MY DAUGHTER CAME HOME WITH MY CHILDHOOD ON HER FACE

Dear Delyara, My daughter came home from school with chewing gum in her hair. She said it was an accident. I knew it wasn’t. I recognized the way she looked at the floor while speaking. I recognized the rush to protect the children who hurt her. I recognized the shame of being afraid that adults will make the humiliation more public by trying to help. When I was eleven, girls held me down in the locker room and wrote UGLY across my stomach with a marker. I have never told anyone. Tonight, while cutting the gum out of my daughter’s hair, I could smell the same cheap strawberry scent from the marker they used on me. My hands started shaking. She asked why I was crying, and I told her I was upset about her hair. That was only partly true. I was crying because the frightened child I buried inside me has been waiting all these years, and tonight she looked up through my daughter’s eyes.