>Little Girls Lost

>While I’ve devoted many, many posts on this blog to my two smallest children, I almost never write about my older girls- even though their lives are no less interesting or important to me, and they cause me just as many sleepless nights as my younger children (but for entirely different reasons).

The reason that I don’t write much about my older girls is that somewhere along the way, before I even started blogging, their stories became their own. I tell Punky and Bruiser’s tales because they can’t tell them themselves. For now, I am their archivist. I am their memory and, for better or for worse, I decide most of what makes it into their personal histories, at least until they’re a little bigger.

My older girls, though, are mature enough to decide on their own what they want shared with the world and what they don’t. They don’t need my help or interference. My youngest stepdaughter keeps her stories to herself. My oldest, not so much.

And so even though there are literally thousands of hilarious and poignant and fascinating stories I could tell you about my stepdaughters, I don’t. I have told a few, and the number has gotten smaller every year as their need for privacy has increased. I feel good about my decision… But when I see pictures like these, I literally ache for the lost years when my girls were growing up without me.

This is my oldest stepdaughter, who just turned 18. She has been a joy to raise. She is wonderful to talk to and watch movies with, she is a brilliant actress and writer, and she comes home every single day with a million entertaining anecdotes. I’ve known her for eight years now, and she has made every one of those years intensely special and charming and fun. And I can just tell from these pictures that she must have been an enchanting little girl, too.

And so, as I make extravagant little meals for Punky and Bruiser and snuggle with them and dance with them to our worn-out Zorba the Greek CD, I can’t help but think about how I would love to have helped this little girl brush her teeth, read her picture books, taken her to the zoo and the botanical gardens, tucked her in at night, and taught her her ABCs.

How I would love to have taken a hundred thousand pictures of her and written down all the funny and charming things she did and said. How I would love to have left her and her sister a record that not only documented their early years in minute detail, but also let them know how much I love and care about them.

As it is, they’ll just have to take my word for it.