To a Daughter Leaving Home

To a Daughter Leaving Home, by Linda Pastan, really struck home for me when I found it in our Lit. book. This past year I graduated high school down the road at Sun Valley High School and the only thoughts I knew were occupying my parents' minds was that they were losing another daughter to college. My dad is quite the emotional type and expresses his feelings, thoughts, worries and concerns on a daily basis to my sisters and me. My older sister, Hillary, is off at graduate school in Michigan and my twin sister is at UNCW. I know my parents were worried about losing me to, but at least I stayed right down the road.

The poem talks about a father teaching his daughter to ride a bike for the first time by herself. The speaker, the father, states in the first sentence "When I taught you" which implies this poem was going to be looking back on a memory. This father put a lot of thought and concern into teaching his daughter how to ride a bike, which kind of symbolized him teaching her to be independent, to grow, and learn on her own. I remember when I first tried riding a bike on my own as my father pushed me down the slight hill we lived on. You could tell he was nervous, like the father in the poem, and that he was worried and waiting for me to crash, but after a few times, I rode on my own with dignity and pride, alone, without my father.

The father in the poem describes the sight of his daughter getting smaller and smaller as she rode farther away. In this way, the poem shows how the daughter is getting further and further out of reach, exploring the road on her own as her father tried desperately to catch up. The words "more breakable with distance" shows that the father views his daughter as very vulnerable on her own. He, like any father, is probably used to always being there every step of the way in his daughter's life, and this bike riding lesson is what tears that tie between a father and daughter.

The girl is the poem is noted as screaming and laughing with excitement as she ventures on her own as her hair flaps in the wind "like a handkerchief waving goodbye." This last line of the poem jumps out at me. The father sees this as a goodbye, even though his daughter, still young, is only learning to ride her bike and will return home. This instance is like a foreshadowing for the father as to what years from then will be like when his daughter starts her own life and leaves home.

I think that the daughter leaving home later in her life is what made her father look back in time and remember when she first learned to ride her bike on her own and how it reminded him of her goodbye.