::: it was easier to fly slicing potatoes :::

As long as I can remember, my father has taught me fear. Don't take risks, don't take chances, don't dream dreams or trust others. Just fear. I didn't recognize it as fear when I was a child and was told that if I was ever found riding my bike on the road, it would be locked up forever. Living on a rural piece of property with no good riding land, I just never rode my bike. I wasn't allowed to spend the night with friends, go on dates or take walks. I wasn't allowed to have poor friends, black friends, hispanic friends or friends whose parents were divorced. I still had them, of course, because my dad, in spite of how much he loved me in his own way, wasn't really involved in my life.

Still, his fear branded me, instilling in me an unhealthy obsession with freak accidents and a very vivid imagination (okay, maybe God gave me the imagination, but my dad helped me with the vivid part). To this day, if one of my children has gone overseas, or over to the neighbor's house, if they are jumping on the bed or jumping on the trampoline, if they are climbing ladders or climbing trees, he's there, fretting, warning, instilling fear.

I was cutting potatoes for dinner when The Baby came running into the kitchen, her pink My Little Pony from McDonald's held firmly in her grip.

"Can I help cut potatoes?" she asked, grabbing one of the wet potatoes from the bowl. My first reaction was to tell her no, that I'm busy, that I want to get this done quickly.

And then I heard my father's voice behind me. Literally. He was sitting at the counter reading the paper, and I heard him say, "No, no, no. You'll cut yourself."

And then I remembered my grandmother, my father's mom, placing a potato in my hand long after I should have learned to cut potatoes, showing me how to cut towards my thumb, letting the blade meet the pad of my thumbprint. She taught me to peel them so that a long, unbroken string of brown peeling would fall to the counter with each peeled, naked potato.

I also remembered my husband's grandmother teaching me, long after I should have known, that potatoes need to be started in cold water when making mashed potatoes.

I took a knife from the utensil crock and handed it to The Baby. She dropped the My Little Pony on the wet countertop, taking the knife into her hand. It took a few tries to show her the right way to hold the potato, the right way to hold the knife, to keep her fingers out of the way, to angle the blade toward the pad of her own thumb, but soon she was peeling potatoes, cutting them into cubes and dropping them into the big pot full of cold water, which went onto the hot stove, and was turned into delicious whipped potatoes with browned butter, which she brought to me in a little vintage bowl and asked me to photograph.

I know that my father loves me. I know that he loves and wants to protect his grandchildren. But I will choose today not to allow my children to be bound by fear, not to let others bind them to fear, and we will both be better for it.  And maybe my father will even be better for it, too.