Only Love Is Real

It’s breakfast time and Sophie hasn’t quite finished her oatmeal, but she can no longer bear being confined to her seat. 

She is up, wandering, doing a little dance, pulling the magnets off my mother’s refrigerator, I ask her to please sit back down or ask to be excused from the table.

Instead, she crawls into my lap, making her eyes large and round and fingering the locket that hangs off a chain on my neck.  “Please don’t pull on it Sophie.  You’ve broken it once before.” 

“I’m not,” she says, trying to pry the locket open.  “I just want to see it.”

“Here, let me,” I say slipping a fingernail inside the crack.  It pops open and Sophie reads the words inside in a whisper, “Only love is real.”

It gives me the shivers, a little, to hear her say this. 

I bought this necklace for myself, to wear as a reminder of the truth, when I get sucked into believing anything else, which happens often. 

“Mommy, what does that mean?” She is looking at me with those eyes as big as saucers. 

“Um…well…it means that love is the only thing that really matters.” 

“Oh,” she says, her face serious, but unreadable.  It is impossible to tell if this has resonated with her deeply or she has no idea what I’m talking about.  She reads the locket again in whispery, reverent way, before hopping off my lap. 

“Time to get ready for school, mouse,” I tell her. 

“Aw, mom.  I want to read a book first.  Will you read this book to me?”  I sigh.  We’ll be late.   Again.  But what does it matter, really.  Only love is real. 

*

A couple days later we are back in our own home.  I have just awakened Sophie who has the uncanny ability to only sleep late on weekdays when there is somewhere we have to be.  She is grumpy.

“You weren’t supposed to wake me!  I was supposed to get up and go down stairs to see daddy!  Go back to bed mommy.”  

I wish.  This is not a plan I agreed to, but one masterminded by Sophie, probably after bedtime last night when she was reading books by the light of the hallway, instead of going to sleep. 

“Soph, unfortunately you slept late this morning, so I need you to get up and get dressed.”

“No!  I am never getting dressed.  I am staying in my bed forever.”

“I’ll give you a few more minutes to get up, “ I concede, “but then I’m coming back in here, and you are getting dressed.”

She has already disappeared under her fuzzy purple blanket.  An obstinate lump in her loft.  The lump says “hmph!” as I walk out. 

When I come back in a few minutes later, she has not changed position.

“Okay.  It’s time.”   I stand in front of the ladder to her bed.  My voice is even and calm, but firm. 

“I don’t want to go to school.  I want to stay at home and play with daddy.  I want it to be the weekend.” 

I can sympathize with this.  Once again, I imposing my adult schedule and adult needs upon her, thwarting her carefree, live-for-the-present-moment state of being. “I know, honey, but today is Thursday.  Daddy has to go to work, Mommy has to go to work, and you have to go to school.  You’ll get to play with him when he comes home tonight.”

She is quiet.  I take this as an in.

“Come on, honey, let’s pick out something supercool to wear,” I coax.

“No.”

“Soph, I don’t want to have to count….”

“Don’t count!”

“Then come on down.”

She doesn’t move.

“1….”

“Stop mommy!”

“2….” She begins to cry, angry stubborn tears.

“But mommy!  Only love is real!” 

I stop counting.  A smile peeks out of the corner of my mouth.  She has invoked these words in the wrongest and rightest way. 

On the one hand, there is the recognition that we are dancing a familiar dance.  That we do not have to do this.  That it can be interrupted.  She understands that what is happening between us is of our own creation, and just as easily as we conjured it, we can change it.  What is happening between us is not real. 

On the other hand, it appears she is hurdling this as a reminder for me, not herself.  I am the one who needs to stop pressing my agenda.  I am the one who must back down.  She is asking me the question, “How can I possibly be so insistent, so unrelenting, when only love is real?”

(Another possibility, my husband suggests, is that she is simply conning me.)

I am not quite sure how to talk to her about this paradox.  That sometimes we just have to do what we have to do, despite the fact that ultimately it’s not really important.  We have to live our lives. 

I look her in the eye.  “Thank you for that reminder, Sophie.  I don’t want to fight with you.” 

She is crying now, “then please stop counting, Mommy.”

“Okay.  Shhhh.  Calm down,” my voice losing its edge.  She leans over the side of her bed towards me, and I hold her for a moment. 

“Here, let me help you pick something out.” I whisper into her hair, “And once you get dressed you can come down and see daddy while I make breakfast, okay?” 

“Okay.”  She begins her decent as I disappear into her closet. 

There was no avoiding this fight.  The rubs are inevitable as we come together with conflicting perspectives, conflicting needs.  But with each moment of recognition, with each repair, the sinew that bonds us gets stronger. 

The Necessity of Conflict

Well, I did it. I yelled at Sophia. It was one of the things that, before I had her, I swore I would never do. But, turns out, I am human after all.

I have long held that most contention, most negative behavior can be effectively prevented if you have the time and energy to do it. But this was a day on which I had neither.

