Member-only story

The Voice I Hear When I Talk to My Daughter

It’s deliberate. It’s direct. It‘s surprisingly mine.

Vanessa Torre
5 min readJun 4, 2019
Photo by Ana Francisconi via Pexels

Someone once asked me what the scariest moment of my life was. I told them it was when I gave birth to my daughter. They asked my second scariest. I told them, “Every other moment after that.”

I have my daughter every other week, the byproduct of a divorce that happened when she was only two. It’s been she and I against the world for 13 years. This has created a major staple in our relationship: We talk. A lot.

It takes significant thought. I am painfully aware of every single word that comes out of my mouth when I talk to my daughter.

I have hit a point in my life where I can look back and rehear things that have been said to me in my life and process them on a whole different level.

I realize the effect that people’s words have on us. It’s deeper than we could ever know. The good. The bad. The indifferent. It all becomes ours.

I feel a tremendous amount of pressure in that I know how formative these years of my daughter’s life are. She is trying to figure the whole world out. She is growing in her own ideas, philosophies and standards. It is a god damn…

--

--

Vanessa Torre
Vanessa Torre

Written by Vanessa Torre

Top 10 feminist writer. Writing, coaching, and relentlessly hyping women in midilfe. linktr.ee/Vanessaltorre Email: vanessa@vanessatorre.com

Responses (8)