Being the Woman I Want My Daughters to Be

Yesterday I watched my almost three year old sleep. I sat on my bed (her favorite place for napping) and stared. Stared at her hands, her long fingers, the dirt under her fingernails. Stared at her perfect, scrunched face, her thin, pale hair falling across her closed eyes. She seemed, in the moment, to age, like a time-lapse sequence in a movie, so that suddenly she was a woman, my tall, beautiful grown-up daughter taking a nap in my bed.

It’s perhaps cliche to say kids grow up too fast, maybe sentimental to mourn the passing years, but certainly it’s stupid not to notice and act accordingly. My days with my daughter are limited, and that’s motivation for me…

To love extravagantly

To teach constantly

To lead wisely

To serve selflessly

To laugh recklessly

To explore courageously

To discipline firmly

To dream wildly

When I found out Eve was a girl, that I would have two daughters, I wondered why God had chosen me to mother girls. Frankly, I’d never liked girls much. Now, I see it as an exciting, delicious challenge, realizing that the woman I am will frame their picture of what a woman is more than perhaps any other factor. So, in the next sixteen years, I plan on reaching and pushing and climbing, allowing God to mold me into the woman I want my daughters to be. Because I can’t expect more from them than I expect of myself.

I need to work quickly (for God to work quickly) because I don’t have long.