To touch a star

So my daughter, who is three, tells me she wants to touch a star. I start to tell her no, that it’s not possible. Then I look at her face, her finger pointed with supreme confidence and absolute clarity in the direction of the star she wants to touch, and I rethink my answer.

Really? I ask myself. Why can’t she touch that star?

I imagine her ancestors, the women who came before her, standing in their little magenta shoes, with their tiaras on their little heads, telling their mothers the exact same thing. My daughter’s great grandmother, my grandmother, telling her mother she wanted to touch a star. Did her mother say. “yes, sure you can sweetie, if you give it your best shot?” Or did she say, “no you can’t, it’s just too far away?”

And what did this little girl, my grandmother, tell her own daughter, my mother? “Go ahead darling, give it a try?” Or, “maybe when you’re older, after you and your sisters have married suitable boys?”

And what did my mother tell me?

Actually, I know the answer to that one. She named me after a star.

She told me I could be anything I wanted to be. A journalist, an IAS officer, a doctor, an engineer, an astronaut, a Nobel prize winner, a Prime Minister.

Just not a wife, a mother, or a toucher of stars.

I imagine it would take a special combination of skill and foolhardiness, of belief and suspension of belief, of audacity and simplicity, to touch a star.

I imagine my daughter may have that combination. Or maybe she doesn’t. What do I know, she’s just three. But I do know that she’s a happy, healthy, regular young little girl born in the twenty first century, who likes tiaras and kittens and trains and cars, who likes to cook and clean and build towers and castles… she can do anything she wants to do.

Even the stars are not the limit.