Just As We Dreamed.

My beautiful friend Dori became a grandma this week. I don’t know that I have ever seen a more beautiful picture than the one above. It doesn’t seem like it was all that long ago that she and I were having babies. White knuckling our way through motherhood. Dori, our friend Gwen and I, spent a lot of time together back then. I was so grateful that I had them, as for me motherhood was so much more “do-able” with the support of girlfriends who I could talk things through with or drop the kids off with every now and again, when I needed a break.

Dori’s daughter Dayna was a precocious kind of kid. A quality that made me love her from the very beginning. It was clear that Dayna didn’t see life quit the way that everyone else did. She was fearless. Even as a little girl, life was something that needed to adjust to her, not the other way around, and I had little double that she would grow into the amazing woman that she is now. Out of our three families, Dayna was the only girl, not that one would have ever had the nerve to tell her, or to treat her as such. She could climb the trees and eat dirt with the best of them.

As I saw this photo this week. I thought back to all of the times when our lives would slow down, when we would find our little bundles of joy finally a sleep on our laps after a brutally exhausting day…. when we would sweep the hair off their forehead and dare to dream of the future… this had to be that dream… .

Being a “nana” suits my friend. My beautiful friend who got me through some of the hardest days of young mommy-hood, days feeling lost as my own boys got older, and even now when, at times, life seems like a puzzle with a critical missing piece.

Yes, she has graced herself into grandma-hood; Wise, caring, graceful, as a momma she fought back when others wanted to define her beautiful Dayna, determined that Dayna was going to be her own unique person, just the way that God created her. A free-thinker, free spirit. I am not sure that a better advocate has ever been found.

I see the woman who Dayna is now, and I can’t wait to see who Madeleine will be, but I do know that with the legacy of fearless women before her, the world is hers to experience as she will.

Just as we dreamed it would be.