Maria and Emma: The Women I Love

I think the way life works is you often pay a toll for the good things you want, the good things you get. Nothing is free, even when it is easy. There are two women I love dearly in the world, my wife and my daughter and they are rarely in the same place. Emma and I lead very different lives – she is a committed urbanite, and the thought of living in the country is almost incomprehensible to her, and I love my upstate county and the people in it, and as excited as I find Brooklyn, the thought of living there does not seem conceivable to me.

So that is the toll. We each live where we wish, and in the way we wish, without any judgement or pressure from the other, and that is a beautiful thing. But a good ways apart.

Emma is happy in her life and successful in her life, and what more could a father want? Well, maybe to see her more than two or three times a year, I suppose.  And to be a bigger part of one another’s lives. I wish all the disruptions in in my life had worked out differently. But tolls are not bad things, just because they cost you. I do not lose sight of the fact that the best things are worth paying for, even if they cost.  Tolls are the price we pay for living our lives. We don’t get it all.  I do not spend much time looking back and none regretting my wonderful life.

I would never want Em to live any other life but her own and if the price is that we sometimes look at one another through a wide prism, or communicate mostly by text, then that is the price. On the train home, I found myself looking out the window and crying, and Maria asked what the matter was, and I said I sometimes just felt sad about being so far from my daughter. Sometimes, with people and with animals, the most loving thing you can do is to let go.

So there is little in life that brings me more joy than seeing the two women I love together, in the same place. They are so comfortable together. The world seems especially bright then. Can’t get enough of that, and so I love this shot of the two of them at the Brooklyn Museum Saturday.