This column first ran the  month my oldest daughter turned 18. Everything you read here is still true, and has only gotten better.   Some days I dream of winning the lottery,  and then I remember: oh yeah, I’ve already done that.

The first time I saw you, I was lying flat on an examination table and an ultrasound tech was counting baby toes and I swear on all that is holy, she said, “Whoa. That baby is smiling and waving. You don’t see that every day.”

And you were, and no, you don’t. But I still have the picture. I cried a little that day because I couldn’t wait to meet you.

Everyone warned me that daycare would warp your brain and make you aggressive and pushy.

Your idea of aggressive and pushy and warped was to persuade an entire school to elect you student body president, right after you persuaded a local organization to award you a scholarship and promote you to a national competition.

Everyone warned me that girls were the worst. That the teenaged moodiness and the angst and the drama would engulf my home and cause me to regret being born and wish that a meteorite would strike me dead while you slammed doors and cried and hollered that you were off to get a few tattoos with your ex-con boyfriend, Butch.

But you showed your idea of drama the day your boyfriend (happily, you’ve never dated Butch) broke up with you and I found you sitting at the computer with tears pouring silently down your face, trying to work a Scholastic Aptitude Test practice problem.

You want to be a teacher when you’re done with college, and I know already that you’ll be a great one. The day you were born you taught me how it feels to love someone else more than I cared about myself.

You’ve taught me that it is impossible to die of pride. If such a thing could happen, I would have been reduced to a puddle of gelatinous goo the day you won the school spelling bee in fourth grade, or when you begged for the opportunity to take your little brothers to the store to buy them their school supplies (how could you think I’d say no?), or when your sixth grade teacher told me that she looked forward to coming to work every day simply because you were in her class, or when the dean of students at your high school told me with a completely straight face that you ‘are a blessing’ for the school.

Thanks to the rip in the time-space continuum that has developed as I get older, it feels like just yesterday that I was waving back at that baby on the ultrasound monitor, when it’s really been eighteen years. When we went to the store the other day to pick up your birthday cake, I promptly dissolved in the middle of the bakery section when I picked out ‘1’ and ‘8’ candles and realized that I had purchased the candle for your very first birthday cake in the very same store.

Since that very first picture, you’ve never stopped smiling and waving. And if I obviously have not stopped crying, it’s only because all too soon you’ll be waving goodbye.

E.S. Evans 2007