I Heard My Daughter Singing Upstairs

Dear Delyara, It was not a proper song. Just little lines of something repeated and half-invented while she moved around in her room. I stood at the bottom of the stairs and listened. Children sing when they feel safe enough to be unwatched inside themselves. That is what I always think when I hear it. And maybe that is why it reaches me so deeply. Because the world does not always feel safe, and I cannot control most of it, and still there she was upstairs singing to herself as if joy were allowed to take up sound. It made me feel relieved and sad at the same time. Relieved for the child. Sad for the woman who notices how rare that feeling has become in herself.