![]() ![]() When my mother died, I lost the only relationship whose foundation is unconditional love. ![]() Amber Noelle Sparks, author of “ And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges ” It helps me to see her not as a little doll but as a messy, cool, fun, amazing human whom I’m lucky enough to get to be best buddies with for a while before sending her off into the world. But I find that treating her, always, like a person I respect, and not just a little kid, has helped me balance out all the ways she delights me and all the ways she frustrates me. My favorite moments are when my daughter surprises me by being a totally different person than me - when she turned out to be an amazing artist, or how she can actually read a map, unlike me - or when she pulls utterly original thoughts from her little goth head, such as asking construction workers if they’ve found any skeletons yet or telling me that at night the woods are full of, and I quote, “the floating dead.” The hardest parts, though, are also when she’s being her own person - when she’s too scared to perform at a school talent show, too full of temper and prone to strongly held opinions and stormy outbursts. The best and also hardest parts of parenting all stem from the same thing: that you have literally created a new person, who is absolutely not you or your partner and has a completely different brain and different personality. ![]()
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