daughters

You are not broken and in need of fixing. You are wounded and in need of healing.

Seed becomes tree, son becomes stranger.

I'd grown up hearing stories about the special hazards that girls faced. I knew where the bodies were found: naked on beaches or cut into pieces, parts frozen in freezers or buried in cement. These stories were never kept from us girls. Instead they were spread around like ghost stories, our parents hoping that fear would do the job that our judgment might not.

Girls should be strong together. Strong like steel, merry like the tinkling of chimes dancing in the wind.

This was why Kiki had dreaded having girls: she knew she wouldn't be able to protect them from self-disgust.

Since you haven__ got a name,_ he said. __ guess you can pick one for yourself. Would you like to pick one for me to write down?__he stopped rocking and looked at him. __ can do that? It__ legal and everything?__e smiled. __t__ a free country again,_ he said. __t least in theory.__he nodded. __nd when I pick a name it can be any name I want?__e nodded.__hat__ your name?___ictor,_ he said. __ic, for short.___kay,_ she said, leaning forward and taking the pad from under his large thing hands. __ow do you spell that?__e spelled it and she wrote it down. Her handwriting was perfectly small and legible. __an I be Victor, too?_ she said, looking up from the pad.He smirked. __t__ a boy__ name,_ he said. __ou__e a girl. You have to add an i and an a to the end if you want to make it a girl__ name.__he looked down at the name she had written and added the letters i and a to the end. __ictoria,_ she said, passing the notepad back to the cop.__ello, Victoria,_ he said, smiling, taking the pad and pen back and presenting his hand for a shake. __t__ nice to meet you, officially.

I am thinking about the way that life can be so slippery; the way that a twelve-year-old girl looking into the mirror to count freckles reaches out toward herself and that reflection has turned into that of a woman on her wedding day, righting her veil. And how, when that bride blinks, she reopens her eyes to see a frazzled young mother trying to get lipstick on straight for the parent/teacher conference that starts in three minutes. And how after that young woman bends down to retrieve the wild-haired doll her daughter has left on the bathroom floor, she rises up to a forty-seven-year-old, looking into the mirror to count age spots.

He was too smitten by his second wife and the sons she produced easily and regularly at eighteen-month intervals to bother too much about a daughter.

You come from your mauma, you sleep in the bed with her till you're near twenty years grown, and you still don't know what haunches in the dark corners of her.

He had been searching for it his entire life. He had devoted himself to poetry to find it. Now, in the middle of his life, he found it. It was in the face of the love of his life, his daughter. She who had never blushed before, now blushed. And in that blushing, he knew, was the existence of God. That was the day her father learned what God was. God was pure beauty, God was his daughter__ face when she blushed.

No matter how old you are, you always want your mother__ love and acceptance. I guess I__ hoping one day I__l get it back.

Mothers and daughters together are a powerful force to be reckoned with

In my dating career, I had found that mothers seemed to like me; fathers did not. Period. So I tended to avoid contact with the dads. I assumed that this wasn't personal. Rather, it was simply the fact that I was a hormone-laden, male teenager with a fully functional penis, who happened to be in the presence of their daughters.

Like a detective keenly searching for clues, our daughters are solving the mystery of womanhood itself.

We must teach our girls that if they speak their mind, they can create the world they want to see. (145)

Tereza's mother never stopped reminding her that being a mother meant sacrificing everything. Her words had the ring of truth, backed as they were by the experience of a woman who had lost everything because of her child. Tereza would listen and believe that being a mother was the highest value in life and that being a mother was a great sacrifice. If a mother was Sacrifice personified, then a daughter was Guilt, with no possibility of redress.

Fathers never have exactly the daughters they want because they invent a notion a them that the daughters have to conform to.

What I really want to tell him is to pick up that baby of his and hold her tight, to set the moon on the edge of her crib and to hang her name up in the stars.