My Daughter the Cat
I am going to tell you for moment about my ten-year-old daughter, my middle child – because I am deeply in love with her, and I am fairly sure that she keeps the world spinning.
She has a tan, small face and tiny features like a mouse or a squirrel. There is a smattering of freckles across her nose like someone has been flinging wild oats out to the horses.
Like her mama, she needs her quiet time. If she gets overwhelmed, she might really let you have it, yelling and screaming at one moment, then taking a moment alone to recollect herself and then reemerging moments later like some kind of beautiful, kind, sweet thing. A thing transformed.
“Oh, hello. I love you,” she will say when she comes back to herself, even if she never left but has been standing in front of you the entire time.
Despite what I have just told you, everyone would say that she has charisma and a calm soul. Even when she was first born, she would look not at you, but through you. She isn’t afraid to hold a person’s gaze. “Wow,” my friends would say to her when they held her as a baby, “Whatever do you see in there? In the deepest darkest depths of my soul?”
She still isn’t afraid of looking into people. She never backs down and she never looks away. She can look at you, swallow you up, understand what you are really all about, your fears, your darkness, all the bad things that you could do and then she loves you anyway.
From the moment I held her as a newborn, I thought to myself – and this is a strange thing for a mom to think about the baby she had birthed moments before – I’m not sure this baby needs me. She’ll just humor me for awhile.
We joke (not to her face) that she is a cat in a family of dogs. She doesn’t feel the need to slobber on you or kiss your ass, like the rest of us do. She rarely even feels the need to answer you when she is called. She would just as soon lie in the sun and scratch herself. She will answer you when she is good and ready. She moves through life, catlike and stretchy. Lithe and animalistic.
She is an amazing piece of work. She is a pure and happy thing. When she walks, she skips. Sometimes she locks her elbows and swings her fists, little pendulums that propel her down the street. It is her way.
And when she is on her bike and going really fast, she can’t stop herself from giggling. Great peals of laughter rip out of her.
I love her. She loves me. And that’s how it will be forever and ever. Amen.
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