Your Radical Left-Wing Daughter Carries Daisies For You Still - A Poem

A working draft, I am eager to hear what you REALLY think

I am your radical left-wing daughter
Holding some limp daisies in my right hand

I am your radical left-wing snowflake daughter
Who pleads with you through
Text and social media posts, and escalating phone conversations
Who even now believes that 
Maybe just one more piece of evidence,
One more statistic would convince you...

It never will
Because it isn't about evidence,
Or statistics, or facts
It's about a gap you need to fill
The size and shape of a family
Maybe the shape ours would have been

And to fill the gap, you would do anything
I guess I would too
Betray the past and 
All my fondest memories of you

I want you to know it's ok
You changed
But I grew up
And I've been building coping skills like houses
Because lord knows I'll never
Be able to afford a real one
Like you did with your first job out of college.
But I'm not mad that you had what I never will,
I'm mad you won't acknowledge that 
The reason I can't have one is not the avocado toast.

I'm mad because the lines I keep shouting
Through these texts and
Ever useless phone conversations
They are the flowers
Of the seeds you germinated
In my child-mind
And it doesn't seem that long ago

But now you've turned the water off
And you say you never liked daisies
You spit weed killer in my direction
You mow the lawn so fastidiously
That I've come to believe you’re afraid
That the daisies will grow back for you too
And what would that mean?

And so what I'm really here to say,
When you're ready,
Is, whatever it means, it's ok

While you hunted for your matching pieces
On Facebook and internet chatrooms
I was learning to see you as a person
And not just my mother
I looked back at the gardens we tended
And saw how much you needed more
Then a child's hand
And so maybe, somehow,
You've found those pieces
A community where non-existed before

It broke my heart when I realized
My hand didn't fill the gap
I was mad at myself for not being enough
In some ways, I still am
But mostly, I know that it wasn't about 
The depth of the hole, but the shape of it.

You say you're happy now
And I have no choice but to believe it
But I still carry these daisies for you
Whenever you remember
That you loved them once