I have watched her ascend, this girl of mine, from the moment she could grasp the weight of a book in her tiny hands. Now, at 18, she stands on the precipice of history—the first lawyer on either side of our families—a reality that seems to intrigue her, as though she understands the gravity of breaking old patterns. It is one thing to dream of being first; it is another to be comfortable with what success demands. She seems to be.
By next year, she will hold her college degree at 19, a milestone that leaves friends astonished, their questions laced with disbelief: How did she get there? They ask this of me and her mother, we who took our time, who found our way later than most. I smile at their questions because I know the answer is simple and not simple at all.
It started when she was three. There were books in the back of the car, always books—stacked, scattered, waiting. I was her chauffeur then, the unseen architect of her hours, ferrying her from one place to the next. An hour on the road each day, an hour spent reading. Not once, not twice, but daily, until the days became years, and the years became a life conditioned for the law—a world that demands relentless reading, ruthless synthesis, and the ability to carve meaning from chaos. What she does now, what she will do as an attorney, is simply an extension of what has always been.
We like to romanticize success as an accident of fate, but I have never believed that. Our children rise or fall by the architecture of their environment, the structures we build or fail to build. And so, when they stumble, the fault is not in our stars, as Shakespeare once mused, but in ourselves—in the silences where words should have been, in the empty hands where books should have rested, in the hours lost to the tides of time rather than invested in the foundation of a future.