Waiting for Yes

I come downstairs and find Sophia and Kevin curled up in bed together, snuggling.  They both look drowsy, their eyes at half-mast.  I sit at the foot of the bed, where there’s barely enough room for me. 

“What a night!”  I exclaim.  “The Easter Bunny showed up really late.”

“When?” said Sophie, sitting up.

“Not until after midnight.  He kept me up way past my bedtime!”  I whistled. 

“Do I have an Easter Basket?” Where is it?” Sophie was ready to leap out of bed.

“Not so fast.  Here’s the thing.  He hid your Easter Basket.”  I am enjoying myself.  Her anticipatory excitement.  What I know is coming next.  “And he gave me a whole series of clues to help you find it.”

Sophie is out of bed, wide awake now.  Ready for action. 

“I think he left the first clue on the table.”  She races into the dining room, where the fourth clue is waiting.

“No, the kitchen table.”  And she’s off and running to the kitchen.  She’s quiet for a minute, and then exclaims, “The bath!  Its’ in the bath!” 

“Come here, let’s check it.”

Sophie appears in the doorway singing the words to the first clue:

“A tisket, a tasket.  Where is Sophie’s Easter Basket?  Here is what you have to do…go on a hunt and solve each clue:  1.  We love to hear you laugh, the next clue is where you take a _________.” 

“I think you’re right!” I shout.

“Come with me, mom!”  We run upstairs to the bathroom and she plucks the next clue out of the tub.  Together, we race around the house, until we wind up at the pile of wood, next to the fireplace.  Sophie reads the final clue:  “You’ve almost found it!  You’re on fire.  Go into the kitchen and look in the ___________.”

“Parlor?”  Sophie ventures a guess.

“We don’t have a parlor.  Go look in the kitchen and see if you can figure it out.”

“Refrigerator?”

“Refrigerator doesn’t rhyme with fire!”  This is too much fun.  The basket is hidden in exactly the same place my mother hid my basket several decades ago. 

Sophie rotates 360 degrees, scanning every inch of the kitchen.  Her eyes settle on the shuttered doors that hide the our cleansers and cleaners and the…

“Dryer!” Sophie cries out, zips over to the machine and claims her prize.  Her face is lit with joy as she pulls out her basket.

“Kidz Bop!  Just what I wanted!  Choose Your Own Adventure!  Just what I wanted!”  There is a certain thrill that comes with getting someone just what they wanted.  I’m snapping pictures as she bounces up and down.  Like most of her pictures, these will probably be blurry. 

“An egg full of jelly beans!  Can I eat some after breakfast?”

“You can eat some now,” Kevin says.  “It’s Easter.” 

“I’ll have one and save one for after breakfast.”  She’s fearful that she won’t get more. 

“Eat them both and you can have another after breakfast,” because I’m secretly very happy that this is what she considers to be indulgence. 

Kevin reads her the first chapter of her new book, while I make coffee.  When they’re finished, they sit down to a couple of bowls of cheerios.  I’ve set out the hard-boiled eggs and a sheet of stickers for Sophie to decorate them with after she’s done.  A bad idea because she can’t keep her hands off them.  One rolls precariously to the edge of the table.

“Maybe you should wait until after breakfast,” I tell her.

Two seconds later she is fondling an egg again.

“Maybe don’t say ‘maybe’,” Kevin gently suggests, as he pushes the eggs away from Sophie.  He’s right.

“Don’t touch the eggs until we’re done with breakfast,” I tell her.  Sophie harumphs and sulks in her seat, not eating. 

“Maybe when we come back from the JCC, you can have another surprise for me.” 

“I think we’re done with surprises for today,” I tell Sophie. 

She reaches for another egg.

“Soph, I said not to touch them until after breakfast.”

Then she whips her bathrobe belt at me, narrowly missing my coffee. 

“Give that to me right now,” I say sternly, taking the belt from her.  Sophie folds her arms across her chest, her eyebrows set in a “V” on her forehead.  She’s quiet for a minute, and then she begins to wail and runs up to her room.

I sigh a very heavy sigh.

I know that one thing has nothing to do with the other, but why, why after we’ve been having so much fun, does she have to be so naughty?  Why is the joy so ephemeral, so fleeting?  Why is she only interested in the next surprise—not what I’ve done, but what I am about to do?

