By Peggy Sturdivant

Twenty-one years ago on the 21st day of March a nurse helped transfer my day-old baby into the virgin car seat placed in middle back of the Honda car. Along with other pregnant women the vernal equinox had worked like a charm; we’d arrived in a wave to the Family Childbirth Center, top floor of then-Ballard Community Hospital. My room overlooked the 7-11 that still rules at the corner of Market and 17th NW.

Almost exactly twenty-one years later I was the clueless arrival first out of the airport chute in Santiago, Dominican Republic. The incubation period should have been longer. One should not be able to board an ice-coated airplane in New York at 8 a.m. and emerge four hours later in the tropics. The culture shock is too great, especially coupled with a confident, glowing young woman suddenly breaking from the waiting throng and calling, “Mom.”

With that I become more daughter to my daughter than mother, the non-Spanish speaking visitor into her current world, following her lead. Emerging from the flat little airport doors into the humidity and exhaust fumes of Santiago I was befuddled, perhaps most of all by this young woman who was familiar, and yet not.

It was long a joke that Emily was so attached to me that I would be the parent walking her child to a college classroom. She was an anxious child who didn’t like loud birthday parties and had me test her food or utensils in case they were poison. I had to put any spoon into my own mouth first, as though my saliva was a preemptive antidote.

When did it all change? When Emily was the one who paddled the kayak, assuring me the float plane was not going to land on us? When her teacher at Center School said she needed to join Model U.N. and travel to New York? Or was it earlier, when Jay Sasnett at Salmon Bay heralded the compass roses on her maps, introduced her to ham radio, Russian and turned her into a future Geography major who didn’t consider a single college on the West Coast?

“What is Emily doing there?” my father asked as I staged my trip from Seattle to her CIEE semester in Santiago via Massachusetts. I told him I didn’t really know: Spanish immersion, service learning?

One week later I had an answer, after trailing in my daughter’s wake. She has worn holes in the soles of all her shoes in the last four months, walking from her host family to the university and then through the mostly unpaved streets of the neighborhood where her project work is to create a sustainable club for teenagers who care for siblings with disabilities. It’s a barrio that many Dominicans will not visit.

The neighborhood is called Cienfuegos, which means 100 fires. This area closest to the ever growing, ever burning landfill is also called La Mosca – The Fly. Childhood doesn’t last long in this neighborhood, especially for those who need to look after a sibling with special needs while their parents work.

Even in the commercial hub of Santiago the electricity is erratic; the city hums with generators. Stop signs are rare, and merely a suggestion. Instead car horns establish right of way. There is almost always music playing in the night: from bars, apartments and passing cars, loud enough to set off car alarms and startle the roosters perched in trees. Pick-up trucks circle the neighborhoods, mounted speakers repeating one message as they collect used refrigerators, metals, beds, piling them ever higher until the load is secured by a man standing on top of the bounty.

Emily moves effortlessly through this cacophony, shows me how to straddle the hump in the front seat of the conchos – cars that drive on certain routes, at about 5 cents a ride, up to six passengers at a time. Someone who never wanted to stand out has accepted that she is always seen as foreign, a Gringo. Usually embarrassed by me in travel situations, Emily just shrugs and translates when I ask the Haitian coconut vendor to pose with his machete. In a place where she cannot be invisible, she exudes confidence.

I sit in on her meetings. She translates for me and her host family. When she is in class I explore the city or read sitting by the fan. On our one weekend we travel to a ranch in the mountains where the bartender graciously flirts with both of us, a young woman coaches my merengue dance and we take a guided horseback ride to the waterfall, clinging to the reins as the horses gallop on uneven terrain. Seated behind us are local boys who aren’t even holding on.

Already at age 21 my daughter has been places I have never been – Thailand, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Siberia. She was born with one arm over her head; I never dreamed it was a sign that she would be charging away from me. On the morning she was born she was simply precipitous, delivered in less than five hours, and content to be placed by the doctor in her father’s arms.

Twenty-one years later she told me I should not be afraid so I got onto the motorcycle taxi; driver in front, Emily in the middle and me on the back, along with our bags. I put my hands under her arms and clasped the fronts of her shoulders as the driver entered traffic. What else can I do now but try to hold on?