Dear Deaja, people don’t say this to you enough, so I decided to take some time to say it today. Thank you for everything you do for yourself and everyone around you. Girl you are tough, funny, honest and you work your ass off. How any times have stepped in for someone else, without them asking? You never stop doing the right thing, not to mention all the times you stepped up for any member of your family when they needed you the most, your awesome and you better never forget that you are. Even if no one ever tells you this again I’m going to repeat it. Thank you for being your great self and you better never stop.

Dear Deaja,
How cool is it reading a letter from your future self? You’re probably in our room at grandma’s house with your headphones on blasting old school rap music so you can put off doing homework. I know there are over a million questions racing through your tiny child’s mind, bad new we never grow wings. Seriously though, in our life we get to do things and see things we never even dreamed we would but at this point I know your mind is only focused on something no kids this young should ever have to be worried about. I understand this is something you don’t ever want to hear but the sooner you hear it the better your mental health will be. Firstly, none of this is your fault. You have to remember who is that parent and who is the child. You have done everything you know how to do since you were seven years old, and the fact is when someone refused to change even after you constantly tell them how they hurt you, then you have to realize that they don’t value their relationship as much as you do. You’re a thirteen-year-old high school student and if that wasn’t hard enough on you, you just found out from one of your classmates that your mom moved away from you, and she also took your brother and sister without saying a word to you. By now you’re on day five of trying to call her and getting no response. I’m sorry to say she won’t answer the phone for you, in fact, at some point she will even change her number altogether.
Secondly, nothing is wrong with you. Grandma is going to tell you to keep calling her once a week like clockwork and not to stop no matter how many more times she sees you break down. I want you to know its ok to be sick of being hurt by the same person. I know how much it hurts you to see all the other kids around have their mothers in their lives and while your dad and grandma struggle to cover it up with you with toys and fun and whatever else, it’s just not the same. That haunting feeling like something in your life is missing, that there’s a piece of your heart you can’t seem to find it and it feels as if you never will. I promise that feeling won’t be there forever, you can and will find your way to fill that hole with things that bring you peace. Despite what the world and some of the people around you will say, no one has the right to keep hurting you. The simple fact is that even after having children, life will never be like the kind of parents we see on the tv shows, the world just doesn’t work that way and there are people in the world who are too selfish to put other, including their own children, before themselves. Between you and your mother, you are the child in this matter not the adult. The responsibility of taking the first step to mend fences should not always be on you. Lastly, it’s ok to be the villain in someone else’s story. While your mother will keep trying to charm you with promises of doing better, wanting to get to know you and doing better from then on, it’s all a lie. Someone who really cares about you will never keep letting you down. They will not repeatedly cancel on you at the last minute, leave you high and dry without a phone call for weeks, months and years at a time, nor will they try to make you out to be the problem every single time.