Check out "10 Things I want my daughter to know before she turns 10" by Lindsey Mead Russell, which I was turned onto via feministing.
My favorites are #1, 7 and 9:
"1. It is not your job to keep the people you love happy. Not me, not Daddy, not your brother, not your friends. I promise, it's not. The hard truth is that you can't, anyway."
"7. You are not me. We are very alike, but you are your
own person, entirely, completely, fully. I know this, I promise, even
when I lose sight of it. I know that separation from me is one of the
fundamental tasks of your adolescence, which I can see glinting over the
horizon. I dread it like ice in my stomach, that space, that distance,
that essential cleaving, but I want you to know I know how vital it
is. I'm going to be here, no matter what, Grace. The red string that
ties us together will stretch. I know it will. And once the transition
is accomplished there will be a new, even better closeness. I know
that too.
9. There is no single person who can be your everything.
Be very careful about bestowing this power on any one person. I
suspect you are trying to fill a gnawing loneliness, and if you are you
inherited it from me. That feeling, Woolf's "emptiness about the heart
of life," is just part of the deal. Trying to fill that ache with other
people (or with anything else, like food, alcohol, numbing behaviors of
a zillion sorts you don't even know of yet) is a lost cause, and nobody
will be up to the task. You will feel let down, and, worse, that
loneliness will be there no matter what. I'm learning to embrace it, to
accept it as part of who I am. I hope to help you do the same.
but it's worth reading the whole thing.
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