Member-only story
Looking Back and Looking in the Mirror
Life lessons from my daughter
I’ve always been fiercely independent. I shunned outside help from a very young age, insisting on doing everything myself.
When I was seven and my fellow latchkey neighbor friends and I wanted to make swords, I broke into the basement window of our house and took an Exacto knife. I shaved off a huge chunk on my left index finger whittling a stick and, afraid to tell my mom, decided to bandage myself up with a roll of toilet paper and duct tape. Almost fifty years later, I still have a little cluster of scars along my top two knuckles.
When I was eleven, I burned my thigh trying to iron a dress on my bed. For years, I had a tiny dark brown rectangle right above the birthmark on the top corner of my leg.
When I was seventeen, I bought five plane tickets from Chicago to Florida (via Newark) on People’s Express Airlines with a money order. My high school friends and I wanted to go on a senior trip, so I collected cash from all of them and bought the tickets through a travel agent. It didn’t even occur to me to ask my mom or dad to use their credit card.
When I graduated from college and moved 2000 miles from home, my mom tried to connect me with a friend of hers in my new city to help me make some connections for a “good” job. I…