Fear Factor
Let me count the ways I'm afraid of my daughter.
by AM Homes
December 11, 2006
Am I going to be one of those parents who say, "If you must do it, do it
at home? Better in my house — where at least I know what's going on — then
somewhere else where I don't"? What am I going to say to her about birth
control, about safe sex? What will that mean — a decade from now?
She is a girl who wakes up in a good mood. She starts her day saying, "I
so happy — you so happy?" She is excited about her life — her future. She
has already decided that when she grows up she will be a ballerina. When her
class was discussing what happens in the rainforest, she raised her hand and
announced, apropos of nothing, that when she grows up she will be a ballerina
and that everyone in the class was invited to see her perform. I live in fear
of her being unhappy, of my doing things as a parent that will undermine her, that
when she's older she will be unhappy and it will be my fault.
"Hold me," she says in the middle of the night, and I do. And I imagine what
she will be like, years from now, as someone's partner and as someone's
mother.
"I'm not a child anymore," she told me this morning. She is wrong.
She is three-and-a-half and has a long way to go. She spent the morning wearing a fleece,
full-body Winnie-the-Pooh costume and said she couldn't have eggs for breakfast
because, "Winnie-the-Pooh only eats honey and could I have a jar of honey,
please. Please!"
"Mommy, I love you," she says out of the blue and she wraps herself around
me and she is so small and every bit as perfect as I could desire. From the moment we first met, I could not imagine her as anything different
from what she is — a most beautiful girl.
©2006 A.M. Homes and Nerve Media
About the Author
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A.M. Homes is the author of numerous novels and short stories, including The
Safety of Objects, The End Of Alice, Music For Torching and This Book Will Save Your Life (Viking, 2006). Her memoir The Mistress's Daughter will be published by Viking in
April 2007. |
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