Heartfelt Open Letter to My Kid Living Through The Coronavirus

Here is the open letter that I penned last week to my daughter Willow.

Hiya, Kiddo! Please read this letter 10 years from now. You will be 19 years old and hopefully moved out of my house by then. I kid, I kid. Stay as long as you need to, stress on the word NEED.

I will miss you singing yourself to sleep (loudly) for an hour every night.

I will miss your hugs and random and continuous constant affirmations of, "I love you, Mom!" I love you, too!

I will miss you telling me every 30 minutes that you are hungry and you eating up all my snacks because you say you "must be going through a growth spurt, Mom!"

I will miss our nearly nightly Movie Nights and staying up past 10:30 because there is no physical school for you to be at early in the morning (or the unforeseeable future).

I will miss making s'mores on our patio once a week and watching you burn 3 big, fat marshmallows at once over and over again (causing me to tell you to "quit wasting my food").

I will miss hearing about your obsession with getting a Nintendo Switch Lite so that you can play Animal Crossing, whatever that is.

I won't miss yelling, begging, and pleading you to do your homeschool worksheets. I won't miss trying to bribe you with toys to "motivate" you to finish all that homework.

But I will miss you crawling into my bed when I leave the room so that you can rub it in my face that you "took my spot".

I will miss you surprising me by cleaning up my work office just because you said you wanted to do something special for me as an early Mother's Day present. (Thank you so much for doing that! You know that clean tooms make my heart swell, and that was the best present!)

You are so sweet, silly, funny, and full of zeal and energy, even though the entire planet around us is crumbling into despair. You are mostly happy and that makes ME happy!

I pray that by the time you are 19. I will still be alive. I pray that I will be here to give you hugs and dinner and yes, even all my snacks, just because I love you so, so much.

I hope this world will be flourishing and open to you, your friends, and my future grandbabies if you happen to bless me with some.

And if by some disastrous event I am not there to see you in person or even alive to read this letter back to you in 10 years, my legacy and love will forever live on through you.

Eff the Coronavirus.

My sweetest Willow.

If you have a child, I want you to do me a favor. Grab a pen and a piece of paper and write them a letter that they can only open up ten years from now, that's right, in the year 2030. In this letter, you will tell them everything you will miss about this time living through the coronavirus. Of course, you could tell them all of this right now, but believe me, in ten years, both of your world views will be in a completely different place and space.

Yes, Texas is opened back up, but one thing we won't forget about any time soon is what it was like to be living in a pandemic lockdown for several weeks.

Think of it as your time capsule letter.

via GIPHY