wing-ed feet
Scout told me last week that she wants to go on a mission trip to Venezuela next summer. Somehow, when she first said the country’s name, my brain parsed it as ‘Nicaragua’ and the hysterical unreasonable part of me recoiled violently and sort of began hissing or something crazy like that.
Then, as she kept talking, ‘Venezuela’ magically morphed from ‘Nicaragua’ back to ‘Venezuela’ and I attempted to listen in earnest.
My kid is taking French, practices speaking it conversationally (just how many times can I ask her what time it is or if she knows that the pencil is yellow or hey, where is the library located, miss? before she’s on to me, before she knows that I let two solid years of French instruction slither out of my consciousness, supplanted by things like the due dates of bills and ever-shifting grocery lists?) with me, and she wants to go to South America, for Chrissakes. I told her ass to take Spanish! I tollllld her!
MY BLUE-EYED, FAIR-SKINNED, PATENTLY GRINGA DAUGHTER WANTS TO GO TO SOUTH AMERICA WITH A GROUP OF PEOPLE I KNOW NOTHING UNDER THE HEAVENS ABOUT. Well, except that they all go to church with her grandmother, my former mother-in-law, whose prissy and judgmental guts I loathe with a certain, key intensity. How unchristian of me, I know.
The world is a mess and everyone despises Americans and, stupidly, I will let her go. I will not have it on my conscience that I stifled her adventurous, expansive, curious and empathetic heart.
But I’m equipping her with muddy brown contacts and one fuck of a spray tan before she leaves. There will be no ifs, ands or buts on that one.
7 worked it out »