A - Z Challenge - D is for Daughter

My theme for this challenge is family and relations.

Daughter “a girl or woman having the relation of child to parent”

I have only one daughter and she is very special to me.  She is beautiful from the inside out, intelligent, caring and I could go on adding positive adjectives all day.  Yes I am proud of her.  Proud of the woman she has become.  She is a woman with her own mind and attitudes at times.  We have a good relationship.

But I can’t take all the credit for her.  Some obviously goes to my husband but some of it I believe comes from me having had a good mother/daughter relationship with my own mother.  I’m sure that many of the lessons I learned from that have been passed on in the way we’ve raised our daughter.

A while back she gave me a journal for me to complete that will then be a gift to her containing my memories for her to keep.  I hadn’t touched it for ages but I’ve recently been working on it and it’s been good to look back and remember things.  Like her birth, which was quite traumatic and ended in an emergency C-section so the first thing I can remember thinking when I first saw her (a topic in the journal) was relief.  Pure relief that she was ok.

Other entries include when she first did things: for someone who is very bright she took to rolling across the floor rather than crawling at first and was quite slow to walk!  She never liked going to bed, frightened she would miss something.  Once she started to talk there was no stopping her.

I remember her as being a beautiful little baby and then I look at the photographic evidence and realise she was actually not little at all!  Rather chubby in fact until she slimmed down to a skinny little thing who looked underfed in her ballet uniform.

And now she is all grown up, has left home and in October this year she will add a new title to her relationships, wife.  Of course this means her first allegiance will no longer be to me, her mother, but to her partner and that is as it should be.  I’m a firm believer that you have to let your children grow and then go.  But if you do that right you will never actually lose them.