The last time I saw my daughter Jessica face-to-face was back in 1989, shortly after her mom, Sheila, and I split up. Caroline and I had been in the States nearly a year before we were situated well enough that Sheila and I could coordinate Jessica boarding a plane in Texas for the unaccompanied flight to Arizona over Spring Break. Our first time outside of Arizona was a trip to the San Diego Zoo over in California.

Jessica was only nine years old, and other than some minor initial shyness, we all got along wonderfully. When last I saw her in Frankfurt, Germany, she had a regular little girl’s voice, now, she traveled with a Texas drawl. Here we are having the first experience together again in 6 years, and being a still-naive 33-year-old, it never occurred to me to note my impressions of what I was recognizing or feeling with seeing her again. What a wasted opportunity.

Some of the few things we remember about the visit were that when she did return to Florence, Texas, was that we sent her home with new clothes, a bunch of books, about a ton of messaging about the importance of reading. We hammered upon her the need to always be an avid reader. Caroline adds that she has the memory of Jessica wanting nail polish that we didn’t see anything wrong with, so we indulged her; seems that her step-father had other ideas and that the nail polish didn’t fly after she got home. For that matter, he didn’t much like the idea of all the books we sent either out of some kind of jealousy that his own three children weren’t benefiting from them. In divorcing her mom, I inadvertently turned her over to a broken, insecure man who would scar her. Guilt for contributing to the grief of a child runs deep.