The words were out of my mouth before I’d quite realized what I was about to say, but as they tripped over my tongue, a feeling rushed over me. 

When I told this teenager who had once spent so many hours in my house that I loved them, I meant it. 

When this teenager was a little girl, she spent hours and hours in my home, enough to be added up to weeks and weeks, perhaps even months when strung all together. 

She slept countless nights under my roof and just as many nights wide awake giggling and watching movies. 

She joined us for family dinners and on family shopping trips. She had a favorite among the mugs in my kitchen cabinets and favorite shirt among the piles in my daughter’s dresser that she preferred to sleep in. She had learned to stop asking when she wanted a snack or a drink from the refrigerator and simply to help herself. 

She had a loving family of her own at home, but at my house, she had become like a second child, another daughter with whom I had no blood connection but to whom I was tied nonetheless.  

And then she disappeared, as childhood friends often do. The friendship with my child had run its course, a victim of growing up. 

Kids grow up. Friendships ebb and flow. 

But as I stood there hugging a child who had lost a parent too soon, telling her that I loved her, I realized just how impossible it is not to love these children who grow up alongside our own, how tightly these children become wrapped up in the fabric of our lives, and how even as these friendships morph, the love does not.

These children who we once shuttled home from sports practices and to dances, these children who shared our own children’s joys and sorrows, these children who made us laugh and made us cry, they are as much a part of our lives as they are our children’s. 

Even as they grow — and grow apart — we still celebrate their success, feel sadness at their losses and root for their successes. 

So yes, I do love this child and probably always will.