Simple. I don't really know who she is yet. Well, I know who she is right now, but I don't have a clue who she's going to be when she grows up. How much of her personality will stick with her? How much is really just a toddler phase? Heck, at this point, I don't even know what hair color she's going to wind up with--my mother said my hair was that light brown until I was about three or four, and then it darkened to its current not-quite-black. Experience indicates she will lose those sweet little curls at the base of her head, but the other girls didn't have anywhere near that much hair at her age, so who knows?
Who knows? That's the question of parenting, and the reward. These little people spring from you fully formed, with a definite indication of personality even before they are born, but it takes decades to find out who they're going to become.
I'm quite privileged to get to watch this metamorphosis a fourth time.
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The future is the undiscovered country.
- or -
If you want to hear God laugh, tell him your plans.
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Kalil Gibran:
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.
You are the bows from which your children
as living arrows are sent forth.
The archer sees the mark upon the path of the infinite,
and He bends you with His might
that His arrows may go swift and far.
Let your bending in the archer's hand be for gladness;
For even as He loves the arrow that flies,
so He loves also the bow that is stable.
But you know this all anyway. ;-)
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