The feel of tender, young grass between her squeezed-tightly fingertips was primal.

The tug, uprooting them, connected her with a fiery anger that she didn’t know her belly housed.

Then, momentarily afterward, she’d feel regret that these vivid, green shoots, with blackened, dirty ends, were now clenched inside her small fists.

Many years later, she watched this collection of emotions play out on another youthful face—her four-year-old daughter—as this new set of miniature hands sunk into the lush green surrounding their pale thighs, touching at the knees.

I ask her not to pull the grass out, and her face falls instantly.

I mentally slap myself and softly ask, “It feels good to pull on the grass, doesn’t it?” She nods silently, and I verbally take back my earlier reprimand.

So much of my life has been a similar pattern, I’ll think later after an argument with my husband.

So much of my life has been this space between managing my reactions with the authenticity of internal need and awareness of this reaction upon others; coupled with the guilt after—the guilt of either not reacting firmly enough for my own needs or, more often, being too harsh. (And then stifling this guilt later, too, when it’s more destructive than productive—more another unnecessary reaction.)

I wonder, as I sit in the backyard underneath the open sky and a canopy of trees with my daughter, what it would feel like to sink my hands into the grass and yank without abandon, but I can’t actually do it—I’m grown.

And I tuck inside the flesh of my delicate mommyheart the secreted hope that the pale, milky thigh gently touching mine stays exactly as she is—for at least one more summer.

Photos: Author’s own.

The post For at Least One More Summer: A Love Note from Mother to Daughter. first appeared on Jennifer S. White.

I want so many things for my children.

They aren’t what I typically hear other parents say.

I don’t fantasize about my children being grown up and married with kids. I don’t daydream that they’ll have good paying jobs. I don’t envision them always bringing home As.

This isn’t to say that I don’t want these things for my girls, or that these aren’t lovely aspirations. But what I want for my kids is much simpler.

I want things like this:

I want them to be honest. I want them to be so honest that sometimes they feel they’ve shared and bared too much.

I want them to be confident. I want them to know (and demand) their worth.

I want them to find happiness. I want my children to continue to see joy in seemingly insignificant hiding places inside of our ordinary lives.

I want them to know that they are not ordinary. I want them to understand that none of us are—we are all special and valuable in our own heroic ways.

I want them to take care of their bodies. I want them to recognize that we eat healthy foods and move our bodies because they house our souls.

I want them to love. I want them to know that learning to show and receive love begins within ourselves.

I want them to work. I do hope that they have enjoyable jobs that support a good life, but what I want so much more than this is for my children to appreciate that life requires effort—to appreciate working hard at everything we do regardless of potential rewards.

I want them to be proud. I don’t mean pride as in arrogance or conceit. Rather, I refer to pride in who they are as individuals—I want them to refuse to allow society’s judgments or stigmas to color their own self-perception and, more, their own sense of self-worth.

So, yes, I want many things for my children. Yet none of these things come with price tags, paper certificates or even public recognition.

Because it’s true that a life well lived begins with knowing who we are, and accepting what we find.

Photo: Pink Sherbet Photography/Flickr.

The post I Don’t Care If My Kids Get Married & Have Kids, but I Care about This. first appeared on Jennifer S. White.