A Daughter’s Recognition
Deciding to adopt a five-year-old girl, our interview required us to have no children, be college educated, and take no notes. On our first visit, we took her to a zoo. On our second she came to our home. “Do I have to go back?” she asked, intelligent, brown eyes and wavy hair, and sitting on the edge of her bed in the room we’d painted warm orange. Her social worker explained the procedure, and she had to return. When she became part of our family, we gave her a new middle name that she chose as her first.
By third grade she went to a magnet school, by seventh she played flute in the school play production, and by high school went to the southern United States, Mexico and Guatemala as a Girl Scout Senior. By her thirties, degreed in Consumer Affairs, she’d professionally waitressed, managed a small airport’s office, been a supervisor at American Airlines then found her niche in marine purchasing and sales.
While raising her, one time in our conflict, I wrote about her anger in a poem that became accurate in the next-to-last stanza only when the editor of my book questioned me. Nearly fifty years later, I confronted the truth that my daughter had recognized that day.
To An Angry Daughter
Forgive me
… for misunderstanding the meaning of your words, which was not on the
surface
like the red sauce that clung dry to the dirty fork in your hand, but in the
metal of the fork,
the sinew handle, the spine of prongs.
Your bones bent in anger. Breaking stone, words fell from your mouth—
rasping, gravelly, sharp-edged.
Forgive me
Forgive me
… the wind of words that bore witches out of my mouth, out of my stomach
reversing like a washing machine, out of my intestines constipated with
desire to control you.
Forgive me
Forgive me
… for standing close and telling you not to leave. What I meant was, never leave,
stay weak as egg white, simple as jelly, young as a pullet, ineffectual as dough.
I got out the umbilical cord and in seconds tried to tie us together again.
Forgive me
Forgive me
… as I paint explanations of how my way to see a thing is broad, experienced—mature
yet falsely so and fearful of your self-assured, your self-reliant—your young woman’s way.
Forgive me
Forgive me
… as I love the metal of your eyes. As you knew an insult when you heard one.
As I love the light in your eyes—rich, crystal shadows of brown.
Forgive me
Facing my ending a twenty-two year marriage, it was this daughter who reassured me that my heart had decided what my mind could not face, which was seeing divorce as wrong. It took years of recovery and spiritual training to understand that the bruising I caused my family was a necessary turning point of my life.
I called her when in the hospital interview learning that Stephen’s and my engagement didn’t qualify me to make a decision regarding his life during cancer surgery—he asked me to marry him that afternoon. By her asking the right question, I knew my daughters would understand my yes.
My realization is, "When we hesitate about an important matter, our children may have a clearer view of the truth we are seeking."