Rad Families by Tomas Moniz

Rad Families by Tomas Moniz

Author:Tomas Moniz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2016-02-27T16:00:00+00:00


What would you like the young folks who read your books to walk away with?

Question everything you’ve been told. Read, search, learn, and dare to think the unthinkable. Don’t let anybody tell you what to think … and that includes me.

A Clutch of Flowers: Celebrating My Love for My Daughter, One Bouquet at a Time

Jonathan Shipley

She sat in the back seat. Her mom—my soon-to-be ex-wife—was at the wheel. I was standing in the driveway. She must have known something momentous was happening. She knew, even at her young age, that the orbits of our lives were going to spin off, with trajectories similar to how they had been, but not the same. Never the same. She asked her mom to roll down the window.

“Daddy,” she said.

“Yeah, sweetheart?” I said, getting as close to her as I could. I knew it’d be some time before I saw her again. Knew that I’d have to be alone with my thoughts in that empty house. Knew I’d come home from work the next night to cold rooms, to quiet and solitude. No laughing kid. No fun music playing. No smells of fresh-baked cookies and shampoo in her hair.

“I want you to have this,” she said as she handed me a little stalk of lavender. “When you miss me you can smell it and then you’ll think of me.”

“I will,” I said, taking a sniff. “Hey, it works!”

She smiled. “I know. I love you,” she said matter-of-factly. And like that, the window was rolled up, the car crunched down our gravel driveway and cruised up the hill, turned left and out of sight. Gone. I had never felt worse in my entire life. Yet I had never felt more loved.

Me and the kiddo would always find ourselves with flowers in our hands. Every day when I got home from work to my wife, exhausted by taking care of our child all day long, my kid and I would go out. We didn’t have to go far, just a walk around the neighborhood. She loved exploring the world right outside our front door and I was all too happy to oblige her.

We’d toddle along the road, coming back to the house with fistfuls of dandelions. Those are always the first bouquets made in a young life, aren’t they? A bunch of cheery, modest flowers (by some definition, weeds, really) arranged in a shaving mug in the bathroom until they droop and wilt away. Soon, we graduated to daisies and daffodils, errant and scattered, growing in clumps in our Gold Beach neighborhood. “This daisy’s as big as my face!” She’d squeal. “This daffodil is daffy!” We’d quack like ducks.

Later, we made flower gathering a game, a challenge. “We have to make a bouquet with nothing but yellow flowers.” We’d pluck California poppies, goldenrod, butterfly weed. (Apologies to our neighbors for our surreptitious clippings. Flower thieves, we were.) We’d go home, slide open the back door. “Mom! We have something for you!” Our kid would hide the bouquet behind her back as if her mom didn’t know what we had brought home.



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