Synonyms & Scotch

I have been away far too long; I apologize. I appreciate the emails and the requests for more.

It's been a very busy six weeks for me as my oldest daughter is graduating from high school next week. It doesn’t seem so long ago that I was wearing a cap and gown sitting through endless speeches waiting to have my name called by someone I had spent my high school career avoiding so he could hand me my diploma, which seemed to me at that time like a release form from servitude. It wasn’t.

One of the strange ironies of life is that parenting is assigned to young people with no parenting experience. Let’s face it; I didn’t know anything about raising a child. I was, in most ways, still a child myself. I barely knew how to take care of myself those early years, much less, act like I competently knew what to do for a baby girl. That part about figuring out what I want to be when I grow up seems to be taking an awfully long time. While I’ve been busy working on that puzzle, my daughter was busy just changing from a child to an amazing adult. It’s one of life’s cruelties that as children we wish to be older and when we’re older we wish we were children again. But as I was trying my best to manage the minute-by-minute, the days turned to years and the years zipped on by.

Here comes the major cliché: it seems like only yesterday that I sat with her in my hands and cried over how beautiful she was. I promised her then that I would protect her with my life. This is the first and most enduring oath I took as a parent: “I will always be there for you. I will always protect you.”

If I am allowed only one regret, and I don’t want to think of my life as one to regret, it is that I’ve spent so much of my life rushing around in search of things that proved to matter little, while I walked past the things that matter most; like spending more time with my daughters.

They are always in my thoughts. They possess so much of my heart.

To them, I will say it again: "I will always be there for you. I will always protect you."


Ask Me

I don't know what growing roses is like,
but I am a father.
Wild Mountain Thyme singing girls
tenuously seeking to soften the barren ground
of my heart seem sweet. They have so much color.
And from the way they talk, like orchids
drunk on steamy sub-tropic air;
they make me wonder
are all flowers so lovely?
I wouldn't know. But ask me
about smiles that bloom from a cry,
of fragile laughs minute and perfect,
that turn sour grapes to warm bouquets,
how all creation is buried beneath
their nurturing shroud,
and I'll tell you they're
God's blossoms in a world laid bare.
I'm a daughter's father, ask me about roses.

- m.r. kidd

Daughter (mp3) - Loudon Wainwright III

Daughters (mp3)- John Meyer

Wild Mountain Thyme (mp3) Al Petteway