What is overindulgence versus giving your child meaningful, enjoyable experiences? 

You know you’ve got a problem when your child says…

“Mommy, please can I?  I’m waiting for a yes….”  Sophie is looking up at me, eyebrows cocked, hand on one hip, wearing an expression that is laughable on a five-year-old, but will be completely obnoxious eight years from now. 

What was she asking me for?  I can’t remember now.  Another sweet?  One more book?  Another episode of Word Girl?

It doesn’t really matter.  She knows I am loathe to say no.  Oh, I say it plenty, but every time I do, there is a tug within.  An equal and opposite reaction.  It takes great effort not to acquiesce.  She must see this internal struggle I go through, reading the flicker of weakness on my face.  The keenness of her perception is her gift and my curse.

Within me, there is an impulse to give Sophia her heart’s desire.  Not because I feel guilty, or I want to avoid a fight, or I’m looking to buy her love, but because I hold the false belief that it will somehow make her happy.    And it does.  For a minute. 

Of course true happiness has absolutely nothing to do with one more anything.  Any joy derived from that extra sweet, book, or television show is fleeting.  We might get a quick squirt of dopamine, but we all-too-quickly habituate to the novelty of the thing and then we just want more, addicts that we are. 

Which isn’t to say that there isn’t any appreciation, deep down, of the love that lies behind each yes.   And, ironically, each no.  Because even the no’s with their limits and boundaries convey caring.  That, and they make the yesses that much sweeter. 

Where to draw the line between yes and no is perhaps our greatest first world parenting problem.  I struggle with it dozens of times a day. 

After having disappeared upstairs in a snit, leaving me to my musings, Sophie re-emerges, blowing sharp notes out of a recorder.  The cloud has passed and skies are bright again. 

She comes up to me and quite unexpectedly gives me her special series of kisses that starts at my forehead, goes down my nose to my chin and then across my face from cheek to cheek. 

Is it gratitude?  An apology?  Or a little jolt of that undercurrent of love that lies beneath all of our interactions?

I can’t know. 

But I can hope that it’s proof that just as often as she’s waiting for a yes, something inside of her is waiting for a no. 

Big 5-Year-Old Love

I got an email from my friend Julia this morning.  Her daughter, Libby, age five, had just announced that she wanted to marry her infant sister, Stella.  At least Libby is no longer looking to depose her mother as Stella’s parent.  That had been the issue the last time we touched base. 

You see, Libby loves her new sister that much.  Almost makes me want to reconsider… Almost. 

Julia explained to Libby that, as Stella was a blood relative, they could not legally marry.  Not in this country, anyhow.  Libby would have to find another, more socially appropriate way to profess her undying love for her sister.  And consider other prospects for a life partner.

Libby decided that marrying a friend might be a good idea, with which her mother (who’s husband, I can attest, is her best friend), heartily agreed.

Well, of course, Libby picked my Sophie.  (I say in my most Jewish-mother voice.)

I shared this news with Sophie on our way to nursery school. 

“Libby’s mother told me that she wants to marry Stella.”

“She can’t do that!” cried Sophie, aghast.  “Stella is too young.  When Stella is a mommy, Libby will be a grandma!” 

“They’re not THAT many years apart.  Libby is about four years older than Stella.  I’m that many years older than daddy.”

“Oh.”

“Besides, that’s not the reason they can’t get married.”

“Why can’t they?”

“You aren’t supposed to marry your sister.  It’s against the law.” 

“Oh.” Sophie was taking this all in.  Perhaps realizing that she had no sister with whom to fall in love and experience the disappointment of not being able to marry, fashioning it into a rationalization for why it’s a very good thing she’s an only child. 

Or maybe that’s just my own twisted imagining.  

“So you know who Libby decided to marry?”  I said, dangling the information before her.

“Who?”

“YOU!” 

Sophie’s face bore a serious expression.  She was considering this prospect.  “Well, I’m going to have a whole bunch of girls marrying me, so she could be one of them.”

My daughter is planning on having a harem.  Of women.

“Who else would you like to marry, Soph?”

“Leah.  Lilly.  Reid.”

“So you would marry a boy?”

“One boy.  And Margo.  We’d all be mommies together.” 

“Except for Reid.”

