When the little owl vanishes
BACK WHEN OUR daughter was 3 or 4 years old, we read the same picture book night after night: El Valiente Búho (The Brave Owl), the story of a baby bird who was worried about leaving the nest. Everyone — her parents, her siblings, the other animals in the forest — promised her that she wouldn’t fall to the ground. When the time was right, they said, and if she didn’t let fear overtake her, she would flap her wings and simply fly away.
No matter how many times we read it together, resonated with me. It was a perfect metaphor for our child’s growing independence, a reminder of the
