Thirty-Eight Questions My Daughter Asked Me

She wanted to know me more fully to better understand herself

My daughter is afraid I will die.

It’s an understandable fear when you love someone. It’s even more understandable during a pandemic.

Obviously, I’ll die. So will she. What she really fears is that I’ll die before she’s ready — and one of the ways she’s trying to handle that fear is by preserving me through my words.

It makes sense. I’m a writer, a talker; words are the way I share myself with the world. Some daughters collect photos of their mothers or place the scarves and sweaters their mothers have knit in a cedar chest. My daughter wants to collect my words.

“Can I interview you, Mom? Ask you some questions about your life?”

Her request, appearing suddenly on my iPhone, was both surprising and not surprising. While neither of us knew anyone who had died from the virus — yet — the sense of fragility was everywhere.

“Sure,” I texted back, and she sent me a list of thirty-eight questions that she wanted me to answer.

Some of the questions were straightforward, predictable.

Who was your first kiss? When was the first time you got drunk? What was the happiest day of your life?

Others were more complex.

When did you begin to truly love yourself?

The ones that touched me the most were her questions about our family history and successive generations. She wanted to know how I felt about having parents, being a parent, and imagining her as a parent.

She knew my parents as grandparents — old, fussy, generous beings who didn’t nag her to do her homework or clean her room, but simply treasured the time they spent together. This was different. She wanted to understand what it was like to have them as parents, not as grandparents.

What traits do you have that remind you of your parents? How have those traits helped or stifled you in your life? How do you feel you let your parents down?

She also wanted to understand my experience as her mother — not as a mother, generally, but as her mother. She wasn’t an easy adolescent — we both knew that — and I think she wanted me to assure her that I had forgiven her, or maybe she hoped I would help her to forgive herself.

What do you wish you could have saved me from? What advice do you most wish I would have listened to? If you could change one thing about my life, what would it be?

Other questions had to do with her emerging vision of herself as a potential mother. In them, there was a hope that I might help her to do it well.

If you could give me three things you hope I instill in my children, what would they be?

She wanted to know how I felt about having parents, being a parent, and imagining her as a parent.

However, as I continued to ponder her questions, I began to see them in another way.

Some are about her desire to know me more deeply. She wants to know about my jobs, my favorite holidays, my childhood friends. After all, that’s the stated purpose of the “interview.”

Who do you feel knows you the best? How many times have you been in love?

Other questions are about her desire for me to know her — to be sure that I’ve truly seen her.

What have I done that has made you the proudest? What have I done that has caused you the most pain?

That took me aback. It seemed as if she was sneaking in a request for me to talk about her, rather than about myself. Then I realized the two desires can’t be separated — to know the other, and to be known.

To know the other without being known oneself leads to a deep loneliness, a sense of isolation even in the midst of presumed intimacy. To be known without knowing the other is equally isolating; it means the other has held back, refusing exposure and the vulnerability that follows. It’s the mutual feeling we long for, the reciprocal sense of being seen.

And then I realized that there’s a third level.

When I know that I’m truly seen — because I’ve revealed myself intentionally, or because I’ve found myself under the gaze of someone who’s managed to penetrate all the masks — I become visible to myself. To be seen like that is to be accepted. Through your vision and acceptance, I can see and accept myself.

I understood now.

My daughter wants to know me more fully because she hopes, in knowing me, that she herself will be known — by me, and by herself.

I don’t have the answers my daughter is really seeking. She’ll have to find them for herself, in her own time and in her own way. But I’m honored that she’s trusting me with her questions.

I don’t have a terminal illness, by the way. I’m simply mortal, with a finite number of days, though I’m not sure I really believed it before the pandemic. Mortality always seemed philosophical, distant, generic. My daughter’s questions made it real.

As I face the almost unfathomable uncertainty around us, I’m trying to keep my daughter’s final question in mind:

How do you want to be remembered?

Barbara Linn Probst is a writer of both fiction and non-fiction. Her debut novel Queen of the Owls is the powerful story of a woman’s search for wholeness, framed around the art and life of iconic American painter Georgia O’Keeffe. Queen of the Owls was selected as one of the 20 most anticipated books of 2020 by Working Mother and one of the best Spring fiction books by Parade Magazine, and a debut novel “too good to ignore” by Bustle. It was also featured in lists compiled by Pop Sugar and Entertainment Weekly, among others. It won the bronze medal for popular fiction from the Independent Publishers Association, and placed first runner-up in general fiction for the Eric Hoffer Award. Barbara’s second novel, The Sound Between the Notes, is slated for publication in April 2021.