Just A Girl...

Have I told you lately that I love you? 

Not you.

But you.

You, my struggles.

I love you.

I love you for making my life interesting and for never leaving me.

I love you for keeping it real, me real, even though you're not real - you're just what I perceive you to be, allow you to become, what I lament over, what I carry with me, most of the time.

You're just what I feel.

You're just mine, my own struggle.

And even when what I feel is worry or frustration, I love you just the same, never less, 

in fact more...

I love you more.

Because your mine.

I recently asked my mother to bare witness and to listen as my daughter tried, to the best of her ability/disability, to articulate what she's going through as a teenage girl with a life long affliction which causes her to feel isolated from most people most of of the time.

It's quite common for those with Asperger's Syndrome to experience great difficulty relating to others, which obviously makes relaying what you can't relate to quite hard. 

And she struggles and I struggle with her struggling.

...And there are tears involved and sometimes outbursts born of anxiety and sometimes just withdrawal, which is the hardest part for me to endure.

Because I love her, I love you my struggle, my child.  I love you.  

Because your mine

I love you and your mine, UNTIL you're his.

When you're his, what would be hard for most people, is just a challenge to you; a joyful, delightful, diversionary challenge.  And for the rest of us who speak without thinking, while you think without speaking, our challenge might simply be to hold our palms flat and steady, allowing a horse to eat a carrot out of our hand.  And then there is you, my struggle - You, my beautiful horse girl.

I love you, my struggle, I love you for making me lie awake in the dark.

For haunting me through my days.   

I love you my struggle.   And I love you too, for making me appreciate those infrequent moments with those rare and beautiful people who make me laugh, make me feel alive and real and warm and open and free and who make you go away, if only for a short while.   Those people who I might not take notice of if not for my struggle, those who remind me who I am...

I love you my struggle, for all you are to me and all you cost me, cause me, give me, change me, make me, stretch me, press me, push me, fill me...

Because of you, I'm more then I would be.

Because you're mine

Until you're his... 

And when you're his... then you're just another girl. 

She's my baby, just another girl.