In a few days – three, to be exact – I get to celebrate my daughter’s seventeenth birthday. I don’t know where the time has gone. I can’t believe that seventeen years ago I could still feel her kick inside me. Seventeen years – it sounds like such a long time and yet it feels like yesterday.
I remember her as that tiny baby who didn’t even fill my arms when we brought her home. I remember her as a toddler running through my parents’ house , walking underneath their kitchen table without needing to stoop to do so, sitting in my dad’s recliner with him as he ever-so-patiently taught her her colors and how to write her name, and I remember her playing in the yard with my mom as Mom tended her flowers.
Then she went to school. I can still see her standing outside the school door, the first day of kindergarten, her face pressed up to the glass, hands beside her head, as she peered in, trying to see what lay before her on that monumental day.
Tori’s life has filled mine with more laughter and love than I have the capacity to convey. I love being her mom, sharing her life, more than I can tell you. I lament, sometimes, how fast the years seem to go. It won’t be long, now, before she’ll be out on her own, at college, really, truly making her own way. It will be here before I can blink.
I know that anyone reading this who is a parent can relate to what I’m saying. The love we have for our children is like no other love in the world. I try to remind myself to hug Tori as often I can, to tell her that I love her whenever I’m thinking it, because we all know that we never know what lies ahead through the next door, or down the next mile of the highway.
Two days ago, two young women from our town were in a horrible car accident. One of them, a freshman in college, died. The other, a junior in Tori’s class, is still in the hospital, but she will recover – physically – from her injuries. We pray that God will help her recover completely. No one could have predicted this tragedy. I’m sure that neither set of parents, when they said goodbye to their daughter that day before the wreck, knew what the day would hold for them.
Ali’s parents will never plan another birthday party for their daughter, as Tori and I have been doing these last couple days. The pictures and memories they have of Ali are all they will ever have, and my heart breaks for them and all they have lost.
God truly blessed me when he gave Tori to me. I pray every day that He will guide me and help me do the best job I can with her, and that He will always be with her, no matter what. Because I can’t be. Because really sad things happen when you least expect them. Because if God is with us, we are never truly lost.
I am grateful for every single hour I get to spend with my daughter, and I’m excited about the rest of her life, about seeing what she does with it, who she is going to become. She’s going to do great things because that’s who she is, and she makes me so proud.
When Tori told me today, all excited about her upcoming party, “I love my birthday!” all I could do was hug her and say, “Me too.”
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