Daughters ~ A Mother’s Treasure

Few in life “get me” like my daughters.  Few in life understand me like my daughters.  There are no other women in my life to whom I am closer than my daughters.  I trust them implicitly.  They are wise beyond their years and have spoken truth and wisdom into my life at times when I most needed truth and wisdom spoken to me by someone I respected and trusted.  My daughters are those women.  I can’t even imagine my life without my daughters.  Thank God, I was blessed with three of them.

Tomorrow is my oldest daughter’s birthday.  

Keicha Marie Christiansen graced my life with her birth 

on the 25th day of January over forty years ago.  

(I’m not telling you her age because I don’t know if she wants me to tell you.)  

Her entrance into my life seemed to be a metaphor for her life.  Born a day before her due date, she was early.  She is always early.  She never runs late.  Her birth was easy.  I had three hours of labor before she was born after there were only three hard labor pains.  She then presented herself with great efficiency. She is still efficient.  She doesn’t waste time or energy.  She just gets things done.  She was a petite baby.  She is still petite.  She was beautiful, and she still is.

Keicha and I on her 40th birthday

This past week, Keicha and I were chatting by phone as she left work and headed home.  In the midst of the conversation, she said, “Oh cool.  They have the shelves up in the new library.  That is so exciting.  I can’t wait to go in and see the new library.”  I asked where the new library was.  She then told me it was the old library that been remodeled.

My mind went back to those early days of Keicha’s life and my memory recalled days of watching her run into the building to get books with such great excitement.  I remembered her holding my hand and walking along the wall to jump off at the end and run to playground that was nearby.  I remembered how from her earliest days she loved books and libraries.  Keicha is a reader.  She always have been.  It did this mom’s heart good to hear how excited her adult daughter was to get to go back into that old library now made new to explore the new surrounding and find new books.

I guess if she has one downfall it would be that after checking out stacks of books for summer reading, she would stash them under her bed and forget to return them.  She read Gone With The Wind and the age of thirteen and that began a very long fascination with all things related to the book and the movie.

Keicha and I have shared many books, book talks, and ideas from books for so much of our lives.  I love that about Keicha.

It has been said that a daughter is a little girl who grows up to be a mother’s best friend.  There is much truth in that statement.  As a young mother, I had no idea that my baby girl, my toddler, my teenage daughter would someday become such a treasured and trusted friend.

Keicha is many things to many people.  She is an awesome mom to Gillian.  She is a much loved sister to her siblings.  She is a wonderful companion to her significant other.  She is a competent, hard-working employee.  She has worked hard within her community over the years through volunteering for Junior League, Boys and Girls Club, Ogden City School Foundation, and she works tirelessly in the area of Suicide Prevention.  There are more organizations and boards that she has served, but I don’t even know what they all are.

I’m very proud of all that she does for so many, but most of all I am just very proud to call her my daughter.  I don’t tell her enough how much she means to me.

Keicha, you are truly a treasure to me.  I do not know what I would do without you.  We have traveled down some very rough roads together.  We have had to stand shoulder to shoulder on the very worst days of our lives, the day we lost your sister Julie, and those hard, hard days that came right after that day that changed our lives forever.

Together we walked through those dark, dark day after Julie’s death.  Together, we cried, we screamed, and yes, we even laughed hysterically at a very inappropriate time not long after Julie died.  We have stumbled through seven and a half years of learning how to live after great grief.  For whatever reason, the two of us, you and me, seemed to always be on the same wave length as we dealt with our great loss.  How would I have made it without you?

I wish this bond we have which was forged out of grief had never had to happen.  I wish we could have just had more and more days of you three girls laughing together while making your mom a bit crazy, but that was not to be.

We have learned that we can do hard things.  We learned that together.  You have inspired me, made me proud, and always been an honest sounding board.  You have told me the truth when I needed to hear it.  You are smart, funny, have a flare for making your surroundings beautiful.  You have style.  Oh do you have style.  Your taste is exquisite.

Keicha, you are my daughter, my beautiful daughter.

I am so blessed.

Happy Birthday!