Too Much Magic

on containment, escape, and becoming

I apologized to strangers in my local coffee shop for my daughter. While waiting for our drinks, she spotted their baby and zeroed in, abandoning everything else. She was transfixed. "Oh, you're so cute. You're so cute," she cooed, and the baby smiled back.

"I'm sorry. She doesn’t know boundaries…"

The words tumbled out before I could catch them. My first instinct was to apologize for her existence in the space. Maybe because if a parent had let their five-year-old viral vector within a foot of my infant's face, I would have tensed.

"She's fine," the parents waved away my concerns, watching my daughter continue singing to their baby, seeing her love rather than her intrusion.

Standing there, watching her, I felt the ghost of another apology from decades ago.

***

My sister's acrostic name poem read "Beautiful Sight." Mine read "Brave Warrior." I towered over the boys in my class, their frosted tips at my eye level. My sister was the opposite - petite, with voluminous curls. My flat hair clung to my oversized head, doing it no favors.

My body was animal enough, the opposite of the delicate femininity I desired. My personality did no favors.

I was "intense." The first time I was called that, I apologized. It wasn't said as a compliment. I had caused an offense simply by existing in myself.

I tried to play basketball with the older boys in junior high, and I boxed one straight into the chain link fence. The horror on his face when I body-checked him was all I needed to see never to do that again.

In my early teens, I mastered the "dumb blonde." I learned to play coy, to make myself smaller. If the facade broke, especially when I was tired or stressed, my intensity would seep back in like water through cracks.

***

I was afraid to have a daughter.

Two boys before her, and that was far less frightening than giving birth to a girl who would someday learn to make herself small.

But my daughter arrived incandescent. I relish in her as she fills the room.

She is bold. As a toddler, she harshly scolded the shadows on the wall. If something scared her, she stared it down with fire in her gut.

She is uninhibited. She loves and feels openly.

She is assertive. She’s clear on her yes and her no, something I never learned as a child.

I watch her and want to protect her from the ideas that too many of us have internalized— that she ever needs to shrink herself or be anything other than exactly who she is.

***

At the coffee shop, our names were called, and I mumbled a "thank you" to the parents as we left with drinks in hand.

My daughter skipped to our car, unaware of any inner turmoil. She had just seen a baby. She now had an apple juice. She was thrilled.

But as I settled into the driver's seat, staring at the parking garage wall ahead, I realized I had betrayed her— this magical girl who filled the room. The first chance I had, I had apologized for her taking up space, for giving love, for being herself.

She hasn't yet heard she is too much.

And maybe, if I can learn to stop apologizing for my own existence first, she never will.