When I met her, she was all wide eyed and freckle faced. A puppy dog, brimming with the need to love and be loved. Wounds still fresh from her parents' divorce. So accepting of my trying to heal them.
The love between us was instantaneous and mutual.
Soon after her father and I met, she crawled into my lap, cupped her dimpled hands around my ear and whispered to me her grand scheme idea that I should marry her father.
We took that advice a few months later, her daddy and I.
Eight years later, that wide eyed and freckled face girl is 13. Most of her babyish ways are long gone. But the love between us is stronger and deeper.
She has just had her Bat Mitzvah. She rocked that Bimah with a flawless recitation of her Torah portion.
I sat with her other parents, real and step, tears of pride threatening to etch a line of my nonwaterproof mascara through the blush on my cheeks, beaming up at this child who was not borne of my womb but yet etched into the very fibers of my soul.
My heart was pounding, wanting to burst from my chest and wrap itself around this young woman who, for all intent and purpose, had become my daughter.
I sat next to her birth mother who smiled proudly through her own tears at her daughter, lost in whatever thoughts were meandering through her mind.
Sitting there, next to her mother and father, I couldn't have been any prouder than I was of that young woman at that very moment.
And it didn't matter how we had gotten to this point and it didn't matter how she claimed a piece of my heart. Blood, water, whatever, she was there to stay.
And I was so proud.
Photo Credit: Lucas Cantor on Flickr
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This is such a beautiful post!