My Dearest Little Love,

Three years ago on Mother’s Day, you were still inside of me.  This year, I look at you and think of you less as my little baby, and more as the girl you truly are.  Though your favorite things are mud and cars, I see how you ask me more often to put your hair in ponies, to try to grab my purse or find a lipstick, or to stomp around in a pair of my shoes.

One day I’ll blink and realize that you aren’t a girl anymore, but a young woman, and I hope that I will be able to be as strong as I always promised I would be if I raised a girl.  I promise to be the mother who will help you fit into whatever skin is really yours, and not the one I think you should be.

I promise that if you decide you want to be a cheerleader instead of play basketball, I’ll buy you a set of pompoms and get you to every practice.  I promise that if you decide you don’t like science I won’t remind you of how you swore when you were two that you were going to be an astronaut when you grow up (and that maybe I’ll even breathe a little sigh of relief, because I wasn’t a science person either.)  And I promise that if you get moony over boys, I won’t tease you or tell you that you are too young and that all you really need are wonderful books and a good self-esteem (although really, those are much more important), because I swear I will try to remember that I went through all of the same feelings when I was a teenager too.

But I have bigger promises to make, don’t I?  Here they go…

I promise that I will make this a world where you can walk down the street without being afraid that someone will hurt you, or attack you.  I will do everything in my power to make men understand that women have as much right to walk without fear as they do.

I promise to give you a world with real sex education that is appropriate for your age, and that discusses real birth control solutions.  And I promise to take you to get condoms and other birth control as necessary.  And if you decide that you want to hold off on sex until you are married and really mean it, I will buy you a pony (Ok, not really. Although your father might.).  Finally, if something should go terribly wrong despite this and you still become pregnant, I promise to help you decide what is right for you and allow it to be your decision, and to support you completely.  I will never, ever let you feel trapped and alone.

I promise to help push society so that when you are older, and entering the workforce, you make the same low entry level wage as any boy also taking the same bad entry level job.  And that I will help you so that you can get promoted ahead of him because frankly, sweetie, I know you will be smarter than him, anyway.

But most of all, I promise that I will continue to help create a world where you can be whatever you want to be when you grow up, be that an engineer, a doctor, a politican, or an actress.  And if, when you get there, you decide what you want to be is a wife and mom, I won’t tell you that it’s not enough, because now I realize that those are two roles I never expected to find so much happiness in, and I do.

Because of you.

Care2′s Mother’s Day Action:

Brighten the day of a hungry, homebound senior Mom. Send Mother’s Day wishes to a Mom in need. They’ll appreciate it more than you could ever imagine.