An Extraordinary Daughter Written By: anneboleynlover
Author's Summary: Mizuno Saeko contemplates on who her daughter Ami is and how proud is of her.
Disclaimer: I do not own Sailor Moon. I ended up not writing fanfiction for a while so I might be rusty. I feel fine with constructive criticism but no flames. Please read and review.
I have been blessed with an extraordinary daughter.
My actual name is Mizuno Saeko. I am thirty-four years old. I come to have a career as a doctor. I do have a brain, come sense, and drive. I excel at my job and I feel good about helping patients who are pregnant women about to give birth, broken bones, car accidents, develop cancers such as brain cancer, breast cancer, colon cancer, heart disease, kidney cancer, leukemia, lung cancer, or skin cancer, eating disorders such as anorexia or bulimia, end up getting insects in their ears, hands, or necks, gun shot wounds, heart attacks, knife wounds, pneumonia, or strokes, but I have to work long hours at the hospital. Guilt eats at me that I have not much free time to spend with my daughter.
My daughter's name is Ami. Ami is fourteen years old. Blue-haired and blue-eyed like me, she comes to have a brilliant and curious mind and a deep love of learning just like me. She does stand out among everyone else for her intellect.
Ami came to learn her alphabet, basic numbers, colors, days of the week and months, and shapes at the age of one. Her father came to teach her how to color inside the lines with coloring books and crayons at the age of two. She did teach herself how to read at the age of three by herself with no help from either her father or me and she excelled at it much to our amazement. Ami enjoyed any book she could get her hands on although she enjoyed fairytales like Aladdin, Beast and Beauty, Cinderella, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Hansel and Gretel, Jack and the Beanstalk, Little Red Riding Hood, Pinocchio, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Thumbelina when she was little and she would read a bedtime story to my ex-husband every night before she went to bed rather than the other way around to practice her reading skills. At the age of five she learned arithmetic and writing although her handwriting skills was not the best she as her little fingers were still learning how to hole a pencil.
Academics were something she excelled at which made me very proud of her. I believe that academics are important to help develop one's brain and common sense and end up developing a love of learning that would last for one's lifetime. Ami comes to have the same beliefs that I do.
However, my ex-husband believes that academics are not the only things that are important in life. He came to teach Ami how to color and draw and discussed with her the importance of art history as art means as much to him as medicine means to me and he wanted his only child to share in that love which Ami does. Ami does enjoy playing chess and swimming just as she learned from her father for that was what he taught her that made her brain and common-sense work and help her relax as too much stress for the mind was not good for one's health.
I am aware that the divorce between her father and me hurt Ami. Both of us accept Ami for who she is, believe in her, care about her, and do love her and came to try to make our marriage work for the sake of our daughter, but we could not make it last even for her sake. We came to try—really we did—but we were not getting along very well and that negativity would hurt her as well. However, it did happen to be my ex-husband who filed for divorce when Ami was eight years old as he ended up going to work as an artist in his cabin in the woods to draw and paint and enjoy the beauty of nature and never came back home. I ended up feeling angry at him for how he went about the divorce, but I gained full custody of Ami and he only keeps in touch with her now by sending her postcards of his drawings and paintings on her birthdays. Divorce is taboo in Japan which must make Ami feel anger and bitterness at her father and me as any child would want to come from a full-adjusted family with two married parents like her friends Tsukino Usagi and Aino Minako has, but if she feels this way she keeps her resentment hidden well.
After her father was gone from our lives, I had to step up to fulfill the role of two parents rather than one, but my schedule made it very difficult to do so. Busy is what I am. However, we came to have some good memories together. I did take her to the amusement park where we would come to buy soda to drink and hotdogs, fries, and cotton candy to eat, do play the games at the game stands where once Ami won a gigantic blue dolphin stuffed animal to take home with us, and enjoy riding the rides. She enjoys going to the amusement park especially the carousels.
Ami and I baked cookies together whenever I had a day off from work. Baked a lot of cookies too. We came to bake apple cookies, butter cookies, chocolate chip cookies, ginger cookies, lemon cookies, oatmeal cookies, peanut butter cookies, snickerdoodles, and sugar cookies. Ami did enjoy licking the cookie mix off of the spoons of the cookie batter we made and I ended up teaching her how to make different shapes of the cookies with the glasses. I enjoyed seeing my daughter's face light up with a smile as any mother who bonds with their child would be.
How I wish I had more time to spend with her!
Life with Mom appears not to be all that bad for my child as I make sure Ami appears to be clothed in clothes of expensive quality, fed well, given as much freedom as a child could want, and happens to be well off in terms of money for we live in a luxurious apartment and pay a great deal for the expensive fine cram school called Crystal Seminar that she attends. I bought her a top-of-the-line laptop and the pencils and pens she uses are of the most expensive kind there is and let her have harp lessons when she expressed a desire to learn how to play it. Ami comes to do her homework and end up studying for exams to get good grades so that she can go to a good college and medical school one day for her to fulfill her dream to be a doctor just like me with my encouragement for her to do so. She does all of the chores—bedmaking, coming to wash and dry dishes, dusting, ending up vacuuming the floors, and laundry after she gets home from school to make life easier for me as she knows that I am too tired after work to do so. Ami and I end up communicating on a dry erase board in the kitchen as sometimes we do not see each other for days at a time. I feel guilty about the use of the white board as it reminds me how little time I have for her. Guilt is a common emotion that I feel towards my daughter. However, I am aware of the important things about my who my daughter is and the basic characteristics of her own personality: her favorite animals are cats, her favorite colors are aquamarine and blue, her favorite drinks are apple juice and bottled water, her favorite foods are anmistu, honey, and sandwiches with her least favorite food being yellowtail, her favorite flowers are Waterlilies, her favorite gemstones are sapphires, her favorite school subject being mathematics with there being no school subjects she does not like, and how computers are her strong point. I even know that my daughter is a secret fan of the anime and manga of Dragon Ball which is not something that she confesses to anyone.
