Daughters

I’ve been thinking a lot about them lately (mine are grown, living a thousand miles away).
On my long drive to the farm this morning, I was listening to NPR and they chose to play Edvard Elgar. Wow. My daughters played strings in the symphony orchestra not so long ago. The little one would sing Elgar with me in the car, I remember that.

Daughters. I did many shameful things in my life, but in terms of direct impact, one of the more shameful was that I found a daughter-journal and one day, I read an entry. I wish I had not, but I did. And then it tortured me. And I could not let it go. And finally I told her – right in the midst of her college tour! In the Admissions office of Amherst, I was admitting to her that I had snooped! And she forgave me.

Daughters. My other little one. You have never seen anyone dance like her. No, I mean it. For verification purposes, let me brag: she was Clara in the Civic Center’s annual production of the Nutcracker. Man, that girl danced! And then one day she did not. Because dancing is an all or nothing thing. You dance, or you do other things. She made that decision when she was a wee 13, being arguably Madison’s best of the best dancers then, to let it go. So that she could do other things.

Someone wrote in the most dunce-ish of emails received by me in the last month that children turn on you if you don’t be careful.

I know nothing of this.

My house is full of markers of how they grew up. As I get ready to let it go, I have to remind myself every minute of each day: it’s only a house. It’s only a house.