Child of Fire

I picked her up from her first day of preschool to find her atop the plastic color-block play castle, roaring at the top of her lungs. 

“They’re playing princesses,” the preschool teacher informed me. “She wanted to be the dragon.”

Indeed.

As she grew, I came to understand why my daughter relates to giant folkloric reptiles that strike fear into human hearts. I should have known from the moment she came screaming out of my womb like a greased fireball and clamped down on my breast hard enough to draw blood. 

An unquenchable fire burns inside her.

My daughter is not like me. If she is a dragon, I am a Golden Retriever. Perhaps a slightly ornery Golden Retriever who occasionally gets bothered enough to growl. I don’t understand how it feels to live with a brain that overheats when the little plastic drawstring cap on your favorite sweatshirt slides off. I don’t understand how contemplating that your pet rabbit might die in eight years makes you hyperventilate. I don’t understand how the prospect of starting kindergarten makes you nervous enough to gnaw off the ends of your hair, or how being seen in a dress makes you burn with shame.   

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