I Saw These Girls.

Saturday morning at IHOP, I saw these girls. Eleven or twelve years old. They were so young and happy, truly in-between. Not children, not women. Just girls. Independent enough for their own table, but moms not far away. I saw these girls fresh from a volleyball victory, celebrating their win with chocolate chip pancakes. They were still young and it was still o.k. to eat what they wanted. For that I was glad. More because their mothers didn't think to tell them no, they couldn't, because chocolate chip pancakes make you fat. My mother started telling me to hold in my stomach at that age. As if I had a stomach. And even if I did, what did it matter? It matters now.

So I watched the girls and thought how wonderful it was to be a girl, how wonderful those girls are. They have never been disappointed. I thought about it and the women they would become.

The world is a hard, cruel place and the great tragedy of my life is that, although I suspected as much, no one who loved me confirmed my reports. I was a naive girl. I wasn't ready. I didn't know.

My mother's mother was married at 15 to my 21-year-old grandfather. That's shocking even today. She was a child, totally unprepared to be a wife or mother. My grandmother was left alone a lot as a child. She never really grew up. She stopped. She was only 15. I know my grandmother was a romantic. She loved the story of the real-life king who gave up his crown for a woman. I'm not sure if she imagined her absent father as a king or that a king would love her enough to save her. I just know she dreamed of a king. Her tragic flaw was dreaming instead of living.

My mother didn't have a bad start, she married at 18, but she had expectations. My mother learned about the king from her mother and I suspect she was dismayed that her father wasn't him. He wasn't a bad man, but he wasn't a very good one either. She chose a good man for a husband, but he wasn't a king, not even a prince. Chronically disappointed, my mother expected more than any good man could give, kingly or otherwise. My mother's tragic flaw is that she expects to see kings around every corner.

My mother. If people are born with internal compasses, hers is either cracked or de-magnetized. She's lost out there. She can't see. I used to think it was because I was invisible. That she made me invisible. That she was blinded at birth. But that's not true. I think you choose when to be born.

I don't believe in kings. I'm not sure if that's always been true, or is now or was. Or will be. It may be just something I say. I don't know.

I saw these girls in all their beauty and innocence. They were too old for crayons really, but just the same, they didn't want to let the crayons go. They were wild, scribbling so quickly and hard they spilled a drink. They immediately looked to their mothers to clean it up, sure the help would come. They were right.

The mothers were harder for me to ignore. I wanted to tell them, to warn them. To explain what is coming and to tell them to prepare their daughters. To teach them to fight before the world swallows them whole, or in bits. I can't decide which way is worse. I don't think I could watch a daughter lose without breaking my own heart. It would be unbearable. Raising a boy to be a king would be easy in comparison.

The mothers looked about my age and I wanted to ask them how they knew they could be mothers. How had the confidence stayed after girlhood had gone? And I wanted to tell them what I know, in case they didn't. They needed to tell their girls, to warn them what is coming. To arm them for battle. Because the world is a hard, cruel place and girls shouldn't go out alone. There are no kings.