from Victoria
For My Mom, With Love
Dad built a whole website to tell you how much he loves you, Mom. This one is mine, for you. It is about us, and it is also my way of saying the thing I never say enough: how grateful I am for both of my parents, and that I get to be your daughter.
Keep scrolling⌄Dear Mom,
Dad made his page for you, so this one is ours, just yours and mine. But before it is anything else, Mom, it has to say this: I am so grateful for both of my parents. Some kids have to go looking for an example of what love is. I never did. I just had to look up from the dinner table, or down the hallway, or across the front seat of the car. The love in this family has been the background of my whole life, so normal to me that it took me a while to realize not everybody gets to grow up inside something like it.
So let me say it plainly, where it stays: thank you, Mom, and thank you, Dad. I am grateful for the big things, the roof, the rides, the lessons, the way you two built a whole life with room for my dreams in it. And grateful for the thousand small things you both probably think nobody notices: the plates made, the late nights, the showing up tired and showing up anyway. I notice. I have always noticed.
This page is not an attempt to sum up our whole family story. Nobody could fit that on one page. It is the bond between you and me, Mom, and a few things I have noticed along the way that I never want you to wonder about. Starting with how thankful I am that out of all the mothers in the world, I got you, and out of all the fathers, I got Dad.
You loved each other out loud. And because of that, Cayden and I learned how to love out loud too.
Mom, you wear the word love around your neck, and mine matches yours. I think about that a lot. Love in this family is not a secret and it is not an accident. We say it, we wear it, we show up for it. That came from the two of you.
And it is not just the dressed up days I am thankful for. It is days like this one, out in the sun with my favorite person, nowhere fancy to be. Thank you for making ordinary days feel like the good old days while we are still living them.
If there is a brick wall, a booth, or a sunny sidewalk somewhere, there is probably a picture of us in front of it. That is what our bond looks like up close: you, me, and a camera one of us insisted on. I would not trade being your shadow and your sidekick for anything.
Grateful for Both of You
Mom, this page is ours, but I could not write it honestly without saying how much of it I owe to Dad too. Gala nights and ordinary Tuesdays, big stages and kitchen tables, you two are a team. You celebrate each other in public and you back each other in private. You laugh together like best friends, because that is what you are. Whatever life rearranged around us, that part never changed: the respect, the friendship, the way you still choose our family every single day.
Dad, your website says the world is better with Mom in it, and she is the one reading this page, so let me tell her what it looks like from a daughter’s seat: the world is better with the two of you in it, side by side, being exactly who you are to each other and to us.
I do not say thank you enough for that, so let me say it here where it stays: thank you for being a team I never had to worry about. Thank you for being parents I never had to wonder about. Kids are not supposed to have to carry those worries, and because of you two, I never did.
And the gratitude is not only for the big, watchable moments. It is for every ordinary outing the two of you turned into a memory: the lunches, the errands that became adventures, the days that were never just days. Here is one of ours, Mom, out in the sunshine like we own the sidewalk.
What the Two of You Taught Me
There are more than six. But these are the ones I carry with me everywhere.
Love Is a Verb
You do not just say it. You cook it, drive it, build it, and show up with it, on the hard days especially.
Friendship Holds It Together
The laughing, the inside jokes, the being glad to see each other walk into a room. That is the glue.
Kindness Is Strength
Even when life got complicated, you stayed kind to each other. I noticed. It taught me what strong really looks like.
Family Is a Choice You Keep Making
Every day, in a hundred small ways, you choose us. And each other. Nobody drifts in this house by accident.
Dream Out Loud
Mom builds big things from scratch, and Dad believes in her out loud. You taught me my dreams deserve the same.
Love Multiplies
The love you two started did not stay small. It became a family, a home, and a whole lot of people who are better because of it.
You Made Room for My Dreams
When I sit in big rooms with big chairs, I am not nervous, because you raised me to believe I belong in them. When I turned thirteen under a sky full of lights, I knew exactly who taught me to hold my head up like that. Everything I am reaching for started with the two of you looking at me like it was already possible.
And Mom, watching you build, watching people gather around the things you create, I learned that a woman’s ambition and a family’s love are not opposites. In our house, they are the same story. This picture of you and me says it better than I can: in this family, love is literally the frame around everything we build.
Little Ladybug Notes
Dad left you ladybug notes on his page, Mom. Ladybugs mean love and luck in this family, so here are mine, for you, and for Dad too.
Thank you for making our home the softest place to land. Home is not a house to me. It is you two.
One of my favorite sounds in the world is you two laughing together in the other room. Please never stop.
Thank you for the thousand things you do that nobody claps for. Your daughter sees them. All of them.
Dad, thank you for loving Mom in a way the whole internet can read. Mom, thank you for being worth every word.
Thank you for teaching Cayden and me together, at home, with patience I know I did not always make easy.
Whatever my life looks like when I am grown, I hope the love in it looks like the love in this house.
Us, In Pictures
Tap any photo to see it up close.
A Few Thank Yous
Thank you for the memories we keep making as a family.
Thank you for a love strong enough to build a childhood on.
Thank you for the friendship at the center of it all.
Thank you for showing me, every day, what love looks like.
Thank you for the sacrifices Cayden and I will probably never even know about.
Thank you, Mom. Thank you, Dad. For everything.
However your story keeps unfolding, I hope you both always know this: your bond built the happiest place I know, and I am grateful every day that I get to call it home.
All my love, always,
Victoria