The day the greatest gift in my single parenting life was my daughter's boredom

On a Friday night when the internet had been out for a few days, my teenage daughter found my love letters.
She was bored. She went looking for one of my journals she remembered finding a few years previously that had first clued her in to realize that I was a human being with similar worries and fears at age 12. Neither of us knew where it landed. Instead she found one box of high school mementos filled with correspondence from my family when I was away at summer camps, play posters, locker signs, a journal, and a few inches worth of letters from friends. The contents of this box hadn't been missed or exposed for 20 years. Not that I had particularly forgotten about the histories these letters told, but I hadn't thought a lot about them either.

My daughter is nearly 16. She is a little bit younger than the era from which the contents of this box survive. Reading letters from my little brothers and sisters and my parents when I was young deepened her sense of appreciation for family ties. Reading letters from beaus and friends showcased the histories of friendships I had - the kinds of friendships she hasn't yet had for herself. Some of these friends I have to this day.  And those that I don't have still showed off the fact that people can be important in your life even when they ultimately go. I know when I was young I didn't want to believe for a second that someone that meant the world to me would one day be just a memory. There were actually a few letters I screened first and moved aside, but for the most part it was a pure delight to share these time capsules. I asked her to read them aloud as she went so I could enjoy her saturation and see the moments that arrested her most.

I never anticipated this moment. Sure, I kept these things because I live for the seduction of fiction that one day these letters and posters and mementos might tell a story I never told to someone who cared about me. I also don't have the guts to mess with my own sentimentality. But I didn't see this particular episode coming. I never planned to read my love letters with my daughters. So for my teenage daughter to swoon over an extinct me and fall a little bit in love with my friends and their feelings, that was a gift. As she read, she expressed a lot of desire for building similar relationships. It was heartbreaking and wonderful all at once. And for me, it was purely thrilling to note one thing that hasn't changed about me - the value of verbose and vocabulary I adore still. I'm a sucker for a man with vocab and feelings and a handwritten letter. Like my daughter, I swooned a little too. But even more than that, it isn't that I want these people back in my life: I got to re-admire and share the notion of people with these qualities in my life, and now I get to share liking and wanting this with my daughter. We got a little closer to being friends that night, and all because she was bored.
So the fact that my daughter and I wouldn't be likely high school friends doesn't matter much. We have really rocky moments. We clash in very big ways.  The fact that we get to start being friends now, that matters quite a bit.