“He would be the daddy.”  The fantasy makes sense.  After all, when they get together, what do they do but play at being parents—I frequently hear Sophie and her friends bossing their dolls around with glee.  “Time to go to bed!  No, you cannot have another cupcake!  Yes, you have to wear those pants!”  Parenting with greater limits, consistency and vehemence than I can possibly muster. 

How do we decide who to marry?  Chemistry?  Security?  Someone with whom to continue the various dynamics we established in our families of origin?  

Imagine, marriage, not born out of sexual attraction, finances, and familial dramas, but friendship, pure enjoyment, and a vision of communal happiness. 

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. 

First Friendships

Walking out of her classroom at my mother’s school, Sophia hands me the 12th birthday invitation she has received since September. I slit it open. It’s from her friend Marie. She’s turning five.

“Please can I go mommy?” Sophie pleads, her brows knitted together hopefully, worried that I’ll say no. To be fair, Sophia rarely asks me to attend a party. If she doesn’t know the child well, she’s the one to suggest that we decline.

But Maria is special. Each week, at school, she greets Sophia effusively. Their faces light up when they see each other. They embrace and head straight for the trunk of dress-up clothes. Unchecked, they would play in the housekeeping all morning, dressed in discarded evening gowns, Maria cooking, Sophia serving plastic facsimiles of food.

I hesitate. “I don’t know sweetie. It’s not on a school day when we’re already up here. Marie lives really far away.” Four hours round trip, to be exact.

Sophie, dejected, instantly reacts with anger, “You aren’t allowed to say that! She’s not too far away! She lives close!”

Though I know better than to argue, I let a snotty little, “No, she doesn’t,” slip out. Sometimes, it’s hard to be the grownup.

We run into Marie on the way out the door. “Sophie’s Mom? Can Sophie come to my birthday party? Please?” She clearly did not hear the conversation that just took place between Sophie and me.

“I’m sorry, Marie. I don’t think so. We live really really far away.” Marie literally hung her head. She looked crestfallen. “Oh man!” she said.

Then, the two of them clung to each other as if they would never see the other again. And they kissed, just barely missing each other’s lips.

I watch, struck by this truth: their friendship matters.

I flash back to when I was six years old and best friends with Judy Kelly. We were as close as six-year-olds could be, playing exclusively together on the playground, visiting each other for play dates. Our teacher, Miss Stonehill, would put a cardboard box around my desk to try to keep me from talking to her in class. Judy had invited me to her seventh birthday. It was going to be a sleepover. We were so excited, we couldn’t stop talking about it. I got my first sleeping bag for the occasion.

Saturday, the morning of the sleepover, I got a phone call from Judy. Mom brought me the phone. “Where were you last night?” Judy asked me. She sounded really upset.

“What do you mean?”

“My party! Why didn’t you come to my party!”

“But it’s tonight!” I protested, an awful feeling rising up inside of me.

“No! It was last night! You missed it. Why didn’t you come?” I didn’t know what to say this. I was so overwhelmed with disappointment. I started to cry and dropped the phone. Judy’s party! My first sleepover! How did this happen?

I was too young to realize this was not my mistake. I blamed myself. Even when I think about now, thirty-five years later, I can feel the disappointment and shame.

Sophie was not going to miss this party.

I found a way to make it work, logistically, and then I told Sophie. She was elated. The next day, she told Marie. Marie was ecstatic. The two hugged each other and danced around.

My hope is not that Sophie will remember the party. I doubt that it had any great emotional salience for her. It was one good time among many. But I do wish that, no matter how many people she meets in her lifetime, no matter how many relationships she moves in an out of, this early friendship will hold a sweet place in her heart.

Love, in any size, at any age is the most important thing.

Cold Fish

I am the demonstrative sort. Perhaps not always in the physical sense, but when it comes to words, I can’t help but say what I feel.

Years ago, when I was teaching, a lovely human being came to work in my classroom for the summer as an aide. She was remarkable with the children—it was just something she exuded—a deep calm and radiant warmth. There was an instant connection between us, an effortlessness, a simpatico that went beyond words. Not long into the relationship, we met for dinner. We spent hours sharing stories, hopping restaurants for drinks, then dinner, then coffee and dessert. As we sipped our lattes, I felt a welling inside, and, though I knew it was odd, I leaned in and said, “I just have to tell you.... I love you.” I waited for her to be completely weirded out and ask for the check. She smiled and said, “I feel the same way.” It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

I believe it is important to not only tell the people you love that you love them, as frequently as it occurs to you, but to show them—by listening intently and being fully present, helping when help is needed, and expressing gratitude for what they bring. I know, at times, this can seem over-the-top, particularly to those recipients who return my affections in more subtle ways. But I’d rather have those I love be quite sure of my love. No one will go to the grave wondering if I truly cared about them.

