![\"\u00a9Gordon](\"https:\/\/enchantedlivingmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/06\/Acr52512723849088187726.jpg\")
I must arm them with every Good Thing I can find, and I must do it now, while they are young and receptive. I must choose my weapons carefully. My daughters\u2019 armories will include beauty and poetry and stories and music and love. I will heap these armors upon them whenever I can, so that joy might sustain them through the inevitable heartaches to come. Last year I took my first grader to the MoMA, and I stared at her, while she stared, open-mouthed, at Van Gogh\u2019s Starry Night<\/em>. In November, my younger daughter and I spent a day at The Cloisters, where we sat holding hands on the cool stone floor of the Fuentidue\u00f1a Chapel, completely wrapped in music. Even my three-year old was moved to silence by the soaring beauty of Janet Cardiff\u2019s The Forty Part Motet. (No one was more surprised than\u00a0I was!) Each evening, we burrow beneath my comforter, close enough so I can smell the toothpaste on their breath, while I read their favorite stories and poems to them.<\/p>\n But beauty is not enough. Their arsenals should also contain magic in all its forms: God, faith, forgiveness, empathy. My children will inherit these words. But I want them to know that there are many different vocabularies for the magic of believing. So my husband and I began by choosing Irish names for them, to echo the ancient mythologies of their heritage, names uttered by fairies once.<\/p>\n In my daughters\u2019 bedroom, propped against the bottom rail of their pale pink dresser, sits a fairy door that I bought when my oldest was newborn. It was rather plain at first, but I painted it with purple glitter and strung pearls and gems across it. I fastened a burst of flower buds to its doorstep because I wanted it to look inviting. My daughters have seen it every day of their lives and don\u2019t often notice it any more. But they know it\u2019s there. They know that, if they leave it unlocked, the fairies might trek through it during the night. (Most fairies are nocturnal, they understand.) The visiting fairies might hide little treasures for my girls, or play funny tricks on them, or perch within the curves of their sleeping ears and murmur dreams into their waiting hearts. So yes, my daughters will command legions of fairies! Because I want them to know that all things are possible in life. I want them to be open to limitless grace, and to know that they cannot predict or define what that grace might look like.<\/p>\n At six, my daughter knows grace. She is intimately familiar with it; she embodies it. She can stand at the foot of Kaaterskill Falls and hear God\u2019s voice scattered and amplified through the whispers of unseen fairies she knows are there. When she is sixteen, and twenty-six, and beyond, I want her to hear it still. When she has her first broken heart, when she is frightened, when she first meets trauma with all of its wicked hooks and weapons, I want her armed. To the teeth.<\/p>\n Article from the Spring 2014 Issue #26<\/strong> Last summer when my father in law came from Ireland to visit, we took my daughters hiking in\u00a0the Kaaterskill Wild Forest in upstate New York. My older daughter was five at the time, and her curls were as untamed as the forest. She sprang from boulder to boulder like the spriteliest of wood nymphs, collecting […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":1885,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[82,91],"tags":[1616,327,221,326],"class_list":{"0":"post-1884","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-essays","8":"category-writing","9":"tag-cummins","10":"tag-daughters","11":"tag-faeries","12":"tag-jeanine-cummins"},"yoast_head":"\n
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