I tell my mom: there will come a time (and that time will be sooner than you think) when you will see a picture of yourself from a day at the park or a dinner celebrating a birthday of a child that's growing up far too fast and you will look at yourself and think that you should never have been allowed to stick your hand in front of your face or grimace or turn your back to the camera or demand to be deleted or cropped out because you will notice that the edge of your face is different than the face you are experiencing at the present time and you will want to remember the feel you had then and the way your skin moved and how your eyes lit and your hair shone. You will wonder why you hadn't allowed the cameras then because now (NOW!) you couldn't possibly out-do that pretty girl who was you (maybe 5 years ago, but also maybe a month ago) and you will wish that you had that reflection of a different time and a different day because it is not how you remembered it and you are not how you remembered you.
I tell my niece: "I will take you for ice cream when you get your report card, we can get the weird bubblegum kind you like and I promise that I will look away when you save the gumballs in a separate paper cup (provided by the teenager behind the counter for this very disgusting purpose) and I will praise you and tell you what a good job you did and I will ask you to not forget the lowest grade because you are bigger than the sky and you don't have to stop because it seems hard, there are days when everything seems hard and we get through them somehow, maybe imperceptibly but always on the power of our own might and the courage of our trying another day." And you will tell me that you earned these grades, here, that the lowest is low, that you're not sure if the ice cream offer is still on the table because am I good enough? "You will always be good enough because you will always be you and when you think back on the day you earned your biggest medal, you are exactly how you remembered you."
