If you let her go, she might not come back.

In my head I had no other choice, but my hands wouldn't release my daughter's small ones. No matter of internal reasoning could persuade the muscles to loosen. There is so much letting go in life. She will ask me to take the training wheels from her bike and she will fall down. My job is to help her up and send her off again. At the beach, she says "mommy, let go!" It is an order, a command her tiny voice makes over the sound of crashing waves. She has a life jacket on. She wants to swim, but I am terrified to let her go.

My own mother holds fear that I will leave her too. I know this because I visited my sister's sparsely decorated house yesterday. I looked at the curtainless windows, the white walls, the empty spare room and it suddenly dawned on me that my mother's touch was nowhere to be seen. My sister lives 20 miles from our mother. How could it be that my own apartment, 1,000 miles away in MA, was completely drenched in my mother's personality while my sister's stood empty? My mother is afraid that if she lets me go, I won't come back to her. My roots run deep here. But honestly, if I were to be let go from her, I don't know that I would return so easily.

There is a poem by Denise Levertov, "In Mind," about a woman who struggles with letting go. On the outside she is clean, without ostentation, and smells of apples and grass. But on the inside she is a woman dressed in rags and opal who knows strange songs and has a wild imagination, however, that woman is not kind.

We are all, at some point in our lives, that woman Denise writes about. Inside my head, there is a writer both ethereal and gypsy. She has great power, raw and dangerous power, and I am afraid to let her out. Once she tastes the honeyed nectar of freedom I do not think she will return to me. I am afraid of having nothing left to say.