Daughter. She entered into my life small and helpless. She was the one who needed to be fed, changed, taught, disciplined, and loved. She always looked up to me to tell her the story of who she is, and she trusted my words, even on the days when I couldn’t hear it myself.
Because there are too many days when I don’t believe this story: that I am special, that I am loved, that I am doing enough. There are too many times when I can’t hear the truth: God has finished it all for me. But small or big, young or old, she bears the words of this story flooding through both of our lives. When I’m not strong enough to remember, I listen to the story of my daughter.
A story of how my daughter helped save me:
She was about 2 years old and we had just had our third child. I was overwhelmed and seemed to be suffering with postpartum depression, or just depression as it was not diagnosed then. Every morning (and I mean EVERY morning) she would come to me and say with her sweet smile, “It’s morning mommy and it’s gonna be a sunny day!” At first this was annoying as I could barely make it hour to hour. It was almost like a knife jabbing at me accusing me of not being happy when I should be. But hearing this consistently day after day in her same happy way, I was lifted slowly out of my spiral downward into her unconditional love as a young child. She could see something good in the day to come and that was like a shot of something that told me to look for the sun. She reminded me to look for something outside my brokenness to focus on, and it worked! Children can teach us so much and this small child saved me by her teaching me to look for the sun. So, I always sang the song “You are My Sunshine” during our bedtime routine.
Cindy Koch 