My love for you is fierce, my girls.

It is not linear, as there’s no concrete end or beginning. I like to believe it was always banked deep inside me, but was awaiting your permission to be unopened and let loose.

It’s a complicated love, between mothers and daughters, but the tangled web that ties us together can’t be broken, because when I was born it was with the ability to belong to you. To live out my life with your purpose in mind- long before I knew your father or my own capacity to do so.

Because I too, was born a girl- with the potential to change the world by my very essence.

And you will navigate this pathway, too. And that makes me proud and hopeful and scared all at the very same time.

Because this world is harsh. And we all struggle being in it, at times.

But know your light is my sunny Sunday afternoon. It is the cool, dewy blades of grass on an early morning walk under my bare feet and the warm wood fire in my sense of home.

You are my centre.

My wish for you is a simple yet challenging one; only that you receive the same sense of fulfillment in your own self as I receive in being your mother. My wish is that you can love yourself in the same capacity that I love you.

And it’s OK that this love encompasses both your strengths and your faults, as we are only human. It is meant to encompass the whole of you- with all your achievements and your failures.

I want you to love others large, sure, but not to apologize for loving yourself with the same intensity. Because you are extraordinary and worth loving, even when the world is unapologetic in its desire to want to keep you small and quiet.

If I could I’d bottle up your greatest joy for you to drink up when it gets hard. Like when you landed your first successful cartwheel on the playground, or first felt the magic of riding on a horse’s velvet brown back, or, when you took your very first steps to outstretched arms. If that joy could be repeated endlessly, I’d do that for you a million times over.

But I can’t.

So I need you to love yourself so much that you can always find your own way back to that feeling. Because that’s the pride you deserve to feel in yourself, and you should carry that pride unashamed.

If only you could love yourself so fully, that would be my wish for you.

Continue to feel your feelings- crying when you need or want, and shouting when you need that release. Don’t hold yourself back from the world, because it needs every bit of your authentic self in it. Sometimes, someone might make you feel that’s not true, but that’s only because they’ve been fed a lie. Continue to embrace yourself, always.

You are my imperfect perfection. My inherited flaws are yours too, but it only makes us more connected to one another, so I won’t apologize for that.

When they look at you, then, they may see some of me. And what an honour that is for myself- know that I mean that.

And know that your flawed body, the same one I’ve struggled with, is, in the end, your portal for your mind’s every dream and a vessel for your heart’s every intention. Protect it and try to love it for the purpose it serves you, because its service to you is in itself a beautiful thing, no matter the exterior pressure to change it.

Commit to loving yourself daily. Wake up and declare it a priority. Serve others, yes, but serve you, too. If you can see yourself the way I see you, it’s not impossible.

If you can exude this love, the world will be a healthier place for it, because your love is contagious. That love will be so powerful and present that it will not be able to be passed over. That love will be the force you greet the dawn with and the strength with which you’ll meet the dusk. And though that love alone may not shelter you from heartbreak or disappointment or dark days, know that those things will pass, and then remember that love will still be in you, and beside you in me, to carry you through.

You are a girl and you are enough. You are a woman and you are a force. You have been and always will be.

The world may not shout it, but I will, and you must, too.

Because my love for you is fierce.

 

With love,

every mother to their daughter