What I thought of as my first language is foreign to you and I didn’t grasp the nuances of this, your native tongue, until many years after your birth, when I claimed it as my own.
What I would have said, had I known what I know now:
I see you, I recognize your face, of course I do — I’ve loved you since before you were conceived.
You entered this world of sound and fury already poised for a fight, my precocious pugilist.
From that moment I first held you, I knew: you are a phoenix, rising, burning with the fire of your own passion, rising again –
but instead I asked, how have I given birth to this warrior? Surely, a warrior must be born of a warrior.
Many years passed,
again & again I watched you soar, fearlessly, even as you approached descent —
I held my breath every time.
And every time, I watched in terror and awe as you burned to ash —
an exquisitely painful process, though only your eyes betrayed your suffering as you breathed through the labor of rebirth.
I stood by, a witness to your strength of spirit, ready to catch you, to help ease the pain, though I knew not how.
Mostly, I did what mothers do:
tucked you in at night, kissed your brow, left the door open a crack
fed you, clothed you, made you soup when you were sick
tried to smooth the way for you in the knowledge of your uniqueness —
only to one day be met with such uncharacteristic anger and rage, words ripped from your throat and aimed at me like arrows from a quiver.
And then you were gone,
for years that may well have been decades, you were gone and I was left with nothing more than singed feathers and questions.
In your absence I tried to come to terms with my failure — surely a warrior must be born of a warrior, with the cruelness particular to self-loathing, these words haunted me,
until one day, from deep within, arose a fierceness I’d only ever equated with you, my warrior phoenix daughter, and a voice I now know is my true voice spoke,
A warrior must be born of a warrior.
The implications reverberated through bone and sinew, and perhaps blood, because in the next moment, you’d returned, hand outstretched resting above my heart;
Our words may have sounded the same, but they differed in meaning, your heart said to mine. It’s as though we learned language from different lexicons, so everything was lost in translation.
And finally my heart understood what my mind had not;
warrior blood runs through me, passed on to me from my mother, and to my daughter from me.
Suddenly, as though a fugue lifted,
I remembered who I am,
who I have always been,
and my voice was my own when I said to you,
We can fly,
already feeling weightless, because
we were soaring.