Knee Walker

My dearest girl,

Graduation is such a strange word for what it actually means.

It sounds almost artificial as though someone moves from one place to another in neat and finite increments. Both of our lives have really never been about clean demarcations. They have involved milestones and crossroads where we became more visible to ourselves and one another. I wonder if your path will follow mine as we both continue to cross thresholds that our younger selves could not name.

We have both been graduating through life together.

I think about your impossibly round and slightly warm cheeks as a baby. When they flushed pink on hot days. When I would come home from a late night on call, carrying the acrid smell of hand sanitizer and the fatigue from carrying other people’s suffering, you would smile as we met each other’s gaze. I would hold your tiny body and press my cheek against yours as my muscles would relax and unclench.

And there was the way you first learned to move through the world with confidence. You crossed the hardwood floors on your knees with conviction. We worried at first because parents are taught to measure children against timelines and milestones. But you were simply unwilling to arrive as the world expected you to.

Then came your childhood where you moved from innocence to awareness. You worried about others’ feelings in a way that made me fear that you might be a super feeling sensitive person like your dad. I can remember your damp hair smelling fresh after a shower and a spritz of detangling spray before bedtime. The way you did not let us close our bedroom door so you could know that we were across the hall before you went to bed. And you grew deeper and deeper into your beautiful self as you graduated towards deeper forms of tenderness instead of away from them.

In adolescence you moved into living between worlds without splitting yourself apart. Canada lived in our home in its memory and America lived outside our windows. You learned how exhausting it was to exist between identities, expectations, and versions of yourself you had to censor and withhold.

But slowly you stopped asking the world who you should become. You stopped fearing and pretending and decided that you would work harder and defy expectations, and all the while honour your worth and intrinsic value without needing to perform for anyone.

You graduated from self-consciousness to self-trust. You began protecting your voice instead of apologizing for it.

And as I watch and participate in the ceremony of it all. The tassels and caps and gowns and parties and diplomas…

I see every earlier version of you standing alongside the one who will walk across that stage.

The baby with flushed cheeks and a smile wide enough to redeem difficult days.

The knee-walking child who refused prescribed routes.

The little girl feeling all too much

The teenager learning that sensitivity was not weakness but a form of perception.

The confident young woman striding into spaces without shrinking.

The world will tell you that adulthood means certainty. It does not. Most grown people are improvising their lives while pretending otherwise. The real task is not perfection. It is integration. It is learning how to remain whole while crossing through different rooms, different identities, different losses, different loves.

And you, my girl, have already begun.

I hope you keep trusting the part of yourself that notices suffering and moves toward it gently. I hope you continue resisting the temptation to become smaller in order to fit easier into rooms that were never built to hold complexity. I hope you remember that there is enormous courage in staying soft in a world that rewards hardness.

Most of all, I hope you understand that graduation is not the moment your life begins.

And wherever you go next, no matter how far from this home or this version of yourself, some part of me will always hear the soft sound of your knees crossing the floor toward me, determined to arrive in your own way.