Day 59

My mom is a truth teller. That may be her greatest gift to me. She never tried to hide herself away, the way so many mothers do. She was never a mystery to me and that made me less of a mystery to myself.

One day I found a baby book in the bottom of a box of old pictures and keepsakes. It had an ivory satin cover that was yellowed with age. On the front was a faded image of a smiling infant. I opened it to find my name written in big script on the first page. It was the handwriting of a young girl, a girl who, at the age of 17, should have been attending prom instead of tending to a newborn.

I turned to the page marked "First Year." There my mother had written a short paragraph intended to serve as an overview of my first year of life. She said that I was beautiful and smart. Don't all mothers believe their children to be those things? It was the next few lines that caught my attention. She said that she didn't know what she would do without me. I was her whole world.

I have thought a lot about those words in the years since I first read them. I have imagined myself as that baby, walking on unstable legs, not yet weened from the bottle, yet bestowed with the power to save her mother. I was a hero before I could tie my own shoelaces. It was the natural consequence of being born to a mother and father who had been victimized; parents who never had the chance to heal their own wounds.

Recently, through my own writing, I came to see how this pattern played out in my relationship with my own child. I wanted to be the hero in her life. It was, after all, the only role I ever really knew. In order to do that, I had to cast her as the victim. Sometimes I still do.

On Saturday, as I talked with friends about my writing and what it is revealing to me, I saw so clearly how my attempts to rescue Kat, to be her hero, have robbed her of the opportunity to make her own way, to be her own hero. I see her doing that now , despite me, and I realize that it is time to hang up my cape.