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Barbara Kingsolver
Letter to a Daughter at Thirteen

Here’s a secret you should know about mothers: We spy. Yes, on our kids. It starts at birth. In those first months, we spend twenty-three hours a day trying to get you to sleep, grateful you aren’t yet verbal because at some point we run out of lyrics to the lullabies and start singing, “Hush little baby, don’t be contrary, / Mama’s gonna have a coro-nary.” And then you finally doze off, and what do you think we do? Go read a book? No, we stand over your cradle and stare, thinking, God, those little fingernails. Those eyelashes. Where did this perfect creature come from?

As you grow older, we attain higher orders of sneakiness. You’re playing dolls with your friend, and we just pause outside the door of your room, hmm-mm, pretending to fiddle with the thermostat but really listening to you say, “Oh, my dear, here is your tea,” as you hand her a recycled plastic Valvoline cap of pretend tea, and our hearts crack, we are such fools for love. We love you like an alcoholic loves gin--it makes our teeth hurt, it’s the first thing we think about before we open our eyes in the morning--and like that, we take little swigs when nobody’s looking…

Excerpted from I Wanna Be Sedated: 30 Writers on Parenting Teenagers Copyright 2002 by Barbara Kingsolver