Move Over, George Bailey

Elisabeth and her Dad

I’ve always had this love affair with my stepdaughter’s beauty. Over the years I’ve taken many hundreds of photos of her; her amazing spirit calls to me, shining through her eyes and her smile. Now photographs from her wedding are going up on Facebook. Sometimes I just sit and stare at this radiantly beautiful bride with her adoring and adorable husband at her side.

Watching her at the wedding, I experienced the pang of loss that I’m sure many parents experience. As much as I love the poised and confident woman she has become, sometimes I miss the little girl who’ll never again need to sit in my lap or hold my hand.

But some of what I felt was a bittersweet awareness that by the time I was her age, I had already left behind a lot of wreckage. I had already made mistakes I couldn’t take back, mistakes that clouded my life and the lives of others. At her age, I still wasn’t fully aware that life wasn’t just happening to me, that I was creating my life with my choices. The sweetness came in recognizing that all my mistakes and missteps have been woven into the wisdom and promise that mark her life. Nothing I did was wasted because my hard-won lessons have contributed, in some small way, to making her life into something finer and brighter than my own life.

As I approach the age of my own mother when she died, I feel my mortality and already mourn the ways parts of my life have played out and cannot be changed. But looking at the beautiful young bride who is my daughter I also know that it is, indeed, a wonderful life.

• Bookmark on Delicious
• Digg this post
• Recommend on Facebook
• share via Reddit
• Share with Stumblers
• Tweet about it
• Subscribe to the comments on this post