Family
“Believe deep in your heart that you can achieve anything your heart desires. Take pride in how far you've come and have faith in how far you can go. But don't forget to enjoy the journey.”
“Somewhere along the way, you started giving me better advice than I gave you. I do not know when it happened, but I am so proud that it did.”
“When you close your eyes and make a wish over the candles, know that your old dad is wishing the very same thing, only harder.”
“You walked into a house that already had its own rules and its own history. You did not try to rewrite any of it. You learned it, and then you added something.”
“The house is a lot quieter now, and I have stopped pretending I do not notice. But every time you tell me about your new place, I can hear how happy you are.”
“I am better at fixing things than I have ever been at saying any of this out loud. So I have mostly shown you instead, and hoped that you were counting it.”
“Everybody is about to give you advice that you did not ask for, so here is none. Only this. I have watched you look after people for years and you are ready.”
“When you were little, your birthday list was longer than the fridge door. I could never get you everything on it, but I hope you always knew you had my heart.”
“Everybody else was busy and somehow you never were, not for me anyway. You had the whole afternoon and you spent it listening to a child talk.”
“I always trusted you to choose someone who would treat you kindly. Watching the two of you together, I know you chose exactly right.”
“Nothing about this was handed to you. You earned it the long way. That is the kind of success that stays with you for the rest of your life.”
“I watched you study through late nights and early shifts to become a nurse. You never once talked about quitting, even when I would have understood.”
“People say you have my eyes and my stubborn streak, and they are right. You also got things that skipped me entirely, and I am very glad of it.”
“You laugh exactly like your mother did when she was young, which you know. What you do not know is that it stops me wherever I am standing, every time.”
“Everyone will say you look beautiful today, and they will be right. But what I love most is that you look so completely like yourself.”
“You made it to winter break, and I know how hard you worked to get here. No lesson plans, no grading and no alarm clock for two whole weeks.”
“You did not have to make room for me at your table. You did it anyway, before I had done a single thing to earn it.”
“You make a lot of hard things look easy, and I know they are not. I see how much work and heart goes into every one of them.”
“Half of what I know how to do I picked up standing next to you in a kitchen. None of it was ever written down and you never once measured a single thing.”
“I ran behind that bicycle holding the seat for most of one long summer. You did not notice the day I let go, and that was entirely the point.”
“When I rang you at an unreasonable hour you did not ask why I had not rung home. You just said you were awake, which I am fairly certain was not true.”
“My parents always had to be careful with me. You never bothered with that. You told me straight, and you did it kindly, and I listened every time.”
“You went first through all of it and you had nobody ahead of you to ask. By the time I got there you had already worked out which parts were survivable.”
“There will be days when you do not know how to fix something. You will figure it out, the way you always have, and I will be a phone call away.”