Perfect
I started blogging eleven years ago (on my old blog ). Back then my daughter Ryan was 8-years-old. She was brilliant and beautiful, gregarious, precocious and wise beyond her years, willful, stubborn, talented, creative, quick-witted, and hilarious. She loved to swim and read and write stories and go camping. She had just given up her belief in Santa and the Easter Bunny, but she was holding (if tenuously) onto the certainty that fairies were real and existed in our garden. She was perfect - to me - in that way that parents see perfection in their children; not in their behavior (lord knows!) or in their physicality, but in the pieces of them that come from the purest parts of ourselves - those parts formed of deep and abiding love, untainted by pain and loss. Perfect. Today, she is 19 and a sophomore at one of the best universities in the country. She is still all of the things she was when she was 8 - brilliant, beautiful, gregarious, wise, willful, stubbor...