A mother should be able to sum things up.
It’s the adult way, the helpful strategy.

I have always been a loss at this.
The sky, I told my daughter, the sky is there

like a thought you never finish. My daughter
looked skeptical. After several more instances

of this, involving the sea, menstruation, love,
my daughter took to reading late in bed, 

under the covers with a flashlight, though I made
or would have made no objection to her light

staying on. This is not, of course, how she
remembers it. She remembers prohibitions,

categorical imperatives, inflexibility
worthy of the spines of her best books.

I was blind to most of this: a side-effect
of my failure to sum things up. I saw her

discontent but believed I could do nothing
to ease it: children were by nature discontent

or what would move them to discover the world
for themselves? Now that my daughter is grown,

I spend my days summing up. Useless activity.
I name my follies, my inadequacies. No mother

is without them. But if I mention this to my daughter,
my grown daughter, she thinks I’m making 

excuses for not having provided her 
essential elements. Look at the sky, I tell her 

silently. Keep looking. There. 
You will never get to the end of this.