Excerpt: "On Going Home" by Joan Didion

Wednesday, September 2, 2015

In the evening, after she has gone to sleep, I kneel beside the crib and touch her face, where it is pressed against the slats, with mine.  She is an open and trusting child, unprepared for and unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life. I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and her great-grandmother's teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her homefor her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that.  I give her a xylophone and a sundress from Madeira, and promise to tell her a funny story.
I cry every time I read this essay. Reading it now, on the verge of our move to somewhere closer to home, I am just completely torn up, but hopeful.

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