Category: creative_writing
Instruction: Write a diary entry about a mother discovering the greatness she sees growing in her middle-school aged daughter.  Contrast the kindness of the daughter against the difficulties the mother is experiencing at work that day.  Infuse the story with love and admiration.
Response: So today I went to Maddie’s class to be the lunch monitor.  She’s in 9th grade, but attends a pretty small school, so everyone was milling about in a small area…playing cards or MahJong, eating baked goods they got from a sale down the hall, and generally, being teenagers. 
I don’t frequent her school often, but Mads seemed pretty happy, and in her element.  It was lovely to witness.
I, on the other hand, was having a Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day at work, and when I arrived, I was checking my phone for updates and trying to fight a battle for my new team that I was told was Very Much Not Worth Fighting.  Of course, this was unheeded advice, as—if there’s a hill that’s worth dying on—I will go prostrate myself upon the top of it as effectively as possible. 
And so I was fighting an Unwinnable War, and my daughter was overseeing a team of boys scarfing down brownies and picking at their healthy lunches and laughing whilst stacking their Chinese tiles…and I was so crestfallen about the outcome of my silent, onscreen, remote work battle that I didn’t even notice the tears welling up in my eyes, or the fact that I was sitting in the middle of a room filled with teenagers. 
I suppose the only good thing about crying in a room full of teenagers at lunch is that you’re very rarely the ONLY one crying…so there’s that.
So there I sat, in fine company, shoulders mildly hunched and trying my damnedest not to wipe my now-soggy nose on my sleeve.  And of course maintaining a smile any time Maddie looked over at me, because Lord knows I was there only to make sure no one flipped over a table (but honestly, not there for much else, as these kids were self-sufficient and rather shockingly well-behaved from what I remembered from 9th grade) and the last thing I wanted was to embarrass my daughter at her school lunch hour.
But Maddie was standing there next to the little sofa chair I was on, and she said, “Mom, scoot over.” 
And I scooted.
And she sat. 
She didn’t ask me what was wrong; she already had heard my rumblings before she left for school this morning about the particular work woe I was dealing with today.  Rather, she leaned over and gave me a big hug, right there in front of anyone paying attention—which seemed to be everyone—and assuaged me with soothing “it will all be fine”s and “didn’t I expect these kind of things from my work by now anyway?”s. 
And then she got up and went back to her perch at the game table, as nonchalantly as if she had just gotten a drink at the water fountain, and I was left thinking that my teenage daughter had just hugged me in public, in the high school lunch room, in front of two dozen other teenagers I had never met, and she didn’t even flinch. 
Three hours later, the issue at work actually ended up coming up roses;  turns out that dying on that Hill was able to save the initiative after all.   I was really, really happy about that.
But the best part of the day was the undeniable recognition that Maddie is Fearless, and Kind, and Confident, and willing to step across lines and do the hard things. She is going to be a Force of Nature. 
Indeed, she already is.