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I used to assume that if I ever had a daughter, she would be like me. Quiet. Independent. Capable of sorting through her own problems without much fuss.
Instead, I was given a girl who feels everything.
She cries at sad films. At kind gestures. At disappointment. At things I would have simply swallowed and moved on from without a second thought. She talks through her worries. Replays conversations. Questions herself in ways that leave me genuinely tired just from listening.
For years, if I’m honest, I mistook our differences for weaknesses. Hers, not mine.
I didn’t understand the drama of secondary school friendships. I didn’t understand the tears over boys who hadn’t earned them. I didn’t understand the anxiety over marks when she was already doing well. At her age, my friendships were uncomplicated, mostly boys and very little emotion. I got on with things, and when I grew bored, I simply disengaged. Life felt rather straightforward. I assumed everyone found it so.
Hers does not.
She sets impossibly high standards for herself. All top marks or nothing. Certainty or failure. Love or rejection. Very little middle ground. I encourage her. I reassure her. I tell her she is more than capable. Sometimes she believes me. Often she doesn’t, and I have learned not to take that personally.
And somewhere along the way, I had to sit with something I hadn’t particularly wanted to admit: that just because I don’t experience the world the way she does doesn’t mean her way of moving through it is wrong. It is simply different from mine. That sounds straightforward enough written down. It took longer to actually believe.
She is in her second year at university now, eight hours away. Brave enough to build a life far from home. Strong enough to navigate things I never had to. Sensitive enough to care deeply when others might not even notice.
I am proud of her. Not because she is like me. But because she isn’t.
Perhaps that is the quiet work of raising a daughter, even for those of us who never quite felt the instinct the way others seem to. Not shaping her into who you would have been, but standing steady while she becomes who she already is. Still learning her, even now. And I suspect she is still working me out as well.
— Kate
I have lived in two countries long enough to know that neither one stays the way you left it.
I was fourteen when I came to America. Old enough to remember England clearly — the neighbourhood, the game nights around someone’s kitchen table, the winters when the whole street came outside without anyone having to be asked. Old enough to carry those things with me. Young enough, perhaps, to build something new without too much difficulty.
The hardest part was the school. I worried my marks might slip with the change in curriculum, the different way of teaching things. I worried about walking into a place where everyone already knew each other and finding my footing. As it turned out, a teacher took it upon herself to introduce me to four girls on my first visit. We sat together at lunch throughout school. We talked in the corridors. There was a sleepover once, I think in the final year. They were good enough friends for what I needed, and I did not need much. That has always been true of me.
America shaped my adulthood in the way that only the place where you truly begin can. I married here. Built a life here. Became whoever I actually am here, rather than whoever I might have become had I stayed. It is home in the truest sense of the word, not because I was born here or because it has always felt familiar, but because it is where I chose to plant myself and grow.
England exists for me now mostly as memory. When I go back, I am always quietly startled by how much has changed. New buildings where old ones stood. Roads that didn’t used to be there. The places I loved simply gone, replaced by something I have no feeling for. It makes me sad in a way that is hard to explain, not grief exactly, but something adjacent to it. The sadness of realising that the place you remember never really existed except in a particular moment in time, and that moment has long since passed.
I don’t feel a pull to go back. England is where I am from. America is where I am. Those are different things and I have made my peace with that distinction.
Though I will say this. I still say England when someone asks where I am from. Not America, not both, not it’s complicated. England. Because that is the honest answer, and because some things stay with you regardless of how many years and how many miles sit between you and them.
My accent has never left. People mention it still, after all this time. I don’t mind. It is the most visible reminder of something I carry quietly and don’t often talk about. That I grew up somewhere else. That I remember a different way of things. That I belong, in some sense, to both places and fully to neither.
And that, I have found, is not such a bad thing to be.
— Kate
There are things I think that I will never say out loud.
Not because they are shameful, or dangerous, or particularly radical. Simply because I am not built that way. I process things privately, turn them over quietly, and then move on without much fuss. That has always been true of me.
But thoughts have a way of accumulating. And somewhere along the way I realised I needed somewhere to put them.
So I write.
I am not entirely sure what this will become. I have a feeling it will cover more ground than I can currently anticipate. Faith, because it is central to my life even when it is complicated. Marriage, because twenty years of anything teaches you things worth saying. Motherhood, because I have always experienced it differently from the way most people seem to and I have spent too long staying quiet about that. The small and specific details of a life that looks ordinary from the outside and feels, from the inside, like something worth examining.
I grew up in England and have lived in America long enough that I belong to both and fully to neither. I notice things. I observe quietly. I form opinions I rarely share in conversation because it has never felt worth the effort of explaining them to people who weren’t asking.
Here, perhaps, is different.
I am not writing to be understood by everyone. I am writing because there are things I have thought for years that I suspect other people have also thought, quietly, without saying. And if one person reads something here and thinks, I have never admitted that, but yes, then that seems worth doing.
This is not a grand project. It is simply a place where the thoughts that would otherwise crowd can go instead.
And perhaps, if I am honest, the quiet hope that it might one day become something more.
— Kate
Kate Alderwick 