Surely I didn’t let this much time go by since I wrote anything down here — I must, between June and now, have written down something!
Be that as it may — it does little good to worry at my words, or at their absence. It is a new school year, a blank slate. My oldest daughter is long and lean and tan and gimlet-eyed, she swings a leg over her blue bike (brand-named Moxie) and pedals into her future.
My work is practically done! I feel both proud and sorry. First I had no children, and then — it seemed like suddenly but it actually was not — I did. Tiny newborns who demanded attention from me that I hadn’t, up until that minute, known how to give another human being.
And now, it feels like seconds later — my job has become the inverse of that. To step back. To ignore the maternal clutch I can’t help but feel as the spokes of the bicycle wheels flash in the sun and my firstborn rides off without looking back, standing up on the pedals, her back straight.
Katherine L. Hester 