My daughter just turned 21, a fact that is incomprehensible for competing reasons. One, because I feel like she just burst onto my scene a few minutes ago, rearranging my heart and priorities and understanding of what matters in an instant and forever. (Twenty-one years have passed? Impossible.)
Two, because I don’t remember life without her. (It’s only been 21 years? Impossible.)
I remember what I did and saw and learned before she was born. I remember who broke my heart and made me laugh and offered me jobs and all that stuff. But I don’t remember me without her. I’m not sure I fully inhabited my own life before I became a parent. I think I kind of followed along, like I was reading a book about this life I found myself living.
Then someone handed her to me and it hit me. You’re in charge. Of her. Of you. Of taking this gift of a human and keeping her healthy and trimming her fingernails and preparing her for the world and loving her unconditionally, unequivocally, for all time.
What a surprise. What an honor.
When she was a toddler, I used to hold her by her arms and swing her in circles in our living room, around and around, until we dissolved in laughter and dizziness and always, at some point, she would squeal the same four words: “Be careful with me!”
Don’t hit my little legs on the couch. Don’t run us into that table. Don’t drop me. “Be careful with me.” You couldn’t write a better instruction manual.
I flew from Chicago to Washington, D.C., to visit her for her 21st birthday. I texted when I landed and she directed me to the train stop closest to her college campus. Rosslyn, a little slice of Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River.
The summer after my junior year of college I interned at the Student Press Law Center, where my fellow interns and I made $700 to defend the First Amendment. I gratefully and frugally lived with relatives in suburban Maryland and rode the train to work every day. My stop was Rosslyn, which my daughter — now a junior in college — just pointed me toward.
Heart emoji. Heart doing a bunch of things.
We went to dinner that night, she and I and four of her friends, one of whom grew up a block from us in Chicago. Her mom, Sharon, is a nurse and a single mom and when I was hospitalized with COVID-19 Sharon took my kids in to stay with her. And while I was recovering from the damage to my heart, she would check on me. And now our daughters are in college together and I get to take them out to dinner together.
Heart doing a bunch of things.
Here’s where I’m going with all of this.
I try to imagine what it feels like to be in college right now, with Cornell and war and so much devastation in your newsfeed and your classrooms and your discourse. Or what it feels like to be heading to college soon, or building a life before adulthood has really set in, however that looks.
Does the world feel terrifying? Hostile? Stacked against you? Exciting? Full of promise? Depends who you are, depends on the day. Maybe all of the above, at points.
My hope is that somehow, it mostly feels like a work in progress.
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Mostly I hope this chapter feels like the middle of a much longer story. Mostly, if you’re young, I hope you feel like you’re writing that story and you can’t possibly imagine where it will go and how all the stuff now — the awful stuff and the wonderful stuff and the mundane stuff — will shape you and show up later. On a trip to Washington, D.C., maybe.
Which isn’t to say this part doesn’t matter. It’s to say the opposite. It’s to say that every part matters. Tremendously.
It’s also to say this: I wish the rest of us, the ones with youth behind us, did a better job modeling care. Humans are wired to give it. We’re wired to receive it. But it’s never what we vote for. It’s never what we fund. It’s never what we elevate. It’s not what we watch on big screens or what we reward with annual bonuses or what we give out A’s for in high school.
This lack of modeling isn’t what makes Cornell and all the other Cornells happen. Not on its own, anyway. But it matters. It matters that we have the ability and the instinct, even, to care for each other. To be careful with each other, and to ask people to be careful with us. It matters that we’ve found one million ways to disconnect ourselves from our own good instincts until all that’s left is some empty, awful drive to dominate something.
I hope that when we’re all writing our stories, the ones that are still being shaped by what we choose and where we go and what and who we protect, we remember to check back to our beginning, when care was everything. When it was our most important job, to care and be cared for. When that was the whole point.
Because I’m certain that it actually still is.
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