I'm Not a Daddy's Princess.
I'm Mama's Warrior.

On the stage I never reached, the mother I do not blame, and the fire that gets handed down.

As I write this, my daughter is on a bus to the rehearsal. I dropped her at the school gate this morning and watched the bus pull away with her on it. Now I am home alone for a couple of hours, and I notice where I am sitting. The day has half begun. Part of it is already behind us, part of it is still ahead of her, and I am here in the quiet middle of it, neither finished nor there. In between, in the most literal sense.

She is at her third song festival. Two local ones, and one national. She stands in a field with thousands of other voices and knows, without question, that she belongs there. I never had that.

I want to tell you what that stage means to me, and why watching her stand on it cracked something open in my chest. But I also want to tell you the part that took me much longer to understand. The part about my mother.

The stage I never reached

We moved too often when I was a child. There was never money to send me away with a choir. My mother gave up on it before the chance ever reached me. By the time a door might have opened, it was already closed.

For most of my life I did not even name it as a loss. It was simply not for us. Other children sang in those fields. We packed boxes. That was the shape of things, and I did not question the shape until I had a daughter of my own.

This is not a story about blame

I need to be careful here, because it would be easy to turn this into a story about what I was denied. It is not that story. I do not blame anyone.

My mother gave what she had. She gave according to her own knowledge, her own skills, the patterns she was handed and never got the chance to question. She did not have more to give. That is not an excuse I am making for her. It is simply the truth, and the truth does not need defending.

And here is the part that is easy to miss. She did change something. A little. Quietly. She moved the line forward, even if only by an inch. She did not pass everything on exactly as she received it. In small ways, she chose to do it differently.

I just had more fire. More room. More time. So I could move the line further than an inch.

She moved the line by an inch. I had more fire, so I moved it further. That is not a debt she owes me. That is how it works.

The fire gets handed down

Each generation carries the fire a little further than the last. My mother lit something in me even when she could not feed it. I grew it. And now I am handing my daughter the whole flame, not the spark.

She does not know yet that the stage she stands on is a stage I never reached. She does not carry the ache of the child who watched from the outside. That is the point. That ache stops with me.

What it is like to watch her

I will be honest about standing there. I feel two things at once. Pride that almost cracks my chest open. And underneath it, quiet, a grief for the girl I was, the one who never got to sing.

Both are true. I do not have to choose one. The in-between teaches you that, eventually. You can be proud of what you built and still grieve what you never got. The two do not cancel each other out. They live in the same chest, at the same time, watching the same stage.

Mama's warrior

About a year ago I wrote a song about myself. I called myself mama's warrior. I meant it as defiance. A girl who needed no crown and no rescue.

I understand it differently now.

The warrior did not come from nowhere. It came from her. From my mother, who gave a little, and from me, who decided to give more. And it is going somewhere. It is standing in a field right now, singing, in a voice that has never once been told that this was not for her.

I'm not a daddy's princess.
I'm mama's warrior.
I don't need a crown.
I've got my battle scars.

And my daughter is singing.