Convergence and Cheer

Today I announced on Facebook that my daughter will be interning at the Silverman Lab for infectious diseases at the UMass Medical School for 8 weeks this summer. My girl is 17 and entering the world of work, responsibility and consequences. This is a great opportunity for her, and we're all thrilled.

Yet, I keep having flashes of seeing her as 4 years old and explaining reincarnation to me, as she tried to make sense of a dead whale that had washed up on Ocean Beach in SF. She had never heard of reincarnation, but the process she was describing of the "whale leaving it's body, becoming energy that will go back into the sand,  sea and later will came back as another life form", was pretty startling from the mouth of a preschooler.

Now she celebrates Mole Day in HS, finds Trader Joe's Avocado’s Number Guacamole hilarious ( named after Lorenzo Avogadro, the math & physics whiz, who came up with 6.02214199 x 1023), and will be measuring chemical reactions in a lab. A lab that has "The goal of our lab is to decipher the molecular mechanisms responsible for transmitting a signal from the site of infection to the nucleus of an immune responsive cell." Did I mention she has benign neutropenia, which means a hyper immune system. Did I mention that the first year of her life, she was constantly having her blood checked, so she's very afraid of needles and a part of this job will require the lab gives her a special shot? Too funny, right?! 

She's always been attracted to all things Buddhist, science, medicine, reference books, politics, laws, fiction, fantasy, nature, mythology, music and art. Each of these things have an order to them, systems that when practiced and repeated make sense or are understandable. She's an introvert who likes to be social. A pale girl show loves to use her face as a canvas. An old soul who is no hurry to grow up. She will soon be transitioning to her Senior year in High School, and all of the process that accompanies that year. We're entering the last years of her being with me daily and my trying to keep pace with who she is in the moment, not the girl I have in my mind's eye, but the young woman standing before me. That will be a constant revision process for the remainder of my life, but for her now it's all new and ever expanding.

Her path may go in any number of directions, as a teacher of Seniors I know what they write in their colleges essays in the fall, are often obsolete by the time they are fashioning their scholarship letters in the spring. This is the time of experimentation on one hand and staying sure-footed on the other. A tight rope of academia and adulthood converging. As long as she learns from her failures, as well as her successes, and keeps progressing forward, she'll be fine.

So here I sit on the convergence of the girl I knew, the young woman before me and the woman in the making. This is a grand first footstep in the direction of a field she's always been interested to explore!

Good Night, Old Souls and Young Scientists, G'night