A Youthful Place.

“I gave up my career to do this” I would always say. To do this thankless job, in this thankless society.

Now, I wake up and bring my only baby to school and pick her up 8 hours later.

I used to be able to name every snack, heal every ache and thoughtfully calculate her every move.

Now I pick her up and she’s begging to eat, we’re both tired and exhausted. She tried fish sticks at school. I didn’t even know that.

I can feel her slipping away.

She’s getting bigger in ways I thought would creep in, but instead came cascading.

She wants to know about why people die, she wants to talk about life.

She’s insightful, but also often reminds me that we are all going to be okay.

She tells me when she’s impressed, disappointed and exhausted.

She tells me when I’m wrong and she remembers everything she hears.

I get this pagne in my chest like I can feel her slipping away.

But maybe, I hope she’s slipping to a place where I don’t have to teach her what to think; she just thinks it.

A place where she doesn’t pick the flowers, she grows them.

To a place where I don’t have to show her how to form an opinion because she doesn’t need me for that; she has her own.

To a place where she leads me, instead of a place where she is being led to.

To the very place we’re all meant to slip through before we’re jaded by life and society’s hardening, a place that we forget.

A place that only children can lead us back to.