Isn't she lovely?

When my favorite oldies radio station played Stevie Wonder's "Isn't she lovely?" the other day, I thought, as always, of my own daughter and was struck by how lovely she really is.

I can't remember many times in her twenty-something years that I haven't been proud of her. Oh, sure, she's pulled some stunts from time to time that have made me want to wring her little neck, but she's almost always wormed out of those by reminding me that she has done so much that's good—and sometimes outright amazing to me—that I've never been able to stay angry with her for very long.

When I shipped her off to New York at 16 with a suitcase full of pasta salad and macaroni because we didn't know what she would find to eat on her tiny budget in a big city, my sisters worried that she was too young for such an adventure and would certainly suffer some horrible doom. My personal feeling was that if they believed God was taking care of her south of the Red River, they ought to trust his judgment north of it, and if something horrible happened, maybe that was the way it was meant to be. She had a wonderful time, and I loved the Saturday I got to spend there with her, walking up and down Manhattan, riding the escalators to the top of the Macy's in Times Square, soaking up sunshine in Central Park—things I would never have done if she hadn't gone ahead to learn to be my tour guide.

When I sent her to college at 18, my biggest worry was probably that the car she was driving was completely unreliable and the road from here to San Marcos could get dark and lonely and even treacherous at night. Her biggest worry seemed to be that I wasn't ready to let her grow up: she had started experimenting with hair dye when she was in middle school, and my rule had always been only that she had to keep it to "real" hair colors, like blonds or browns or auburns rather than anything out of the Crayola box. It may have been her first weekend back home that she refused to take off her cap until she told me she had dyed her hair Crayola red and she didn't want me to be mad at her. So she was at least a little surprised when I reminded her that she was an adult and on her own, and as long as she wasn't living with me, I didn't much care what see did with her hair. As it turned out, she had only sprayed a few bright-red streaks into it, and it was much less annoying than some dye jobs I've seen on adult friends since then.

When she moved to California to go to school at 18, I bit the bullet to put her into a new car that would let me rest more comfortably (although she was pretty ticked off at me for taking away her sporty little T-top), and I knew that she wasn't likely to come back to Texas for more than a visit once she was gone. Her adventures in college, getting a job, and building a life for herself are her story, but she went about all of them with the same determination and talent that she had displayed growing up. And she never lost sight of the fact that I was always here, supporting her where I could (it took me 3 years to pay off the car, and I was the cosigner on her student loans) and ready to listen when she ran into walls or had reasons to celebrate.

Three or 4 years ago, she found herself in a position where she wasn't optimally happy with her life. Mostly, she was living with a boyfriend who had a lot of good things going for him, but she was beginning to realize that he wasn't the man of her dreams—or even one she wanted. The phone calls became more frequent (okay, partly because she and her brother had set me up with a cell phone that she still pays for, so calling was free), and the questions became more focused on my opinion of how she could handle things. I've always thought of her as mature for her age, and I've always thought we had a pretty good mother/daughter relationship, but I knew something was changing since she was asking more than telling and really seemed to be taking my advice earnestly, even if she didn't always follow it.

Ultimately, after a particularly tense visit there, I sent an email that told the two of them what I had observed. I didn't consider the situation hopeless (and I told them so), but I did think they needed to bring some issues to the table and work them out. Shortly after that, she called me and asked me how to go about picking out a dog.

The Junkyard dog moved in a few weeks later, and before long, she and my daughter moved into a new apartment, where my daughter had the good sense to take some time off to regroup before she got into another relationship.

That lasted for about a year before I got a message that newest man in her life "might be the one." I heard lots of good things about the young man (including that his dog played well with hers), but before I had a chance to go to the left coast, he took off for school somewhere too far north to drop by for a visit, so I never had a chance to form an opinion about him. In fact, before I got to travel again, she had already begun to express some disillusionment. She had been concerned about the notion of another "long-distance" romance; she had learned a hard lesson about those during her first year of college. And she had begun to get feedback from the young man that suggested that he wasn't exactly focusing on his studies so he could hurry back to her.

So by the time I did go west again, I was a little surprised to hear that she was pretty sure she was about to call off the relationship with that young man, but she was almost equally concerned about the reason: one from Texas had come to tour the wine country and had invited her along. Texas is even farther away than the other young man's school, but the tour of the wine country had shown her that this one had some very positive qualities that she wanted to know more—although she had known him through a working relationship almost 10 years earlier.

She sneaked a trip back to Texas at Thanksgiving to spend time with him, and they decided to see where life took them. On the one hand, I was a little hurt that she hadn't let me know she was here; on the other, I suspected the apron strings were being cut in a different way from any of the little knicks they had seen before. Last summer, her Prince Charming quit a good job in Houston and packed his bags for LA.

My visits there—and theirs here—have been fun for me. She acknowledges that he's not "perfect," but the "flaws" she sees are mostly attributable to testosterone, and she's okay with that. On the matters that count, he measures up very well—including having taken over the heart of the JY from the very beginning. I have always considered my daughter high-maintenance (although I know she knows how to squeak by on a tight budget) and high-energy; she says he often presses her to keep up. They're really a pretty neat couple.

Her recent visit home, though, is what flashed to my mind when I heard Stevie Wonder. On the last day we were home together, I had had to work during the morning, and she trooped off to visit her grandfather, who is in hospice care following a couple of rough years combating prostate cancer that has probably metastasized to the bone. We got our signals crossed on who would decide when to leave for our family reunion, so she stayed with him longer than she intended to. In some ways she was glad, because she knew these were likely to be her last few hours to see her grandfather alive; in others, she was sad that she had so few hours to spend.

When she finally called me to see if I was ready to go, I was actually wrapping up from work and tossing clothes into a bag for travel, so her timing was great. She stopped by a favorite taco stand for the salsa and chips she loves, grabbed a burrito for me, and headed home. A light rain was falling as she juggled bags and drinks through the front door, and her brother's dog bounded out past her into the street. It wasn't the first time he had gotten out past her in the rain, but like me, she considers him prize property: that brother has orders to go to Afghanistan, and right  now the dog is the closest we can get to him. But the dog also has been known to dart out into the nearby highway or charge around the neighborhood, and neither of those makes him any fun to catch.

By the time I got to the door to help her, she was in a much bigger puddle than the rain could have caused; the stress of losing her grandfather and possibly losing her brother's dog was far more than she was ready to take. I grabbed a ball, bounced it on the driveway, and starting calling the dog to play fetch, and within a couple of minutes, my smaller escapee dog had led him back to the fold. We penned the dogs in the backyard, spread out our food, and enjoyed a sense that somewhere, somehow, we'll get through all of it okay.

But I realized then that I wasn't just sitting there eating lunch with my daughter this time. I had pitched in to help her with the dog because I've done that drill before, and I know that calling him to play fetch is about as good a way as any to get him to come home; she hadn't learned that yet. It wasn't at all the adult helping the child; it was one adult pitching in with another.

She's been an adult for a long time—surely since long before that weekend when she came home from San Marcos with the Crayola-red hair. And we've had lots of adult conversations about things going on in our lives. But this time it felt different; this time, I really think she's found who she really is and where she really belongs.

And she is lovely.