I am (not)

It is a long walk from 7784 Thornebelle and home, but I try to do it at least once a week. I like to wave at the people I know, and sound small, meaningless utterances. It's going to come, I say, and make a point of casting an ominous glance to the darkening sky. The people, folding the flags, locking the doors, standing with their arms crossed always agree...it's coming.
Walking home does take a little longer than public transportation, and it's all but dark by the time I get there, but it's more relaxing. It gives me time to think. And I usually spend the better part of that short journey thinking about myself, but last night I found myself thinking about my youngest daughter.
I wondered what growing up with me as a father was like, I wondered if I was doing a good job. I wondered if I was like my dad or mom. I wondered if I was stern enough with her or if I spoiled her. I wondered if I gave her enough attention. To be honest, I thought I was doing alright, as things go. I don't really even like kids, but with her, it was like she'd been there all along. I don't want to get all hippy-trash, but maybe she had been.
Sometimes I think she knows more than I do, about myself, the world. And other times, when I'm reminded she doesn't, I want to protect her from all that, to make her world as simple as possible.
I thought about how big she was getting, and that made me think about how big she will get. All the changes she has gone through, and will go through. I began to think about where I am in my world and how I got to be here.
Change. A human event, a metamorphosis, one day that, to this. Some cultures, most cultures, marked this change by some tradition. I wondered what my tradition had been. Since I hadn't gone out into the woods to come back a man, since no one held me aloft in a chair and danced me around a room, what had I done to cultivate my change, and if the answer was nothing, how did I get to be this? Had something gone wrong? Did I miss something? A meeting? None of my friends had held me down and sharpened my teeth with rocks. What kind of friends did I have then, if none of them had held me down and sharpened my teeth with rocks?
So, I began to wonder if my daughter's friends would be kind enough to gather around her in a circle and pluck all of her hair out, so that she will know she's become a woman. Because, I have doubts whether or not I'll be able to tell her she's walked over that threshold, I'm not even sure I'll know when she does.
To comfort me, to assuage my doubts of what I am, I tempered my thoughts with what I am not. Being able to mentally check off Not a serial killer, Not a drug addict, and so on, comforted me somewhat, but then I could also add to the list Not a world-renowned surgeon, as well.
I settled on this: we are defined as much as what we are, as what we are not. That I could live with, enough to make it home, anyways.
Lost in my thoughts, the walk home hadn't seemed so long, but it was strangely quiet when I shut the front door behind me. My daughter was in her room, the door was shut. That was odd, her door was only ever shut at night, when she was asleep. I stood outside her door and wondered what she was doing in there, I could see the light shining at the gap on the floor so it was unlikely she was asleep. She must have known I was out there, I could hear her get up (from the floor?) and cross the room, the way you cross the room when you know someone's at the door.
She opened the door and looked up at me, I smiled, but she looked uncertain. Did she think she was in trouble? Had she broken something in her room or...? But then she smiled, she seemed to have come to a decision in her head of simple black and whites. She was beginning to realize this was her world, too, and she had a place in it. A place that she was going to define with small steps, perfectly crisp, defined boundaries. She looked up at me and took a breath, now or never, flicked across her face.

"I'm not a unicorn," she said.