Because you have to.

There is this heavy weight pressing on your shoulders at all times. Usually you are only dimly aware of it, but sometimes, with a flick of your thoughts and your eyes cast upward, the weight inverts, and feels lighter than air, and you are close to flying. And sometimes, it's so heavy your feet have to resist the ground to keep from driving down into it. Sometimes your knees hurt with the effort of staying upright.

She says words, good words, words that should make you feel better, or okay, but when you walk out into the parking lot, the tears spill out. And your knees ache with the effort from stiffening against a buckle that will send you straight to the pavement. Words like: it is who she is, this is probably what she'll be dealing with five years from now, 10 years from now. Here is how we help her. It is good. We are moving forward, finding solutions. There is all this hope to be had.

It's just that you look into her eyes and see her better than you see anything else, that unfathomable, bottomless well of deep brown, and you see nameless things there that you have within yourself and you've never quite put a name to them, but it has to be, it is, the awareness of that weight that presses, always, and the effort it takes to make it light, how hard it is to fly. She feels it already, just like you did, and you hurt for her because you remember how much you hurt growing up, feeling the weight that nobody else seemed to feel.

It's a fallacy to think she's like you, he reminds you, and he's right. Of course. It's a different nature and a different nurture, he says. Yes. You see this. But you also see all of it, generations of mothers and daughters stretched out on a vast timeline of decades, and there are threads stretching through, invisible tethers that bind you all together. Good and bad. It all looks the same from up here, the weight reminds you. And so you cry, and you buckle.

And then slowly your knees stiffen and you stand up. You flick your shoulders back, and the weight doesn't loosen for now, but you bear it anyway. Because you have to.

And you begin the arduous process of teaching her how to fly.