Bethany's Post

My daughter, Bethany, turned 18 today. Last night we went out and celebrated at her favorite restaurant. Today, she and her cousin and best friend are doing things you have to be 18 to do (register to vote, go to a casino and I believe buy a scratch-off ticket at a convenience store).

Earlier this week we shot her senior pictures.

It is so amazing to see the woman she has grown into.

While I frequently write "people in my story" posts about my friends, I find it hard to do that for my family.  I think because there are so many aspects it seems hard to capture in a few hundred words. Here is my attempt at telling you about Bethany.

If I had a tagline for Bethany it would be Bethany-the-Brave.  She is never slow to fight injustice and doesn't suffer fools well.  If Bethany is presented with a conflict, she engages. And, it is highly unlikely that she cares what you think of her. She has a quick and clever sense of humor. (In many ways she is a lot like John.) 

Bethany is very driven (this is the part where she is like me).  A girl with a plan she is into working hard to get where she wants to go.  Right now that includes taking classes at community college before she goes to University in the fall while working as much as she possibly can as a hostess at a sushi restaurant.

Bethany is a weird mix of girly and tomboy.  For example, she will easily roll out of bed with her hair a mess and no makeup, throw on sweats and head to class, but she also adores high heels, is always changing her hairstyle and enjoys dressing up with enough eyeliner to make her look Asian. She was on the wrestling team in high school. (She recently told the story of having to give a fact about herself in class and said the everyone turned around to see if she could beat them up when she said she was a wrestler. It made her laugh out loud and tell them to turn back around she wasn't a Sumo wrestler.)

Bethany once told me that the one thing she truly wanted was to be successful.  When I asked her what success looked like to her she said to "just marry once and to work at something she enjoyed."

Sounds like a great ambition to me.