has many challenges. I’m not a new parent. My daughter is twenty-two years old, but that fact has no bearing what-so-ever on reality. I look at the people around me who have small children and I, on some level, feel sorry for them.
The only bloody nose I ever gave anyone was my girl’s elementary school principal. It’s funny, in a sick sort of way, that I will take it and take it, whatever it may be, but when my child is threatened, I become a different human. Or maybe I become less human and more animal, a mama bear, a she-wolf … whatever works. What I do know is that I would go to the ends of the earth for her.
I am certain, beyond anything else, that were she to know I speak so of her, she would be mortified. I don’t care. Not one whit. What I do care about is that she is happy. That she is safe. That she is where she is supposed to be at this particular moment. I, in some ways, live vicariously through her. She is so much of what I wanted to be. A musician, a fighter, confident and brainy. I always hoped, as she grew up, that she would be herself and not like me. That sounds overdramatic, I’m sure, but it is true.
I was so backward. Being one who was bullied and too shy to stand up for myself, I spent much of my life alone. I learned to be alone and, at some point, began to thrive on it. I decided early on that I didn’t deserve to be loved and when someone said they did, I immediately assumed they were lying. The sad truth is that they usually were. It is like a line from a Billy Joel song that says “she’ll ask for the truth but she’ll never believe you”.
But all of that being said, it doesn’t matter how old our children become, they are still our babies. My mom said that to me, but until I had my own, I couldn’t understand it. She is a wise woman, my mom. A wise woman indeed.
A Photographer's Heart 