Amy Watkins | Letter to My Daughter on Her 16th Birthday | Poets Resist

Poets Resist
Edited by Kanika Lawton
June 13, 2019

Amy Watkins

Letter to My Daughter on Her 16th Birthday

May 9, 2019 Sixteen years and one week ago today, I stood in cap and gown between a stranger and a woman whose name I can’t remember, another writer, the only person I recognized in the auditorium of my huge public university. She said, “Oh my god, what if you go into labor right here during graduation?” and laughed, and I laughed too and felt self-conscious. For months I’d been afraid in a way I can’t explain, of the unavoidable physical fact of your birth, of how my life had changed because of you. It was the wrong time to be pregnant, I knew. Your dad and I married young. We were poor and graduation wouldn’t change that. I knew I wanted kids but not the life of a family on TV, that default setting. When the college health center nurse said “positive,” handed me the photo-copied list of all my options — doctors’ names and Medicaid, Planned Parenthood and a few adoption agencies — she said, “You can call this number if you need to talk. You don’t have to decide now.” And I said, “It’s not like that. We want it.” It’s important to me that you understand: I could have said no. I could have said not yet. Maybe you haven’t felt it yet, the sense that a whole life could happen to you by accident — a spouse and kids, a job and house and pets and friends you never asked for-- a default life. When I was sixteen I saw a magazine photo spread of an artist’s cottage. The entryway was entirely blue — blue walls, blue floor, blue books and knick knacks on blue shelves, and I carried that image with me, an ideal. I knew that nothing so bold and strange just happened. A blue room, the life that contained it were consciously made, and that’s what I wanted: I chose to be your mother, and it was not my only choice.