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Letter to our daughter
16 May 2011 12:29Letter to our daughter.
Letter number one.
(The first of many letters, I’m sure)
I imagine you at six years old, worried that some people don’t like you. I imagine you worried that your new shoes might get wet in the rain.
You haven’t yet had to take care of your friend’s children because your friend is dying. You haven’t been to a third-world country and seen true poverty. You haven’t found a lump in your breast in your late twenties. The real horrors of life that put the rest of life into perspective have yet to visit you.
Your six-year-old view of the world is small and your experience of life is taken for granted. Your intensity is admirable and, I hope, unstoppable.
I wonder if you experience worry right now in your mother’s womb. I wonder if you dream. It is ten weeks before you’re scheduled to be here.
I hope you are healthy but not too pretty. I’ve gone out with pretty girls and every single of them has been sexually assaulted at some point. I never want that to happen to you. I hope we’ve made a dent in that part of society by the time you’re a teen.
I don’t want you to worry too much or be too vain because I worry too much and I am too vain and it’s not worth it.
My father came from an abusive family. He encouraged me to be whatever I wanted to be and gave me art supplies and keyboards when I expressed interest in art and music. This gang member, this member of the military police, this bouncer in the dance halls of Glasgow, this violently jealous hippie who had emigrated from Scotland and had three daughters and an ex-wife before he even met my mother, this man encouraged me to draw and play piano and taught me to be kind even though that was not his first response to most situations. He broke the cycle of violence with me and started the fire of creativity in my soul.
I hope that I can be even half as useful as that to you. I hope that I can do something even remotely as momentous. I hope we can impress upon you that love has to win and kindness is the only way forward, as new-aged and dumb as that sounds.
I’m glad you’re a girl. I’m glad you’ll be a combination of the genes of me and your mother Sonja.
I’m looking forward to seeing the colour of your eyes.
tags
Letter number one.
(The first of many letters, I’m sure)
I imagine you at six years old, worried that some people don’t like you. I imagine you worried that your new shoes might get wet in the rain.
You haven’t yet had to take care of your friend’s children because your friend is dying. You haven’t been to a third-world country and seen true poverty. You haven’t found a lump in your breast in your late twenties. The real horrors of life that put the rest of life into perspective have yet to visit you.
Your six-year-old view of the world is small and your experience of life is taken for granted. Your intensity is admirable and, I hope, unstoppable.
I wonder if you experience worry right now in your mother’s womb. I wonder if you dream. It is ten weeks before you’re scheduled to be here.
I hope you are healthy but not too pretty. I’ve gone out with pretty girls and every single of them has been sexually assaulted at some point. I never want that to happen to you. I hope we’ve made a dent in that part of society by the time you’re a teen.
I don’t want you to worry too much or be too vain because I worry too much and I am too vain and it’s not worth it.
My father came from an abusive family. He encouraged me to be whatever I wanted to be and gave me art supplies and keyboards when I expressed interest in art and music. This gang member, this member of the military police, this bouncer in the dance halls of Glasgow, this violently jealous hippie who had emigrated from Scotland and had three daughters and an ex-wife before he even met my mother, this man encouraged me to draw and play piano and taught me to be kind even though that was not his first response to most situations. He broke the cycle of violence with me and started the fire of creativity in my soul.
I hope that I can be even half as useful as that to you. I hope that I can do something even remotely as momentous. I hope we can impress upon you that love has to win and kindness is the only way forward, as new-aged and dumb as that sounds.
I’m glad you’re a girl. I’m glad you’ll be a combination of the genes of me and your mother Sonja.
I’m looking forward to seeing the colour of your eyes.
tags