Sixteen

"It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are." — E.E. Cummings

While I sometimes look for my keys in the refrigerator and I repeatedly ask my kids if they fed the dog even though they already did (and told me, multiple times), I can very clearly remember every birthday party that we had for my daughter for the first decade of her life.

When she turned one, we had family and friends over and an Elmo balloon that sang “Happy Birthday to you” in that high Elmo voice on repeat. She loved Elmo, and she giggled loudly every time. On repeat. It was the highlight of her day and at the end of the party, perched high in her alphabet highchair, she smiled so big, pure joy radiating from those chubby cheeks and gummy smile as she celebrated being on earth one whole year.

This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Subscribed

When she was two, we took her to a local park to celebrate. It was very easy and low maintenance. We had some cupcakes and some bottled water, grabbed a picnic table and watched as she and her friends slid down her favorite slide. Curly haired and red faced, she smiled when she reached the end of the slide. She clapped. We clapped. And she fell asleep immediately on her way home.

Three was a Rapunzel party, four was at the bouncy house, five was when we rented a bouncy house, and six was the year of Frozen when Anna and Elsa showed up at our home and painted faces and fingernails and sang “Let it Go.” My daughter, wearing a miniature version of Elsa’s Ice Queen dress with bright purple eyeshadow, blue fingernails and the blue tulle flowing behind her, ran into Elsa’s arms and could not stop smiling or singing.

We had her 7th and 8th birthday parties at a music studio where she and her friends sang karaoke and learned choreography to Taylor Swift’s Bad Blood. We had nine girls sleep over for her ninth birthday party and when she was 10, we turned our carport into a dance club, covering the walls with black garbage bags and spray painting them with glow in the dark paint. Her friends wore glow-in-the-dark bracelets and necklaces.

She’s 16 today and as she continues to grow, I continue to remember. I’m so happy my brain retains the fond memories of raising my kids and not the times I was exhausted and impatient and lost. I have the sweetest memories of nighttime cuddles with my daughter. She sat on my lap, drinking a bottle of milk, leaning back onto me, her body perfectly aligned with mine, as she curled my hair with her left fingers and clasped her bottle with her right. I can feel my heart swell in my chest as I remember how complete I felt at that moment.

While those memories are stored tightly in my brain, and raising a teenager is hard and sometimes I feel like my toolbox is completely empty, I am holding on tightly to these new memories we are making. We sing at the top of our lungs to Olivia Rodrigo while driving in the car and she tells me the funniest stories from her day at school. Like really, witty funny, and when she says something that makes me laugh really hard, she laughs too, and I hear that same authentic giggle she had when she was little.

She’s independent. She wakes up on her own at 6 a.m., feeds the dog, packs her lunch, and curls her hair. And this is embarrassing to admit because I want to be the mom that’s up early, but she sometimes (most of the time) wakes the rest of the house up, all bright lights and often a hefty dose of righteousness as she reminds us that it’s 6:15 and we, are in fact, the parents, not her kids.

Her baby face is gone, permanent teeth took over the tiny baby teeth and she is her own person. If I need advice on what to wear, how to do my makeup or what curling iron works best for a beachy wave, she’s my girl. Her door is closed more than open, and I have to knock now. There’s a privacy piece of growing up, a boundary that happened gradually but felt like overnight and she’s not mine anymore, never really was. A mom doesn’t get ownership over her kids, she gets to watch and hold and then stand by and next to and eventually behind as she watches them enter the world on their own. Our kids are not born to us, but for us, and if we are lucky and open, we learn from them, too.

I learn from her every day, whether it’s a lesson I want or need. Most of the time, she teaches me what I need to know. Most of the time, it’s a hard lesson to learn. And most of the time, I meet the lesson with an ego full of resistance.

She’s fiercely loyal and deeply compassionate and full of chances and mistakes and heartache and excitement. She lives her life more fully than any human being I have ever met. If she’s scared, she does it anyway. Her courage is quiet but complete, she was born brave.

I celebrate her today and every day. Happy 16th birthday, my love.

March 27, 2025