A Letter To My Daughter by Eric J. Weiner

Dear Chloe:

You were born an old soul and I was sure you had been here before.[i] You arrived sporting a black, faux-hawk and I immediately imagined you as a punk rock girl banging heads and breaking hearts wherever you went.[ii] From the moment you were placed on your mother’s breast, there was something in the way that you took an account of your surroundings; the alertness of your wide, brown eyes, the perpetual grin of amused curiosity that turned the corners of your rosebud lips slightly upwards, suggesting, perhaps, that you were making comparisons between an older catalogue of memories and the new reality in which you found yourself. You were born into a family tree hardened by the pain of poverty and ripened by the triumph and tenacity of Holocaust survival; a blank slate you were not. Vibrating with light and energy, yet calm like still waters, you frightened and amazed me. I desperately wanted to learn what you knew, reach across the chasm of time and space that separated us, read into the history of your dreams, but I could not speak your language. However nervous your birth made me feel, I was thrilled to have a daughter as I secretly dreaded the idea of having to raise a son within the patriarchy.

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