Raising Children, Raising Adults: Two Girls, Two Selkies, Two Beautiful Pelts

When I was pregnant with my daughter, I had hoped she was a boy. If you know me, you might be surprised. I appeared to be a woman who was well-adjusted into her skin--I kept my own surname, I worked with teenage girls as a profession, I had been using cloth pads for 10 years(I thought I was revolutionary), I studied women's poetry, I wrote about Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party, I knew how to follow my deep desires--but I really wasn't adjusted. Even in my thirty year old body, I was still a girl. I was a selkie wanting to finally return home, wanting to find her skin to catch the waves of the sea. I wanted to understand fully and I had so much to learn.

All those interests, those quirky personality traits, the desire to fill my life with women (stories, friends, art, poetry, sisters, nieces), and to measure my wildness by the length of my hair, were merely signs that pointed me to my lost skin.

"Over here, over there," I found in the simple well-crafted images of Elizabeth Bishop or "look right here in the compost pile," I might have heard my grandmother say to me.

But "here I am," is what I heard when I met my daughter.

For eight years now I have been trying my pelt on when no one is looking. I never take it to the sea. Oh, I tuck it away in the closet, I store it in the rafters. I even hide it from myself. Sometimes I take it out to admire it when no one is looking.

But recently my daughter was looking. She followed me in to my room. She was crying. She wanted to talk to me. She made me promise not to tell her brothers or her father. She cried. She was confused. Her tears were for women, she told me. She begged me to tell her why the world still uses the word man for human or people. Why is everything men and not men and women? Through her tears, she said it was not fair.

I understood. This I know. This I remember.

And then I remembered my pelt, my beautiful pelt. "I have to take her to the sea," I thought, "to show her how to swim with her cousins." Together. Two girls, two women, two selkies, two seals. Two pelts, two beautiful pelts no longer hidden.

"Take her to the sea before she forgets," I thought, but then I notice she is the one calling me to remember.