earth. It’s just something that forms in a mother’s brain once she finds out she’s growing a human life that breeds into a tangled web of all the things she wants for her babies, that makes us pray to the gods you don’t make those same mistakes we made that we regret so hard now that we are older, wiser and more fine-tuned into who we are. I’m still changing and evolving to this day. You’re never really “done”.

I’m not going to go into specifics here. Just please know that you are welcome to come to me with anything that’s going on in your life. My door is always open to you. I won’t judge you (too harshly), I will give you my honest opinion, and I will do it all out of the purest love for you. I am your mom, but I’m also your friend and your confidant. Please don’t forget that.

I love you, girls, more than anything. Thank you for being part of who I am and letting me be your mom.

Love,

Dusty, Mommy, Mom