A Walk With My Daughter

Iwent for a walk with my daughter the other day.

It was a walk that I had been sort of anticipating, maybe even looking forward to, but at the same time, I was not without some trepidation.

When I brought my daughter home from the hospital just a few days after her birth, our route home was along Deerfoot Trail in Calgary. The speed limit was 100 km per hour and I was doing 60 - white-knuckling my way along in the slow lane being superultra-careful to avoid any bumps and unnecessarily jounce my precious cargo. I was overwhelmed with my responsibility, my duty-of-care. My daughter.

With the passage of some 35 years I look back and seemingly only a few days after bringing her home my daughter was taking her first few tentative steps, falling often and crying but also picking herself up and trying again. Learning to walk, learning to be independent.

Still it was a process. Going outside for a walk meant having to stop every second step to examine the flowers and weeds growing out of cracks in the sidewalk or to watch the peripatetic routes of ants scurrying from one place to another, never in a straight line.

In the ensuing years, though she was quite competent to walk, I never refused her a request to be carried, something in the back of my brain knowing that one day she wouldn't want to be carried and that beyond that there would be a day I was physically unable, unavailable, to carry her.

I had an initial premonition of this on her first day of kindergarten. I parked the truck and lifted her out of her car seat settling her in on my arm and against my shoulder, prepared to deliver her to the school door, and even into the classroom and onto her chair, if that was what was wanted. She squirmed in my arms and asked to be put down. "I can walk, Daddy," she said. And while I was proud of her for her independence, I was also a little sad that I wasn't needed anymore, that that aspect of being her hero was shifting into the background.

But that moment, and others, of independence didn't deter her from asking to be carried when we went on hikes in the parks and mountains around our home. And I was more than happy to oblige. I had a backpack for her to ride in for when she was tired, or bored and which got frequent use on the uphill portion of the trails.

She managed to anticipate the interesting spots and summits and would scramble out of the backpack just in time to run to the top, leaving me in gasping pursuit. And of course, she would be tired on the tail end of the hike as well and would get carried over the finish line.

Memorably, at the end of one hike, a long and hot excursion, I helped my daughter out of the backpack and laid myself flat out on my back on the grass, hot, tired and worn out. She came and sat on my stomach, and in the way of tired but still excited young children, peed. On me.

The walk I took with my daughter the other day wasn't as long as the walks when she discovered ants, nor was it as arduous as some of our mountain hikes, but it seemed that way.

I didn't get to finish that walk with my daughter. A few steps short of her destination she stopped, turned to me and hugged me. She turned forward again and proceeded to take the last few steps on her own.

Because for her, for my daughter, this walk was a walk into another stage of her life, a new and exciting stage, a stage she was happy and eager to begin.

After taking those last few steps, she joined hands with the young man waiting for her and together they stood hand in hand, smiling and facing each other as they pronounced their wedding vows.

And again, just as I was overcome with emotion when she first came home from the hospital, I was overwhelmed.

My daughter.