#raisingdaughters

Our Lives, Seen and Unseen

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

A few minutes early to collect the 12-year-old and her friend from track practice, the 19-year-old and I take a walk around a neighborhood circle near the high school, passing a house I considered buying but didn’t.

Full of excitement about her morning, my daughter talks on and on, her happiness as visible as red-breasted robins in a bare-branched maple tree. We pause for a moment before the three-story house, with large original windows on the first and second floors, bordered at the top by ornate stained glass. The owner confessed the windows leaked air profusely but couldn’t bear to replace them. The house is no longer for sale; my daughter and I speculate the family still lives there.

We walk by another house flanked by five sugar maples, the trees young enough to live for many more decades.

Robins, both visible and hidden, sing.

My daughter and I pass these houses and these possible lives our family might have taken but didn’t. Then we’re back at the high school, still in the cold and clear March sunlight, beside a maple filled with robins fluttering their wings, chorusing in the beginning of spring.

I know that I love the day,
The sun on the mountain, the Pacific
Shiny and accomplishing itself in breakers,
But I know I live half alive in the world,
I know half my life belongs to the wild darkness.

— Galway Kinnell

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Young Woman Traveling

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

Rising in the middle of the night is synonymous for me with journeying: catch a plane to visit a family member in need or set off on a long road trip, like our exquisitely beautiful drive out of Prince Edward Island last summer as the dawn gradually rose, and my 12-year-old and I listened to Canadian radio while the two others slept curled on each other in the backseat.

Once upon a time that miles-long bridge would have terrified me: last summer it hardly seemed long enough, suspended over all that ocean.

Now my older daughter, starting her womanhood journey, rises in the dark and returns long after dark, fascinated by her classes and job, brimming with an enthusiasm she lacked all through adolescence. When she leaves, I open my laptop for my day’s work, but I wonder, Where will her life lead?

Without leaps of imagination or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all is a form of planning.

— Gloria Steinem

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Mud Season in All Its Holy Glory

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 1 Comment

My daughter texts me at work: My car is stuck in the mud.

Snap, I think. I continue what I’m doing, thinking my girl can likely solve whatever she’s gotten into now. It’s the last day of February, 2018, a day so warm I’ve propped open the library door. The lilies are pushing up around the school, and I step outside with a patron to watch a woolly bear inching its way across the walk.

My daughter, laughing, calls me and tells me she could no longer drive her little Toyota on a muddy road. I just stopped! In her nice Danskos, she stayed in her car, surrounded by glistening mud. The town road crew, working nearby, asked if she was going to move, and she explained her predicament. The road commissioner had her slip over to the passenger seat. He floored her car, drove it free, and suggested she might want to stay off that stretch of road.

Ah, spring.

….I, who so often used to wish to float free
of earth, now with all my being want to stay,
to climb with you on other evenings to this stone,
maybe finding a bear, or a coyote, like
the one who, at dusk, a week ago, passed
in his scissorish gait ten feet from where we sat—
this earth we attach ourselves to so fiercely….

— Galway Kinnell

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Kid Zen

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 4 Comments

My 12-year-old shoveled a path across our sizable lawn, ending at the cemetery’s fence, putting considerable effort into this project.

My teenager, arriving home from work, asked me, in her trademark language, What the hell?

The next morning, I stood on the porch, watching my girl walk through her path, leap the fence with her backpack, and then plunge through the snow on the cemetery side. She lifted her hand once and waved at me.

The girls are both teetering on the precipices of new ages — one into adolescence, the other leaving adolescence for adulthood. I loved that dogged determination of my daughter, shoveling snow through a field in the bitter cold. A few mornings later, doubtlessly wising up to avoid wet jeans all day at school, she opted to head down the road and take the unshoveled path. At the top of Spring Street, she waits for her friend, holding her sister’s insulated mug with hot chocolate.

This girl reminds me that the journey really is the thing, that parenting isn’t ever about a goal or an ending place. Innately, she knows this, while I’m still standing on the porch step, watching.

A scholar tries to learn something everyday; a student of Buddhism tries to unlearn something daily.

— Alan Watts

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Long Nights

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / Leave a comment

With the time change, darkness drifts in early, aided by rain. Like an old friend, the long nights are familiar.

When I return from work, just after five, my 12-year-old is not jumping on the trampoline, watching for me. Instead, she’s rearranging her room. She’s hit middle school heartache, where her friend has turned to a cliche and boy watching. My daughter hands me pictures of herself and her friend, asking for them to disappear. In one photo, the girls’ cheeks are sprinkled with red chalk.

May’s forsythia is a long way off. My daughter dyes paper circles for flower petals. For now, that color will need to suffice.

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth….

From Naomi Shahib Nye’s “Before You Know Kindness”

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One Word

/ Brett Ann Stanciu / 3 Comments

Texting is like tossing paper airplanes to someone, back and forth, with tiny notes.

My daughter texts me about the usual humdrum of who’s picking up her sister or grocery lists, sometimes bigger issues like financial aid deadlines, but also notes like, Want to know something weird? Well, who wouldn’t?

Some days, nothing. Some days, a veritable JFK International of these flying notes.

The other day, she and her friend shoulder their heavy backpacks and head off to their college classes. I’m at my laptop, working, when a single word comes through: rainbow. Just that.

I type back, Double.

Yes, she returns.

That was all. She was already on her way, having tossed me that sweet missive: see this.

The rainbow stands
In a moment
As if you are here.

– Takahama Kyoshi

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