Ami had a difficult time in making friends. Brilliance, curiosity, and drive to excel at everything she does means she makes herself do everything to the best she can time and time again. It can scare people off from her or think that she is a rude and stuck-up snob who thinks she is better than everyone else. However, my daughter does happen to be reserved and shy and too timid to know how to talk to people, but when she did people saw she was so desperate to fit in that they would take advantage of her eagerness and her friendliness to use to get them good grades themselves and turn their backs on her the moment that they got what they wanted. It did break my heart to see her crumble when she realized that she had been used again and again until she gave up in trying to get people to befriend her and focus on academics and books to keep from getting hurt by others again.
I feel grateful of the transfer of my job to Juuban. It gave Ami a chance to be happy. She had made the greatest blessing she ever wanted: best friends who accept her for who she is, believe in her, and care about her and do see that academics were something she excelled in, but that saw that there was so much more to her than that.
Ami's first friend had been Tsukino Usagi. Blonde-haired and blue-eyed with her hair pulled back into buns and pigtails almost down to her ankles, she did not believe in the rumors that Ami was a rude, stuck-up snob and that she was merely shy. She came to take Ami to the arcade to play videogames after school one day and Ami got the highest score ever on the Sailor V videogame even though she had never played them before. Ami did say that all Usagi seemed to like was comic books, drawing, eating, going shopping, napping, and playing videogames and ended up not applying herself to coming to do homework and do studying for exams so her grades were horrible, but Ami ended up trying to get her to focus more on academics.
Ami's second friend had been Hino Rei. Black-haired and purple-eyed, Rei had been a shrine priestess at her grandfather's Hikawa Shrine. Ami came to say that Rei's father Hino Takashi had been an important politician who had not been even there when her his wife Hino Risa died in the hospital. He did only see her one time a year on her birthday where he would take her to eat dinner at a fancy restaurant with her getting her favorite flowers Casablanca lilies and a white dress to wear when she went to meet him there. Rei ended up being unable to accept her father for who he was, believe nothing in him, care nothing for him, and dislike him. She ended up to have developed physic powers that she would cultivate by diving through the Sacred Fire at the shrine which made her abilities cause people to view her as strange and avoid her with her only friends being two crows named Phobos and Deimos. Ami said that she was gifted at archery, beadwork, calligraphy, drawing, fortunetelling, guitar playing, mediation, piano playing, singing, skiing, and songwriting.
Ami's third friend had been Kino Makoto. Brown curly-hair pulled back in a ponytail with a ponytail holder with two big green balls and green eyes, Makoto had become an orphan at the age of eight after her parents had died in an airplane crash. Makoto came to be extremely strong and tall and had to wear her old school's uniform to school as the school uniforms that both Ami and Usagi wore did not have her size which made people think she was a troublemaker with rumors that she had been expelled at her old school for fighting. However, it did happen to be a bunch of lies according to Ami. Ami said that she was gifted in arts and crafts, baking and cooking, basketball, cleaning, dance especially ballet, flower arranging, gardening, ice skating, knitting, and martial arts, but she felt that she was a tomboy when she was really the most feminine among her friends.
Ami's fourth friend had been Aino Minako. Blonde-haired with a red hair ribbon in her hair and blue eyes, Minako came from a family where both her parents Mr. Aino and Mrs. Aino were married, but she was an only child with no brothers or sisters and had a strict mother who was never satisfied with anything that Minako did. Minako came to live in England for a year where she became fluent in English and did go to both to Greece and China. Ami did say that Minako had been lonely in England, but she had made two good friends in Alan and Katrina while she was there. Minako ended up excelling in acting, dancing, and singing, coming to speak English, drawing, knitting, and volleyball, but her grades are poor and Ami helps her do her homework and end up studying for exams.
Ami loves Minako's white tomcat Artemis and Usagi's black cat Luna. How could she not? I believe the cats can talk as I could hear unfamiliar voices speaking to Ami on her new watch.
However, it is not just her academic success that makes Ami amazing.
My daughter is Sailor Mercury.
Ami risks her own life on a daily basis to fight against monsters that appear to come home hell itself. She believes that she can hide who she actually is and her being a Sailor Scout from me, but I can see through her deception,. I come to see the bruises and cuts that she comes home with on a daily basis which she tries to treat on her own, the deep rips in her clothes, the enormous hunger and thirst she has to help replenish the energy she loses during the fights, and the fatigue that gets to her for the lack of sleep she gets, but somehow she gets through the day on two or three hours of sleep at night. I do know she has horrible nightmares after she fights since having to battle against evil monsters every day has left trauma that she struggles to deal with every day.
I come to wish that I could get her to stop putting her own life on the line every time she fights. Dangerous. I end up not wanting to bury my daughter if she dies or ends up getting critically wounded in a fight. I feel that it should be the child that buries her parents and not the other way around. It gives me nightmares of my own.
However, I am extremely proud of her not just for her brilliance, her curiosity, and her desire to learn, but for her courage and her determination to do the right thing to safe others. In a way it is good for her to help others. She will make an excellent doctor in the future so if another opportunity for her to go study medicine in Germany will be something that she will embrace in the future.
I have an extraordinary daughter and I would not trade her for anything.