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She’s my best friend. No one understands me like this tiny little human does. It amazes me how much wisdom she can have at such a young age.

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I always thought being your “little girl” was a title that would always be at the top of your priority list. I’m not going to lie. It hurts like hell, and it probably will for a while.

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he was afraid because our children make us question everything when they are trying to forgive what we would not

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Choose the man who stands. The one who grabs your hand and helps you stand when you feel like bowing.

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You will be a story I tell my daughter someday when she comes home crying with a broken heart. I’ll tell her of a boy I once knew. Of a boy I once loved. I’ll hold her as she whispers the same words that dripped from my own mouth many years before. I’ll listen as she tells me about a boy a lot like you, a boy who promised her the world and then walked away.

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They tell you that in time, you will heal. They tell you that in a matter of months, you will get “better.”

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I want her gender, her identity, to only be one part of her. And I never want her to grow up thinking of it as something limiting or something that defines who she is “supposed to be.”

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My experience — just like all the girls whose fathers were the first men to leave them — is complex. It has ridges and laughs and fires, but too many men reduce it into a simple phrase. My autobiography in his mouth was two words: daddy issues. If I wanted a guy to stay, I had to be ashamed of them.

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Tell them how beautiful they are no matter what anyone else says.

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She grew up — she had to grow up. Like everyone does. She discovered her own books, books I’d never read — books that hadn’t been written yet when I was a child. It’s what’s supposed to happen.