Not My Daughter

I’ve always believed that words have power. One of my favorite euphemisms for putting a curse on someone is “to put words” on someone–to bind them by the finality and imperviousness of actual words, of letters, the actual building blocks of the universe. And owing to my deep loyalty to this belief, I won’t allow people to say things in my presence that I really don’t want to come true.

Nevertheless, my midwife cursed my daughter and me on the day of her birth. As she slid into this world covered in goo and screaming her slimy pink head off, my midwife stared at her white skin, her slender nose, the almond shape of her eyes, the dark blonde hair. And the midwife looked from the newborn baby to me, her newborn mother, and put words on us both with, “If I didn’t just take this baby out of you I’d never believe she was yours.”

And with those foul words, a world of difference between mother and daughter was created.

My daughter and I have nothing in common. I am girly and frivolous. I like mary janes and sparkly eyeshadow. I hoard perfume the way a junkie hoards his crack cocaine. My daughter is sporty and serious, deeply concerned about following rules and obeying orders. She wouldn’t be caught dead in a shoes that showed her toes, an making herself pretty means brushing her hair with a wet brush to flatten every single hair against her head so that she looks like a greasy homeless person. Where I am spontaneous and carefree, she’s a planner and a worrier, always fretting about details I’m much happier to leave to chance.

When she was younger, the glaring discrepancy between our personalities bothered me. I tried to mold her into a miniature version of me. Those of you who have tried this know how well it works, which is to say that it doesn’t. (I am reminded of Alanis Morissette’s song “8 Easy Steps” where she offers to teach you “How to control someone to be a carbon copy of you; how to have that not work and have them run away from you.”) Try as I might, my daughter insisted upon having her own personality, her own likes and dislikes. And nothing I did could dissuade her; in fact, my attempts to make her more like me succeeded only in emphasizing the ways in which were we neatly and irreparably different.

Eventually, we came to accept each other. When asked what she thought of my new blouse, she learned to say, “Well, it’s not something I would wear but it looks very nice on you” and I learned to ignore that her clothes didn’t match or that she went to school with dried milk on her upper lip. When we went shopping not too long ago, she bought a hideous pair of polka dotted shoes.

“I hate those shoes,” I said to my husband as she walked out the door to go to church with a friend.

“Then why’d you let her buy them?” he asked, bewildered.

I shrugged. “She likes them. She’ll wear them. And they were cheap. So what do I care?”

But secretly, deep down in my heart, I was sad that she was completely unlike me in all the ways that mattered.

Except, she wasn’t. She isn’t. I found out last week that my daughter, my antithesis, can sing.

I grew up in a musical household. My mother has a sparkling coloratura soprano and my father is a songwriter and musician. Singing and composing are part of my DNA. I studied opera in high school, and although I abandoned opera as a career, it still holds a special place in my heart. I sing all the time. (In fact, my son’s kindergarten class recently did a mother’s day project where one of the things the children had to talk about was their mother’s favorite song. My son responded, “Her favorite song is every song.”)

But although in the school choir, my daughter never sings around the house. Ever. So I assumed that she couldn’t. After all, she’s always moaning that she doesn’t have a talent–if she could sing, I figured she would.

She sang a solo at her choir concert. She sang a solo that stupefied me. I watched her with my mouth agape, my mind whirling. “How can this child, this child with this amazing voice, be my daughter? How can she have this gift that I never knew she had? ”

But the shock was only momentary, because it was soon replaced with the most amazing realization–that my daughter, who was cursed from birth to not be my daughter, did have something of me in her veins after all. So she didn’t get my dark, curly hair or my brown skin. She didn’t get my upside down or my too-wide nose or my long, crooked fingers. What she got from me is more intimate, more astounding, more breath-taking, because though it isn’t immediately apparent, it bonds us together in a way nothing else could. The gift of song passed through the placenta and penetrated her soul. And now she is mine. And if we never share a similarity in any other way ever again, we’ll always have this.

And for that, I am eternally grateful.

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