hello.
If you are looking for advice on canoeing with your 13-year-old daughter, I have none. Come to think of it, I have no advice on what there is to be done with a 13-year-old daughter, except that here we are, in the same boat, trying to navigate our way down river, or up river, without causing too much damage to the boat or to ourselves.
Let her navigate, is what I suggest. Let her be in front. Tell her you’ll follow her lead – if she goes left, you’ll go left, etc. You’re not lying, she is calling the shots. Plus, it’s good for her to see and assess what is in front of her. If you do it for her, your back to her and you crane your neck to yell, “We’re going to need to turn soon, and also look at those turtles,” she’s not going to listen because she wants to see the world for herself.
This way, she’ll see the turtles first. And the lotus flowers, too. She will be the one to consider what to do when we come to a tree branch sticking out of the water. She’ll look at the beaver teeth marks on the branch before coming up with a plan so as not to disrupt what home she thinks they might be trying to build.
You’ll remember when she was in Kindergaten and she checked out a book on Amelia Earhart. She read it and marked it up with post-it notes and drew pictures of airplanes and the Bermuda Triangle and that Sunday in church a friend told you that Hadley’s prayer request was for Amelia Earhart. That Amelia would be found.
She’ll tell you why some of the trees are dead as you move along the water. She’ll say something about acid and pine needles and too much water, or not enough. “Mark* told me this,” she’ll say. “He knows everything about trees, and plants, and grass. Steer right, Mom. We are getting too close to the side.”
You’ll push the oar deeper into the water and feel the pressure of trying to support her, of trying to help her get to where she wants to go.
Mark is her boss, and he is kind and he is gruff and she is learning that she still lives in a world where she must prove she is capable of doing certain kinds of work not despite the fact that she is a girl, but because she is a girl. She wants to fly. She wants to do something with herself. She was made for big things, you think as successfully steer the two of you away from long stemmed purple flowers with one, bright red one off to the side.
So she is learning about nuance and what it means to be female, and whether or not she is going to embrace those beliefs, or whether she is going to listen to herself, who she is, how she was created, how she feels, and what she believes about herself outside early in the morning when the world is still damp and the clouds seems to be lifting up from the grass because they’ve fallen asleep but now it’s time to rise.
She’s learning about how to take care of things that grow – what they need and what they don’t need – you think as the two of you get to a point in the river where there’s a bridge with three tunnels to go through – all of them dark, all of them with a slant of light at each end. She lifts her oar out of the water and we coast for a second.
There is no stopping, there is no way to know which tunnel is the best, there is no way to tell what we will see when we go through.
“To the left,” she says, and we plunge our oars into the water.
(*name has been changed)
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Writing this month:
read well:
Last month, I finished You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit by James K.A. Smith. I particularly loved the chapters on worship and education. I also read Charity Singleton Craig’s The Art of the Essay which is an excellent resource for essay writers, and essay readers, too. Erin Loechner’s Chasing Slow was a great read for a little vacation we took up North, and I finished Jeanine Hathaway’s Long After Lauds, which is a wonderful book of poems exploring what’s left after the prayers have been said; after the work has been done.
I’m hoping to finish All the Light We Cannot See in August, and I need a new poetry book to read. I am desperately missing going to the library and pulling as many books and magazines as I can hold off the shelves. I never know what I want to read. I try to keep lists, but there is something delightful and mischievous about not knowing what you’re headed for and how you’ll be changed once you turn the page.
offerings:
Reading Well, Writing Well: Building a Writer’s Toolbox
twirl girl and the teacher.
Twirl gives language to the fierce concerns of an ordinary woman. It tracks small but defining moments, attesting to the joys of design and the pleasure of color we feel as we choose and joke and work and play in jeans, sandals, a coat, T-shirts. Start reading and you will be hooked.
–Jeanne Murray Walker, author of The Geography of Memory
The Teacher Diaries – Callie Feyen is not just a writer, she is a weaver. She seamlessly threads her past, her students’ experiences, and the timeless tale of Romeo and Juliet into a story of growth and remembrance. She brings the ache of early teenhood to life, and I was transported along with her students every step of the way. Honestly, 8th grade would have been better if she had been my guide. —Stephanie Stearns Dulli, Director Listen To Your Mother Show DC
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