My relationships are the most important thing in my life, and Sophia, of course, is among the most cherished.

Despite my own ambivalent relationship to physical affection, I am compelled to manhandle my child. I want to pet her head, trace the outline of her face, plant raspberries on her belly, pinch her tushie, and hold her close.

Some children love to be held and cuddled. They thrive on the attention. They beg to be picked up. They snuggle on the couch. They freely hug and kiss. Sophia is not one of these children. She never has been. Even as an infant, she would rather be exploring than held in the confines of my arms. Now, I scoop her up for a hug, and she wriggles out of my grasp. If I ask for a kiss, I get a flash of a peck. I eye my friends’ more affectionate children jealously. How did I wind up with such a cold fish?

It is actually one of the hardest things about being Sophia’s parent. I would love nothing better than to embrace her and whisper confectionary words into her hair, but the only way I can get her to stay nestled at my side is by reading her piles and piles of picture books. And if she is hurt, rather than reaching out for me, she pushes me away, bearing her pain on her own, recovering quickly, and returning to the world.

What do I do with my unwanted affection? “That’s why you need to have another,” my mother says in an unveiled pitch for a grandchild. I remind her that there are no guarantees. “That child could also have my prickly genes. No thank you.” I will stick with the devil I know. The one who refuses to hold my hand or lounge with me in bed. And I will continue to flood her with torrents of my emotion, unable and with no desire to dam my feeling, hopeful that, invisibly, it feeds her in important ways.

Yet, despite her obvious discomfort with caresses and nuzzles, I am quite sure of her love. The signs are everywhere. It’s in the music in her voice as she calls for me when she wakes; it’s in the comfort with which she leaves my side to be with others; it’s in the bright smile she casts my way when we are reunited. And then there are the subtle, sacred articulations of her love—an adoring look in my rearview mirror, “Mo-mmy,” said with a deep, satisfied, sigh, a small hand that sneaks onto my thigh as I tell her a story.

These moments sustain me, but, in truth, I’m always hungry for more.

Learning to Say I Love You

I said it in the general direction of my distended belly, certain she could hear through the stretched dermal layers that separated my words from her ears.

I whispered it into the spongy, uncalcified surface of her head, certain the words would be absorbed into the delicate folds of her gray matter.

I assured her of its truth as I rocked her from tears to sleep, when her eyes first met mine in the morning, when she smiled with recognition at my face, when she crawled towards me babbling mama, the earliest of her words.

I love you.

Long before she could understand the sentiment, I sensed she understood the emotion. She did not yet love; not in the way that I loved her. She was dependent on me. She felt comforted by me. But she did not know where she ended and I began. She didn’t understand me as separate, let alone as an object of love.

No matter. I could live with this intense unrequited passion. I did not love her to be loved. I loved her because she was. I loved her with primal ferocity and maternal tenderness. With deep gratitude and a bit of disbelief.

It’s crazy love, one of my friends tried to explain what it was like, before Sophia was born. There’s nothing like it.

But like all lovers, I eventually began to wonder when I would hear those three words directed towards me.

The words came in stages. For about six months it was said as a ritual, something she parroted when Kevin and I put her to bed or whenever we parted. She clearly felt deep affection for us, and she was expressing that affection, but it was rote. Any words could have replaced, “I love you,” and they would have held the same meaning.

I determined that, unlike the understanding of other feelings (look at my eyes, they are filled with tears, I feel sad), love could not be taught. The ability to say the words and mean it is something quite magical. Almost everyone has the capacity to love, but it is the most ineffable of emotions.

I would have to wait until she had her epiphany. It came one night, under the most quotidian of circumstances. We were sitting together at dinner, Sophia, Kevin and I eating something unmemorable, talking, listening, laughing. She suddenly looked at us with a new light in her eyes.

“I love daddy; I love mommy; and I love me. We are a whole family,” she observed.

Even now, I am awash with the simple truth of it. She learned to express love through the experience of being loved. And hearing it over and over and over again.