George Bishop - Letter To My Daughter

FOR MY FATHER

I shall but love thee better after death.

ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING ,
Sonnets from the Portuguese, NO. 43

MARCH 22, 2004
BATON ROUGE

Dear Elizabeth,

How to begin this? Its early morning and Im sitting here wondering where you are, hoping youre all right. I havent slept since you left. Your father says theres no sense in phoning the police yet; youre probably just blowing off steam, and youll be back as soon as you run out of money or the car runs out of gas, whichever comes first. I shouldnt be so hard on myself, he says. What with the way you spoke to me last night, it would take more forbearance than anyones capable of not to react the way I did, and besides, it wasnt even that much of a slap.

Still, I blame myself. I keep seeing the look on your face as you brought your hand up to your cheekthe shock, the hurt, then the cold stare that bordered on hatred. When I heard the back door close in the middle of the night, I thought to myself, Well. There she goes. But it was only when I was standing on the driveway in my nightgown watching the taillights of my car disappear down the street that I understood just how bad this has become.

Ill try not to insult you by saying I know how it feels to be fifteen. (I can see you rolling your eyes.) But believe it or not, I was your age once, and I had the same ugly fights with my parents. And I promised myself that if I ever had a daughter, I would be a better parent to her than mine were to me. My daughter, I told myself, would never have to endure the same inept upbringing that I did. I would be the perfect mother: patient and understanding, kind and sensible. I would listen to all my girls problems, help her when she needed it, and together we would build a bridge of trust that would carry us both into old age. Our relationshipit seemed so simple thenwould be marked by love, not war.

Well. Things dont always turn out the way we want them to, do they? Sometimes when Im yelling at you for coming in late, or criticizing your choice of friends, or your taste in clothing, or your apparent indifference to anything having to do with family or school or future, I hear my mothers voice coming out of my mouth. My mothers very words, even. In spite of all my best intentions, I find myself becoming her. And you, of course, become me, reacting the same way I reacted when I was your age, revisiting all the same hurts that I suffered, and so completing one great big vicious circle of ineptitude.

I want to stop this. Ive thought and thought, and Im not sure how to go about it, except maybe to make it a rule to do everything that my mother didnt do and not to do everything that she dida crude way to right the wrongs, no doubt, and not altogether fair to my mother, who on occasion could be a decent person.

But one thing Ive realized that my mother never didand this was perhaps her greatest failing as a parentthe one thing she never did was to give me any good honest advice about growing up. Oh, she gave me plenty of rules, to be sure. She was a fountain of rules: sit up straight, keep your legs together, dont run, dont shout, dont frown, dont wear too much makeup or boys will think youre a tramp. But she never told me what I really wanted to know: How does a girl grow up? How does a girl make it through that miserable age called adolescence and finally get to become a woman?

This was something I thought I might be able to help you with. I always pictured us sitting down together and having a talk, mother to daughter. Youd take your earphones out, Id turn off the TV. Your father would be out running errands and so wed have the whole afternoon to ourselves. In this talk, I would begin by telling you, as straightforwardly as I could, the story of my own adolescence. My intention would be not to shock or embarrass you, but to try and show you were not all that different, you and I. I do know what its like to be your age: I was there once, after all. I lived through it. And hearing the mistakes I made, you might learn from them and not have to repeat them. You could be spared my scars, in other words, so that the life you grow up in might be better than the one I had. Today, I thought, would be a good time for us to have this talk, your fifteenth birthday.

As nice as it sounds, that probably isnt going to happen, is it? I think I made sure of that last night when I slapped you and drove you from our home. I could hardly blame you now if you dont want to listen to me. Itll take more than apologies for you to begin to trust me again.

So what Ive decided to do is that while Im sitting here waiting for you to return, Ill write down in a letter everything Ive always meant to tell you but never have. Maybe a letter is a poor substitute for the talk I always wanted us to have. But its a start at least, and I hope youll find it in yourself, if not today then sometime in the future, to accept it in the same spirit that I write it. Think of it as my birthday present to yousomething that my mother never told me, but that Ill endeavor now with all my heart to tell you: the truth about how a girl grows up. The truth about life.

Im on my third cup of coffee now and theres still no sign of you. Your dads out back mowing the grass like nothing ever happened. Im not going to get all panicky, not yet. Its still early, and I intend to keep my mind from imagining the worst. But I do hope youll be back in time to spend at least some of your birthday with us. I do hope youre okay, Liz.

Begin at the beginning, Sister Mary Margaret always told us.

The beginning of this, I suppose, is 1969, when I was your age, a freshman in high school. We still had the farm thenyou know, the old house in Zachary where your Mams and Gramps used to live. Zachary wasnt like it is today. It really was the sticks then. I often felt we mightve been living on Mars for all the contact we had with the rest of the world. Our house was at the end of a gravel road, a mile and a half from any other home, and I mostly hated living there. I was only a farm girl in the sense that I could ride a horse and, if forced to, I could milk a cow. But as a teenager, generally I wanted nothing to do with cows and horses and alfalfa crops. I went to school, read magazines, and watched The Partridge Family on TV on Friday nights, suspecting that everyone in the world lived a more glamorous and exciting life than I did. Probably a lot like you.

Your grandparents were Baptists, as you know, and certainly more strict with me than Ive ever been with you. They were what, if you were feeling generous, you might call conservative. If you were feeling more honest, you might call them narrow-minded and racist. Mom loathed The Partridge Familythought it was a disgrace that a single mother would tramp around the country with all those long-haired kids in a painted school bus. And Dadwell, your grandfather loathed the blacks. Sorry to say.

The schools in Louisiana were just then getting integrated, if you can believe that. Im sure Ive told you this before. Nineteen seventy was the year all the white students from Zachary High and all the black students from Lincoln High were to be mixed up together at one school. You can imagine the commotion this announcement caused, especially among people like your grandfather. There were rallies, the National Guard was called in, the KKK was called in