My daughter, now 17, had her last school day on Friday.

A moment, for both of us, in very different ways.

As a mother, I have mostly delineated my life in accordance with her timelines, her growing upness and its attendant and essential growing awayness. Now, I wonder about her life ahead, about the separate worlds we increasingly inhabit, and I work on allowing the distance between us to flourish.

I like this poem by Natalie Shapero, which wonderfully encapsulates the essence of poetry – the saying of so much with so few words.

Survive Me

It wasn’t for love of having

children that I had a child.

Rather, I simply didn’t know how a person

could cross, fully shoeless, a bed of coals

and not burn, and I needed

someone to pass this to.

I needed my obtuseness to survive me.

But I never accounted for our thwarting era.

Every day, the paper

runs a remembrance

of a child, the notice struggling to sing the few

years lived: He never sketched the Earth without

its hatch of latitudes. She did

not like to try new foods.

–Natalie Shapero