Idara at Eight

We were ten minutes from the ski lodge, near the fake stag on the outcrop pitched ever-so-slightly off-kilter, enough so that you would never mistake it for the real thing, not in fifty years. Idara asked to choose the music, so I passed my phone to Rachael, wondering whether we were about to hear Frozen or Frozen II. But when Idara said the name I didn't recognize it, and when Rachael put on "Believer" by Imagine Dragons, the song itself was unfamiliar, too. Maybe I'd heard it before, somewhere, but I couldn't say where or who I was with. Certainly not Idara.

How was it, exactly, that she'd heard it? At a friend's house? During a school assembly? And heard it enough times that she knew the name and wanted to hear it again? The experience tipped me slightly off-kilter, like the stag on the outcrop, and I couldn't explain why. Not at the time. It's taken me the better part of a year to realize what was going on. What is going on.

There are other signs, and when I look back through photographs I can see them. Peace signs, in fact, held high with crossed eyes and a stuck-out tongue. I don't flash peace signs in pictures, and neither does Rachael, which means that this came from the outside. It is at once a small, playful gesture, and also proof of a weak point in the armor we've built around our family, a breach of the line that divides us from everything and everyone else.

Shortly after I wrote about Idara turning seven I spent a week on a sailing boat in Scotland with a man who had three daughters, now mostly grown up. One day we were anchored near Holy Loch, waiting for our afternoon tea to steep, and he said, "In the beginning they orbit you, and then at some point you begin to orbit them."

I'm not living it yet. Not when Idara crawls into bed with us and falls back asleep with her head on my chest. Not when she waves to me from the playground. Not when she steals a stickie note from my desk and writes, "i LOVe you Papa."

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If you've read my other posts about Oren and Idara growing up then you might think me a broken record. You might think, "Wow, he's realizing again that it's not going to last." How do other people keep their eyes open to this brutal and beautiful reality without writing things down? Do they just know?

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Last fall we took Idara to a tattoo and piercing parlor in downtown Baku to complete a right of passage. She was proud to report that she didn’t cry, even though it hurt a lot.

Climbing a fig tree in Kenya which must’ve been three hundred years old. Not the first child to scale it, surely, and hopefully not the last.

When we were in Kenya Idara spent the better part of a day sitting still while three Kenyan women pulled on her hair and wove pink acrylic into her blond, curly hair. A few weeks after we returned to Baku a storm brought several inches of wet, heavy snow.

✌️

Still running and playing with Oren, here in front of Chief Kiwanda Rock.

One of my favorite photos from the past year. We extended our camping trip by a few days and paddled on a deserted Timothy Lake as low-lying clouds brought tiny raindrops from the west. Idara is mostly Rachael, and better for it, but one thing she seems to have inherited from me is an inexplicable desire to swim in cold water.

On the first day of 2nd grade, with Oren, on his first day of preschool.

Idara’s cousin, Josie, jumped off the high dive, and so naturally Idara had to follow suit. It never looks as high from the ground as it does from above, and when Idara got to the top of the ladder she said she wanted to come back down again. I lied without thinking, saying “I think that’s against the rules.” So she walked out to the end of the board, paused for a second or two, and jumped. And then she jumped, and jumped, and jumped, making sure I saw, and that Rachael saw, and that Oren saw.