'A clean slate, with your own face on'

Another little milestone in the whirl of day-to-day parenting; Boo started studying an author whose work I have studied. I am conscious as she gets older that she will step the same path as I did; the urge I feel to arm her with wisdom as she takes those steps, can be overwhelming. I have to remind myself that she is her own person; she is not another me.

Boo came home from school with a Sylvia Plath poem...rather advanced for 10 years of age I thought, but it was lovely; the poem 'You're' is about motherhood. An ode to her unborn child. However troubled Plath's life was, she glimpsed genius in her work. I wrote my college dissertation on Sylvia Plath so it resonates with me and reading this poem with my daughter, I was struck again what a full circle life can be. The final line refers to her baby as being '...a clean slate, with you own face on.' That is what Boo is to me. We look, people tell me, uncannily similar (I suspect she is prettier than I ever was; but that could be a mother's love making me biased?)

I remembered, as we talked about the poem and all of its references, when she was born, her little face, was hers and mine and his. That strange mingling of us three, so evident in a firstborn child. The hours I spent just looking at her, fascinated by her. And even now, years later, I can still get that flash of memory of her as a baby, still there in her ever-changing, maturing face. A heady combination of nostalgia and sentimentality mixed with her future potential. This motherhood; it still amazes me every day.

...love this...a silver cross pram!