Closing your eyes is a gut level act.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul

and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this:

‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no

commandment greater than these.

Mark 12:30-31

Dear Me,

You waste a lot of energy not teaching her about Jesus. It weathers through you like rain-soaked clothes.

She sees something that’s not there and talks to it in her room. She calls it Jesus, and she’s only three-year-old.

You do your best to conceal your panic.

Your nights are filled with researching how to raise the perfect child, and your days are testament to that fact. You become vegan because meat and dairy are the love children of Satan (if you believed in him too), and there’s nothing that makes you happier than forcing a two-year-old to read. What you don’t understand (and the God you don’t believe in has been trying to show you) is that your child has ADHD. She is not perfect. Neither are you. And how the truth proves only to be inconvenient but not a total deterrent.

Closing your eyes is a gut level act.

When she’s nine months, she falls out of her crib. No wait, she pulls her body up in a daring act of defiance and flips out of it like an acrobat because you are too slow for her demands.

And at eighteen months, she eyes you with a raw immutability, conscious of your need to overpower her, and reacts with beating her head against the wall. Literally.

“Ava, we don’t do that.” The glare she gives, and is that a slightly arched eyebrow? Your declaration on what is done and not done is met with even harder whacks against the wall.

At this point, you almost want to believe in God so you can be angry at Him. After all, this is somebody’s cruel joke, isn’t it? How many years did you spend sweeping all your “bad” under the rug where no one could see it, whereas this child—this miscreant—wears it like a badge of pride. And you know that people will mistakenly lump you two together even though you would never beat your head against a wall, at least not where people could see.

But isn’t that how it always goes? After all, you are the mother.

You’ve never been more jealous of your husband in your life.

Breathe. Your daughter isn’t your foe. Honestly, she turns out to be one of your greatest friends. She teaches you how to pull back each clenched finger until your hand relaxes and all the earth is no longer yours to police. She teaches you how to crack a smile, raise an eyebrow of your own.

She teaches you that real love has no regard for the “rules” and the only ones that truly exist are to love your God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself.

But isn’t that what you’ve been running away from all these years?

Your God and yourself?

Talk soon,

Ericka