Reading this reminds me of my daughter ages four to eight in the phase of how do you do it. The world does not tell you how to be a parent, but you make mistakes and accidental and planned brilliances that somehow pace that organic path of one day older. After eight into twelve now I see the psyche of a forming adolescent where it is much more about parental atmosphere created for bubbles of questions rising from oceanic waters inside of a small fish growing larger. As a parent, there is that grand lesson of what a human cannot control in the vastness.
I get into moments on a couch watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer or on road trips listening to the Beatles where she has learned the lyrics to I am the Walrus and Across the Universe and you muster fumes of certitude that books read together at five have output to this inquisitive and self-confident girl who is on pace in that confidence every parent, I would think, hopes to impart or cultivate that a child at some point can swim on her own. That as divorced single parents you do not get to see it all. You just don’t.
You are playing poker blind more often than you can admit, because if the kid knew how many times you are just going on instinct, on some kind of innate I am jumping now or holding firm in this teaching point of contention to be a parent and not a friend or a servant, but a parent knowing that kid has this whole other option to sequester into that may or may not back you up on why you played that card or drew that line. You do it. You do it day by day breathing in and out loving with a tempered conveyance of your heart. You can’t love in all the moments you want to as a divorce single parent. You can love fully and openly and ferocious in the moments you get poetic and comet riding, but you love for what the kid needs not what you need.
You shut the fuck up when that is what is best for the kid. You speak up even when you are not sure what the fuck to say. You make breakfast, lunch, and dinner, help with math homework, you read the book she’s reading so you can talk about it, you look at her trying to be some etch of a blueprint for what her opposite gendered relationships might become and you try to show her happy, positive, and kind in these moon and sun beams where it is just you and you’re not so little girl making magic, because you are her dad. No matter what other people in this world may try to tell you, “You are not qualified. Go away. You were not built to do this or that.” You say fuck those people in your head and nothing outside, because it is not about them, it is about her. And she wants you to be magic, even when she’s upset and it feels like if she had wrecking balls in her eye sockets she would crush you, even then the girl still loves you. She might not remember four and that is ok, because we do not live in our pasts, we live in that pace of one day older in the now smiling the brilliant dream forgiving and loving ourselves as parents and children.
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