by valérie kuki
Each of our daughters has provided me a unique gift with the presence of their lives in mine. Our eldest, a twenty-six year old senior law student exemplifies the epitome of loyalty.
That she chose to move back home and resume living in her old room while attending
law school touched me greatly. It gave me the invaluable opportunity to witness her ascendance into young adulthood and womanhood.
It also provided me a portal through which to revisit my young adult life.
Though I married at twenty-one, much remains similar between me, and our eldest daughter, yet married.
Her ambition and drive remind me so much of the unfinished business I entered with into my marriage. Fortunately I returned to school in my early thirties, while pregnant with our second, now a junior in college, earning a MA in psychology, and for a second time when I was forty-four.
The decade in between found me giving birth to our third child then, a week later and while nursing her, participating in a study group in preparation for taking my oral examination towards licensure as a practicing Marriage and Family Therapist.
Our youngest was seven years old and sitting on my knee–our two elder a college sophomore and high school freshman–when I listened to my fellow graduates offer speeches in the ceremony honoring the earning of our MFA’s in Creative Writing.
Our elder daughter and her sisters have observed me in this process of reaching for my passion, while working passionately as their mother to provide them a large table from which to draw inspiration and knowledge on which they might build a firm foundation for pursuing the same in their lives.
I am thankful for not simply the presence of their lives in mine, but their experience of witnessing me, their mother, in my striving.
The variable of the witness is so important. In the concept of quantum mechanics regarding emotions and experience, the witness introduces a fourth an invaluable factor for making things real and indelibly binding them in the psyche of our memories.
And as we know memories create immortality, give evidence of our presence for eternity and time immemorial.
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