 This was written in 2009, so it's a bit dated, but in a way not. On God, daughter in residence. It's time to hunker down behind the barricades. My daughter, now a woman, is back. She's newly graduated from a university in a far off land where she majored in pubs, English literature, long-term live-in boyfriends, and love. Where she learned to suck in the smoke of home-rolled tobacco and greet many a dawn with bottles emptied into the night. Suddenly, she's in residence once again after four years away playing free agent in a parentless world. In her absence, I've grown accustomed to her sweet silences, brief emails, occasional transatlantic calls, crying for comfort, requesting cash demurely. But now she's here, disdainful, demanding, directorial, opinionated, sharp-tongued, steel-coated, confrontational, and perhaps just a wee bit scared. But she's looming large, close up in my face, full-blown with bosoms, daring, defiance, and she's ready, or not, for the world. She's a tall ten, blond, mained, voluptuous, a shy little girl, no more. She, who once hung on my legs at parties and only mouthed the lyrics of songs her classmates sang out loud at lower school assemblies. Suddenly, she's figurehead of her own vessel, a Nordic presence, a forward-thinking woman with a cauldron-quick mind, a Viking princess who can slip into any space and own it. While I, her mother, wake to the morning mirror, searching a gravity-fed face for its younger selves, while she, in her bedroom, oblivious, sleeps off another late night out in a bar. I am feeling suddenly the senior citizen I am bereft of all those glorious girls with open-hearted wonder, who live inside me, even now. Why is it that my daughter, with her hard-earned, end-of-summer tan, dressed in her short-short, blue-jean shorts and white-sequined, slinky-sultry, cleavage-bearing, electromagnetic, teeny-tiny tank top, makes me feel my life is over? How dare she do this to me, and at my age? She's my own flesh and blood, my longed-for baby, my little toe-headed girl, whose presto grown up into this kind of daisy-may with brains, this walking, talking, playboy centerfold, a woman not of the 1950s or 60s, like her mom, not obliging, smiling, decorative, compliant, not a slave to any man, this bold 21st-century woman, my daughter, this woman with a well-planned agenda of her own, this woman now living under my roof, without the kind of tight-faced smiles that created crow-footed trails of indescribable pain on my own 64 years of womanhood.