I'm not going to get all sentimental in this post. Although it does seem like only yesterday that I was holding this tiny, naked baby on a cold, snowy December morning, crying my eyes out. It just amazes me how fast my daughter has grown up.
Tomorrow night is the open house at my daughter's school. It will be the first school open house I have ever missed. I have to teach a class instead. That depresses me even more. I hate the idea of being an absent father. I don't want to be the father from the song Cat's in the Cradle. However, I don't have a choice this time.
The poem I have from Julianna Baggott tonight is about a little girl growing up. It's beautiful and heartbreaking.
Saint Marty can hear Harry Chapin singing in the background.
My Daughter, like Eve, Realizes Nakedness
by: Julianna Baggott
At graduation, every eight-grade girl,
dressed in white, walks slowly,
hems swaying as if on boat decks,
I can't find my daughter.
Her jittery gait has changed;
only a month ago, she'd have waved
and whistled through her teeth like a sailor.
I imagine it happened quickly for Eve,
as well, a moment or two of sugary sap,
and then it settled in like a drug
in the blood. (It isn't so simple as an apple,
wagon-red and waxy, the sweet snap in the teeth,
because even the apple knows nakedness,
how like a miner beneath coal,
the apple is pale when peeled.)
Her body began to burn,
the blush at her neck, her eyes
settling to stare at her feet,
how she began to cave in, the mine again
collapsing in the dark, like my daughter--
I see her now in the poised row--
who even when fully dressed,
knows what the clothes are hiding.
I recognize the hunch of her shoulders,
the hitch in her hips as my own
and remember the wish to unmake myself,
to be a rib again, a perfect white bone
hidden in a row of perfect white bones.
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| A really, really depressing song |
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