As she became more independent, she no longer had to listen to the incessant: “Don’t pick it up, because it’s dirty!” Walking her ways, she filled her pockets with priceless finds. When I was doing laundry, in the nooks and crannies of her clothes I could find: screws, nuts, chains, springs, beads, safety pins, hooks – all the unnecessary, abandoned, broken world that no one wanted anymore….
She was blessed with special blue eyes that always see value in everything. Abandoned screws, nuts, feathers and pieces of glass, she saw as a valuable addition to ornaments of all kinds. She made necklaces, bracelets, hair ornaments and brooches from these found treasures. She created unique gifts and souvenirs from them.
This blessed trait of hers also found expression in her beloved art of collage. With care and anointing, she took these scraps of the world abandoned by others and gave them new meaning.
In fact, her whole life resembles the constant creation of a collage. She always sees beauty where others don’t even look. She sees it in literature, in film, in life….
For her, a black character in a story has never been unequivocally black. She always wondered what happened in his life, what broke his heart that he ended up in this dark place. She always saw the beautiful, valuable side of these personalities. Reading books with her, watching movies, I wanted to teach her how to recognize right and wrong, I wanted to teach her about life. But it was she who was teaching me.
She was breaking my paradigms, turning my parenting methodology upside down. When I judged the other person in advance and wanted nothing to do with (even if this thought remained only in my heart) – she always gave to others a chance, hope, looked with faith. She saw the good. And she gathered all those broken scraps into one beautiful life of special friendships with broken, unwanted, rejected people.
It’s like a life mission filling her heart – to see the world broken and enjoy it. To see the broken world not with eyes full of pity, but truly celebrating the beauty overlooked, rejected, forgotten – as if behind those blue eyes was hidden another reality altogether. As if she doesn’t know how to live otherwise.
She refuses to let the world trample on what has been abandoned. She restores value where hope has been lost. She finds abandoned beauty in the torn scraps of life. My daughter.
