September 14, 2019
This is a painful one for me to recount. My 14-year-old daughter and I fought half the way to this Park from our home. I don’t even remember what the fight was about; I just remember the two of us screaming at each other. When we got to the Park, we separated and toured the grounds each by ourselves. It took half the visit for us to find one another and become a duo again. The emotional drama distracted me from learning more about the Park in person. I remember he was a great artist, and that he had a wife AND a mistress, and that his wife knew about the mistress and one day took off and toured the world by herself for a while. Mostly I remember wishing my daughter and I could stop wounding one another and learn how to love our way forward.
[Edit – reading this in 2024, I look back and wish I had managed things differently and controlled my temper. I did not have the emotional capacity to be more patient during that point in time. She was only 14. I felt so overwhelmed during those years, and I was so alone in my parenting. I have compassion for myself now for not being able to handle certain things better back then given all the extremely difficult and traumatic circumstances, none of which I will publicly describe right now – but that doesn’t mean I am off the hook for not being a better mother to my daughter during the trying times. I have since apologized to her. But still.]
Enjoy the few photos I took and forgive the lack of historical data in this post. Ah yes – I hiked the two trails, they are both fairly short and easy. One takes you down to an old mill. My daughter joined me on that one and we had a blessedly peaceful time.
