Wanted
Dear daughter,
I need to tell you something. Come close. Closer. One day—hopefully a long, long time from now—you will, inevitably, look in the mirror and wonder if you are wanted. I don’t know what will spark this question. An unreturned kiss, a once-close friend casting you aside like a stained tee shirt. Rejection comes in many forms.
It starts early; it never stops.
I don’t know when that day will come for you. I don’t know if you’ll be thirteen or six when you stare at your own sapphire eyes in the mirror and wonder for the very first time if you are truly loved and wanted. This is part of being human in a broken world. It is certainly part of being a girl.
Are you still listening? Come closer.
When that day comes, and I hate that it will, promise me you’ll picture this:
Your mother—before she was a mother, before she was even a wife—closing her eyes at bedtime, whispering, begging, pleading with God … for you. Your mother—before she was a mother, placing gold sparkly shoes in her shopping cart eight years before you’d take your first breath. She kept them in the back of her closet, across four different houses, a tangible reminder of her greatest desire and unwavering hope that one day you would exist.
Do you hear me, sweet girl?
You, dear daughter, are a walking, breathing, answered prayer.
A miracle, in the flesh.
Yesterday.
Today.
Tomorrow.
Always.
Make no mistake.
Hear me loud and clear.
You are wholly, undoubtedly, and unequivocally wanted—by the mother who spent decades praying for you, and even more by the Creator who planted the desire for you in her heart in the first place, knowing all along exactly who you’d be and how many hairs would grace your head.
Don’t ever forget, okay?
Photos by Ellen Elizabeth Covey.
