UNDERSTAND I am 22-1/2 years old, my girl, and have just recently discovered that I am a woman: oh how hard it is to act that way.
Excerpt from the letter from my mother.
THE SWEET LIFE
My grandmother saved a valentine given to her by her daughter, my mother. I also have a special valentine given to me by my daughter. Lovely, isn't it, the way daughters love their mothers and vice versa. There's nothing like the love I feel for my children. Nothing.
Undoubtedly you have thought of me as immature, inconsistent, a fat cow, lacking in understanding… and they’re [these thoughts are] probably true. I know, for I thought the same of my own mother at times. But now, tonight, at 22-1/2, with short brown curly hair, greenish eyes into which men read their own feelings, with 123 pounds stacked into a comfortable beddable figure, with a shyness that makes it easier to talk in quiet groups - with all this, try to understand that I too was young and if I don’t understand you now, somewhere long ago in history, on a Monday nite [sic] in 1957, I did understand and know the things you feel.
- Excerpt from the letter, "To My Daughter When She Wonders..." written by Sally Dene Roos, August 19, 1957