To my daughter on her 30th birthday
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- October 9, 2020
- 6452
Wasn’t I just 21 years old several days ago, sitting in a bathtub, rubbing my swollen late-term belly and thinking about the shape of your face? I wondered if you would have black hair like your dad and maybe his smile, the one that could melt a thousand suns when at full intensity. We didn’t find out your sex because I longed for the moment when you made your entrance, to look at your whole being and say, “Hey, there you are.” I knew your movements as you grew inside me, and that was enough.
Then you were born on a peak fall day in October. And now you’re 30. Happy Birthday, Esabelle.
Even then I didn’t want you to be like me. I wanted you to fly far, far away to somewhere that didn’t make you shrink into a smaller version of yourself. There is a town-shaped box that comes for all of us, along with the pressure to choose whether we’ll squish ourselves inside it. I wanted the notion of that expectation to be stricken from anything you would learn.
And then we brought you home to our tiny house on the hill. The hickory rocker I rocked you in sits upstairs by your childhood bed, the bed empty now for 11 years. I rocked you for miles and miles into the deserts of wee morning hours as the tears and screaming rose by octaves. I didn’t believe you’d ever stop crying or that I’d sleep again. I remember a hazy morning after your dad went to work when grandma came and lifted you from my arms out of that rocker, and I sunk into bed to dream a dreamless sleep of the dead.
Each layer of years I travel through makes me pause. You were affectionate and full of temper and arranged your tiny dollhouses to the nth degree. As I would hum through my day of laundry and dishes and the endless straightening of a toddler-filled home, I could hear you playing in your room — endless scenarios with imaginary friends, talking and singing on your little radio with the microphone. And your creativity was a boundless energy that was unparalleled.
Don’t all parents say that? We probably do, but I knew you would break barriers by wit or by domination because there was no in-between. And then you grew. I watched you play organized soccer with boys because they had no girls team, and I remember the fury in your eyes as you were stuck in the back row playing defense time and again because girls don’t score, right? I remember that same fury in your eyes on the high school pitch as you mowed over opponents to make up for lost time.
You navigated injustice, trauma and the words that fell off 10,000 lips inside the town-shaped box that came for you. Then I watched as you burned that box in a bonfire as hot as the surface of the sun. And I smiled through my tears, taking you 1,000 miles away where college and diversity awaited you.
You are still my little girl, married woman that you are, and if I can ever type those words without crying, it will be a first. I am infinitely proud of you. My mind drifts to the time before I knew your face, when you were a very-wanted person in my lucid daydreams. I remember closing my eyes as I sat in that bathtub, fervently directing the utmost for your life. I have never been disappointed. You were born of me but are not me.
And I am thankful for the friendship we have now, what you’ve taught me through your way, not my own. Because children aren’t ours to keep and direct. Tend to your most human of hearts, my daughter, and feel the weight of your 30 years and embrace it. Every year before this has been an unfurling. It’s now time to flourish.
Melissa Kay Herrera is a columnist and author. You can find her published novel on Amazon at www.tinyurl.com/Tonolives, as well as The Gospel Book Store in Berlin. For queries or speaking engagements, email her at junkbabe68@gmail.com.