Sophia had just finished her morning at my mother’s nursery school, and as usual was utterly exhausted, having had less than her standard twelve hours of beauty rest and spent two hours in the car to arrive at school by nine. She collapsed on a giant stuffed frog, plugged her mouth with her thumb, and stared at the ceiling as she stroked his green fuzz.

My hard-working mom was having a down day, and I wanted to cheer her up. “Go ask grandma if she wants to come out to lunch with us,” I whispered into Sophia’s ear. She popped up, galloped over to my mother and shouted down the parents surrounding my mom. “Grandma, will you come to lunch with me?” My mother scooped Sophia up, beaming. “Excuse me,” she told the crowd, “but I was just asked to lunch by my grand-daughter.”

It took us awhile to collect our things, pile into the car, and get over to the luncheonette, but when we arrived we were the only customers, so I wasn’t terribly concerned that we were swiftly approaching nap time. Somehow, our three sandwiches took over a half-hour to make. By which point Sophia had fallen out of her chair several times, was transitioned to a high chair, protested adamantly, rejected every toy and chotchke offered, had grabbed every sharp and fragile object off the table, and had thoroughly irritated the couple having an adulterous rendez-vous at the next table.

I got half of a greasy grilled-cheese into her before she really started to lose it, whining, dropping her milk on the floor, and running her oily hands through her freshly-washed hair. (She knows this really gets to me). We asked for the check and high-tailed it out of there, leaving shredded napkins in our wake. In the car Sophia announced, “I want to go to sleep. I want my crib.”

“I know, darlin’.” I assured her, “I’ll get us home as fast as I can.” It was ½ an hour past her naptime. Most kids would just nap in the car. Not Sophie.

Forty red lights later, we arrived at my mother’s house, Sophie’s diaper bulging. I forgot to change it at the nursery school. If I let it go, she’s was going to leak. At best, she’d smell like pee. At worst, she’d soak the pack and play that she uses for a bed. I decided to change her.

Bad decision. She squirmed out of my grasp and made a break for it. “I just want to be with these two rabbits,” she screamed from across the room, clutching two stuffed rabbits to her chest defiantly. I approached her slowly, brandishing my iphone. “Hey Sophie,” I coo, “you want to look at animals?” I tapped the toddler flashcard app and held up a picture of a pig and snorted. “Look, it’s a pig!”

“NO! I DON’T WANT THE PIG.”

“Come on, Sophie. I just need to change your diaper and then you can go to sleep.”

“I DON’T HAVE A POOPY DIAPER!”

“I know you don’t, but you do have a very wet diaper, and I need to change it. I would be remiss as your mother if I didn’t make sure you were clean and dry before I put you down for a nap.”

“I’M NOT POOPY! I’M NOT POOPY!”

I decided that negotiations were over. I laid her flat on the changing pad. She began to buck and kick me. I would pin one part of her body and another part would wrench free and take a shot at me. I managed to rip off her soaked Pampers. I was grabbing a wipe when she clocked me in the jaw with her heel. That was it. I lost my cool.

“GOD DAMN IT, SOPHIA! STOP KICKING ME! YOU’RE HURTING ME! FOR THE LOVE OF GOD I JUST WANT TO CHANGE YOUR DIAPER! WHY CAN’T YOU JUST LIE STILL?!?!?!”

My guilty conscience answered: Because she’s exhausted. Because you woke her early. You kept her up late. And now you’re subjecting her to her least favorite activity in the whole wide world. How would you like to have someone pin you to the ground, rip off your clothes, and vigorously wipe your vulva when all you wanted to do was sleep?

I took a deep breath. I forewent the wiping, slapped a fresh diaper on her, and carried her off to bed.

“I’m sorry for yelling, Sophia. I love you. I was just frustrated.” I closed the door. Then, I got a cup of coffee, put my head in my hands, and berated myself for an hour.

When she woke up, all seemed forgotten. We didn’t talk about the incident.

That night, over dinner, Sophia told my mother, “Mommy and I had a fight.”

“Oh?” says my mother.

“Yes. Mommy yelled at me, and I was squirming too much.”

I felt the weight of my guilt lift a little. I was deeply impressed that she acknowledged her role in our struggle. She didn’t simply feel victimized by my yelling; she accepted responsibility for the co-creation of our fight.

Most adults can’t do that.

Here, I was thinking that as her parent, I need to be the one who exercises self-control for the both of us, the one who engineers the environment for harmony. But what I didn’t realize, is that Sophia is becoming her own person, a person with a nascent understanding of what makes me angry, what hurts me, what pleases me. And she is beginning to be able to make choices about how she acts in the world. It is only through the context of a real fight that one learns the impact that one has on another. It is only through processing of these incidents that one understands contrition. Empathy, taking personal responsibility, and making a meaningful apology are skills that need to be learned in the context of a relationship where safety is guaranteed. And all is forgiven.

I cannot make any promises that I won’t yell again. I will. And it won’t be rational, or fair. But I’ll continue to try to do my best to respect Sophia’s needs, to pick my battles and to admit when I’ve done her wrong.

And to take her to the carpet, when necessary.