Before I put on my coat to walk Aginéni back home with my dad, I hand her brand-new copies of two books.

“Most Likely To … Daisy by R. S. Williams,” she reads from the first cover.

“So you can reread it as many times as you like without having to return it to the library,” I tell her. Her eyes twinkle with pleasure.

“And Cashews by Sylvia Lim,” she reads from the second cover. “Nu, what’s this one about?”

“It’s kind of like ‘Chad Gadya,’ ” I say. “I thought you might like it.”

After a long winter, everything is green again. All the neighborhood trees are flowering and perfuming the streets. My favorite are the lilacs. They always remind me of Shavuot, which celebrates when the Children of Israel received the Torah and began to rule themselves with their own laws. I guess it’s fitting that this is when my bat mitzvah is too!

The Sunday after Shavuot, the air is warm and the sun shines late into the day as the guests arrive. We have a big tent in our backyard, and everyone walks around oohing and aahing at the blue and yellow colors my mom and I chose for the decor and exclaiming over the bite-sized delicacies passed around by waiters in bow ties. Mr. Rosen, the music teacher, plays Jewish music on his keyboard until it is time for everyone to find their seats, and my mother taps the microphone.

She welcomes everyone and says some thank-yous and some nice things about me and my journey toward adulthood. Then she pulls out a crumpled piece of paper and nods at me. I nod back.

“There’s one final thing I want to share with you all about my daughter, Milla. I found this paper in our recycling bin last week after Milla cleaned out her schoolbag, and I felt compelled to rescue it. I don’t know what the genesis or the context of it was besides something for Judaic Studies, but if you’ll indulge me, I have Milla’s permission to share it. If you want to know who my daughter is, her words speak for themselves:

“ ‘How to Create a Kiddush Hashem’—a sanctification of God—‘by Milla Bloom’:

“ ‘Who do I want to be in the real world? I want to be that person who might not win everything all the time, but who works really hard and deserves to win when she does. A person where the glass is half-full, even when things feel hard. A person who tries to understand what other people are going through. A person whose imagination can create exciting worlds for other people to dream in too and make other people laugh and sometimes cry, but the good kind of crying, the one that wrings you out and you feel much better afterward. A person who is pretty good at lots of things, not so good at some things, and who discovers something she’s really good at and then gets to do it all the time and doesn’t even feel like it’s work because she loves it so much. A person who knows who she is and lets that guide her to make good decisions. I want to be a person who can make a Kiddush Hashem with these things that make me special.’