"To a Daughter Leaving Home" by Linda Pastan

Linda Pastan was raised in New York, but lived in Maryland. She won the Mademoiselle Poetry Prize her senior year in college, but decided to stop writing to raise her family. Then she picked back up her writing.

To a Daughter Leaving Home
by: Linda Pastan
When I taught you
at eight to ride
a bicycle, loping along
beside you
as you wobbled away
on two round wheels,
my own mouth rounding
in surprise when you pulled
ahead down the curved
path of the park,
I kept waiting
for the thud
of your crash as I
sprinted to catch up,
while you grew
smaller, more breakable
with distance,
pumping, pumping
for your life, screaming
with laughter,
the hair flapping
behind you like a
handkerchief waving
goodbye.

As the speaker pushes her little girl off on a bike for the first time, it shows her whole life. As we grow up, we generally leave our families and move away, having our own lives. Throughout our school years- preschool, kindergarten, elementary school, junior high, high school- we are with our parents, unless other circumstances, but once we go to college, many students move away. This short poem expresses a lifetime of the parent-daughter relationship. As the setting being outside because the girl is learning to ride a bike, it is the parent’s perspective of how she takes on her life. Her life starts as she “wobbled away” soon to be growing “smaller, more breakable with distance.” The parents chase after the girl as she grows and is filled with life “screaming with laughter.” Parents often hold onto the children much longer than children hold to parents. The first taste of freedom children taste, they take it all. The sequence of the daughter’s life in the short poem shows how short life seems to be to a parent when their child grows up. The “hair flapping behind you like a handkerchief waving goodbye” is the daughter’s way of saying goodbye. It is never a real goodbye, but the parents know what it is. This poem can be translated to most parents’ life as they see their children going off; they get smaller in the distance as the parents sprint after them, never quite catching back up.