When my oldest daughter turned eighteen, I honored her with a column. I read it to her at the little dinner we put together. Which was really sweet and touching and I think she liked it, but it also set a potentially dangerous precedent: when you’re my kid and you turn eighteen, you wonder where your column is.

It was easy to write this for Abby last year. In fact, the timing of her day was such that my editor called at the last minute and asked if I had a picture of me and Abby handy so he could put the whole thing on the front page for a Mother’s Day edition. I only had a picture of Abby handy, and so we used that.

I actually caught some grief for this one, if you can imagine. The reader copied my editor to ask me why getting a gender off an ultrasound was so difficult back then? She was pregnant at roughly the same time and had no problem at all. I was astounded at the nitpickiness…I mean, hassling the ultrasound tech eighteen years later is a little much. As it turned out, she was trying to promote her own column, written for a niche newsletter.

I can’t think of anything lamer than trying to vault oneself to fame on the pathetic little back of Mom, Interrupted, which is avidly read by about twelve people locally.

It’s Abby’s nineteenth birthday next week, and so this is for her.

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Like most expectant parents, when I was pregnant with you your father and I debated your name at some length. We bandied names back and forth for either a girl or a boy (because back in the Stone Age of my pregnancies it was much more difficult to predict these things) until the midnight when I snapped awake, prodded your long-suffering father awake and announced, “Abby. Her name is Abby.”

I liked the name because I knew that a girl named Abby would be really pretty, really smart, really sweet, and really capable.

How right I was.

Even in the delivery room, you were considerate. The labor was relatively brief, the epidural was working, the attending physician was cute, and when you appeared with the umbilical cord wrapped around your neck you handled even that with your now-trademark, low-key aplomb.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. The details are mercifully dim, but I still own the book I bought in 1994 (“Your Three-Year-Old: Friend or Foe?”) when we spent all that year locked in a stubborn battle of wills, a battle I think you let me win.

But you showed your truest self that day your five-year-old sister decided that it was time she knew how to read. She insisted that I sit down with her and plow through the classic “Hop On Pop,” and hop we did. While you watched, I kept trying to demonstrate the sound-it-out technique, and she kept trying to demonstrate the this-isn’t-as-easy-as-I-thought-it-would-be-but-no-we-can’t-stop-because-I-want-to-read-now technique and so we kept hopping for a couple of hours because your sister is nothing if not determined.

Finally, she mastered the nuances of Pop Hopping and ran out to play, leaving me exhausted and drained on the couch and contemplating the merits of bar hopping. Three-year-old you casually picked out another tome from the extensive Seuss oeuvre, “Fox in Socks,” and proceeded to read it to me without hesitation and with perfect pronunciation, having once again listened carefully, absorbed the lesson quietly, and then you knocked those socks right off me and the fox with your understated mastery of the task.

You’re still doing that: with no fanfare at all you are ranked third in your graduating high school class. With even less hoopla you have covered a major part of your college education with scholarships. The way you’re going, I figure that we’ll find out about your Nobel Prize in medicine when the Associated Press calls for a quote.

These are facts: you send and receive roughly 4,000 text messages a month. There are probably two complete sets of silverware, dishes, and glassware in your room under your bed. You are, this minute, wearing my earrings and maybe a pair of my shoes. Even money says you have driven off with my debit card.

But this is also true: the day eighteen years ago when the quiet, serene baby girl with the delicate features was born was a happy day. But the days after that have truly been the happiest, in a large part because of the young woman you have become.

Thank you for being my daughter.

 

• E. Stocking Evans 2009