Ann. Letter: Kayleigh Rising

Kayleigh will spend 20 long minutes regaling me with all the intricate reasons why some band I’ve never heard of is incredibly cool, but look bored and irritated by my own dusty recollections of treasured musical moments from the “Old Days”. She has become a teenager in full flight: unsure of nearly everything but sure it is all hers to decide, with all the insecurity and arrogance that goes along with that.

She turned sweet sixteen in November ‘04 and celebrated with a big dinner party at a local restaurant. We went along but clung to the outer edge of the long table, just enjoying the spectacle of her and her interesting friends carrying on. High School (she’s now in the 11th grade) has proved to be an ordeal both socially and academically. She is fortunate to have a few good friends to cling to as she negotiates the turbulent waters of a huge student body coming of age in a morally challenged time. Like her parents before her (and her siblings for that matter) she is “not working to her potential” but unlike everybody else she has a pretty strong sense of certitude once she makes the risky and/or difficult choice. We just gotta work hard to get her there...which means conflict, confrontation, and lots of running our hands through our thinning hair. When she listens, however, I can see the desire to please in her eyes, 17 becomes 5 again, for a moment, and it melts my cold, dark, frustrated heart. Some days she will reveal that she does pay attention in class, talking about World War I or the French language with detail and interest that makes us hope and we just listen with big dopey grins, already calculating the coming scholarship money. Then the grade report comes back and we return to the daily battle of how to turn interest into action.

Kayleigh likes to point out that she does excellent work on pressure comps, which sounds frightening but it’s a good thing. She can be an excellent writer and we think she has lots of possibilities with that skill…push, push, push. She wants to please but hates to be told to do it. We’ll all get along fine but in a moment’s notice her mom or I can return to being the dictatorial obstructionists that make her life so haaaard, always demanding she study, or critiquing her hanger-less, closet-less clothing storage system, or displaying our obnoxious insistence on always switching the car radio to the oldies station (are they “oldies” already???). It’s a roller coaster, has been for awhile, and will be for years to come. But it can be fun, in a masochistic way. Speaking of masochism, she just had a full set of braces embedded on her teeth until 2007, when she will journey to Seattle to have her jaw broken and surgically enhanced for a better smile. Yeouch.

Kayleigh has, besides her huge interest in music, a love of anime, still attends Saturday art classes (over ten years now), and tries to play guitar with her small, delicate fingers. She is part of the Eureka High Choir and works on the school newspaper. She is in the Soroptimist's Club and the Red Cross Club (vice-president!). She writes quite well, and has written a few short stories for her own enjoyment that we hope she’ll greatly expand upon. She loves to play “The Sims”, a computer game in which the user gets to create people and manipulate their lives in challenging ways, something Anna & I like to call “parenting”. She keeps quite current with politics, marrying that with her growing knowledge of history to help her understand the world. She loves movies and good TV, of course, and reading (unless a paper is due). She just finished reading Tom Wolfe’s I Am Charlotte Simmons, which I read first and it almost scared us out of sending her off to college! I’m working overtime to afford a bodyguard to fend off depredatious frat boys. She’s currently reading a book about an Iraqi female political dissident’s life under Saddam. We would like her to get more interested in sports – she played soccer for a while, along with her siblings, but unfortunately, we aren’t a big sports family, so as goes the parents often goes the child, I guess.

Tragedy struck Kayleigh and all of us as her beloved, wonderful, joyous cat, Buttons, met an untimely demise on our way-too-busy street. He was her big surprise birthday gift just 3 years ago. I dug the grave and bawled like a baby, but this isn't about me (damn, i loved that cat). It hurts so much to see your child suffer pain even over something as relatively simple and everyday as the loss of a pet. One more slip away from innocence, but one she took stoically and with grace.

Kayleigh was the most excited and least overwhelmed by our visit to New York City last year. Our small town girl drank it all in and announced, in the middle of the intersection of Madison Ave and 49th St., “I want to live in a big city!!” Now, camping trips are dull for her unless we throw in some sort of big urban diversion along the way. She’s already compiled a list of American cities to inspect and she also can’t wait to get to FRANCE, despite the smelly cheese (and politicians). It looks like she will soon get that latter dream; she has been accepted in a three week student ambassador program for next summer. Her group will immerse in the culture of Britain, Italy, and France, and she will spend a week in the latter nation living with a family and, hopefully, speaking their language she is working so hard to learn. We look forward to her and her siblings making it to all of those places and more. There is so much more to offer for their minds. I love living here but I do miss the opportunities I ignored when I lived in LA: museums, nightlife, festivals. I was into the outdoors and wilderness; city life was obnoxious, dangerous, and expensive. Well, that hasn’t changed but it looks like adventure to our kids and we hope they manage to find their place in it if that does their spirits well, despite losing their nearby presence. When Kayleigh was small she used to often say, “I’m going to live with you forever!” Later, at about 8 or 9 years old, when we’d remind her of that vow, she would smile and say, “well, I’ll live next door to you!” Seeing her and her siblings gazing from the towers, walking the streets amid a mass of purposeful humanity, studying the paintings and sculptures of the greats, wading, however tentatively, into the energy and color of 10 million strangers’ lives and dreams, was a powerful sight. We’re biased, of course, and even though none of them still have any idea what they want to do with their lives, we absolutely believe they can all be significant additions to that tapestry and perhaps Kayleigh will be the trailblazer in that direction. If only life were as simple as the The Sims…well, I guess we’d all lose interest in playing after a while, so it’s just as well.

...to be continued...