A common Ryan refrain in our house is: “I don’t know why you let her play with that.” He means well and isn’t talking about anything outright dangerous. Usually, it’s just a little risky… to me. For instance, my wallet, which H. likes to comb through, extracting every card and receipt until it’s empty and she can file everything “all back in,” as she would say. It buys me 15 uninterrupted minutes, easy, but he has a point. After one wallet episode, she “lost” my driver’s license for a week. We turned the house inside out until I discovered it wedged between two business cards… in the actual wallet. We’d had it all along.

H. seems drawn to the meaning of a thing: the clay heart box Laura and Katie gave me in Mexico after Kendra’s wedding, the white seashell we found at Bethany Beach, the jewelry box with the twirling ballerina. Sometimes, she won’t nap until she can tuck a wooden music box under each arm. One is a little slanted now, but it works. The song plays, the three Pinocchio figurines move round and round. But the beauty is in that slant—H. has left her mark because she lives, she explores, she holds and beholds. The lesson is that I don’t want her to be scared to break things, to get messy, to leave things a little out of order because she passed through. I am teaching her to play respectfully, too. But if the glass heart now has a chip in it, if there will always be blue ink on her white table, if the three silver charms that sit in that white seashell were once on beaded bracelets that only broke after she wore them with such fierce commitment, then I love the thing even more. Perhaps because a pristine world now, after loss, feels like an un-lived one.

As a child, I lived in a nice home with nice things, my mom’s reaction to not having much to call nice about her own upbringing. (Life cycles in these patterns and inversions, doesn’t it?) As I grew up, my mom gave me everything she didn’t have, from an intense mother/daughter bond to horseback-riding lessons and pink cowboy boots. I loved those summers on horseback, but the sparkly boots embarrassed me. I was more comfortable in my white lace-up Keds. I got a new pair before the start of each school year, but I’d keep them in their box in the closet, saving them for when my current pair officially gave out. It was hard to let go of that old pair—stained beige from kicking down dry California paths all summer, holed by each big toe’s push against that soft canvas, the blue logo on each heel long ago picked clean off. I was fancy-free in those things, unworried about what grime got added to the mix. When I put on the new pair I’d saved and saved, I got anxious about that first streak of oil from my bike chain. It was so visible now against that bright white. But eventually, that new pair faded too, back into the old one.

I worried a lot as a kid, and not just about my shoes. I don’t want H. to worry about such little things. She doesn’t seem to, as she smears hummus in her hair, wipes her hands down the front of her shirt, and explores the “jungle” out back, caking her new shoes in a healthy layer of yard. So what I really don’t want is for her to lose that impulse. I want the spirit of exploration to come first. Play is one of our very first teachers, after all. I hope amongst everything else, it teaches her some of all this. I know that the way she plays—so at ease in her world and the interesting things it contains—is teaching me.

I am honored to share a bond with her that feels like the one I was taught is possible between a parent and a child, and to see Ryan share that with her, too. Our daughter doesn’t want for anything right now, and I will be sure to teach her how privileged that also makes her. For fun, there are even a pair of magenta cowboy boots propped up on the floor of her closet. My mom sent them, an inside joke spanning generations now. Knowing H., she will wear them with gusto, as she tromps down unknown paths ahead. It’s simply up to her to decide.