If I One Day Have A Daughter, I Will Tell Her This

If I should have a daughter, I would cage her in my arms and try to preserve her childhood away from those who are eager to take it away from her. Because I learned that growing up is never easy, never the way I thought it was when I was her age.

I will tell her, no. I will show her how life and some people can be cruel and how much it will hurt her but that doesn’t give her the right to also inflict pain towards others.

I will tell her that her world is my world and that she only needs to hold my hand and she will never be lost.

I will tell her that scars and bruises are beautiful no matter where she got them and no matter how ugly they may look; for I will always embrace her and remind her that our home is her playground and my arms will always be her monkey bars.

If I should have a daughter, I will tell her that beauty isn’t just about the contours on her face, or the curves on her body but it is something she needs to learn how to own with confidence. That it is also found in the simplest of things like how she glows when the sunlight touches her face or how she wrinkles her nose when she can’t seem to grasp something. That her eyes is amongst the brightest stars mine has ever seen.

And “baby,” I will tell her, when she comes home one night, shattered, eyes puffy from her very first heartbreak that “sometimes loving someone doesn’t mean they won’t hurt and that is terribly awful and sad but you, you will always be enough.”

If I should have a daughter, I will try to teach her my own ways of dealing with pain. Because the world I grew up in isn’t as nice to me as I dreamed. That the world I grew up in is where feelings are often thrown away, and a few insults can torment your soul but it never stopped me from hoping.

I will tell her that you have to go through high dosage of pain before you finally come up with a cure. That she has to go through many sleepless nights before she finally decides to sleep and wake up with the sun smile at her.

That there will be days where she’ll lock herself inside her room and hate me and curse me with words that she learned from reading something she’s not allowed to read, but I will always leave my door unlocked if she needs to have a cup of hot chocolate and a warm hug.

And I will tell her, when the moment comes that she’ll leave my arms and our house, when she finally find the small part of herself that she will always cherish, that someone will love her more than she could ever love herself, that someone will always look at her with awe, with love, with respect, with pride and that she only needs to come home and look at my room to know that that someone will always be me.