April is National Poetry Month. Honoring a threshold for yourself or your child can be marked by writing a simple piece of poetry. Bittersweet. Insanely happy. Contentedly present. All are valid emotions and valid ways of marking the passages in our lives. Here’s one I wrote marking my daughter’s 13th year awhile back:
A Chunk of Me
walked out the door
with size 2 pants and a
skateboard shirt.
I don’t know how
to bring her back;
she will experience my world
in size 12-year-old thoughts,
I will experience hers
in size 39.
I reel back the invisible
fishing line
I’ve attached to her
ankles
in the hope of synthesizing
her soul back into mine,
but like all good fish,
she slips away.
– Gina Marie Mammano
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Ah! Exactly! Thank you for that lovely rich morsel of humor intertwined with wistfulness.
Thank you, T!! And a lovely-worded comment on your end as well!
Oh, that all young girls be tethered by the ankles with an invisible line to mothers such as you.
You are so sweet! Almost brings me to tears as I sit here looking out the window across the New Mexican desert . . . .