Another sensational family moment

Sophie has discovered irony. It’s a rich discovery, and she’s a natural. So much so that I forget she’s 7, and I think I’m talking to Dorothy Parker.

What’s truly funny? I can’t tell anymore when she’s being ironic and when she’s being serious. She’s mastered wry subtlety a bit too early in life for my taste, and I am beginning to fear her whip-smart brain. A thinker, this one.

*****

Sophie and the other three of us (and the two dogs) have an impromptu BBQ the other evening in the backyard. While David grills chicken and hot dogs, I scoop dog poo and fling it into the mini-forest/leaf-and-poo-and-Christmas-tree-compost-depot behind our shed.

Hattie is, as always, my eager Poo Pointer. It’s a very no-nonsense job, requiring stamina, a strong stomach, and a loud voice. Check. Check. Supercheck-ow-my-eardrum-just-burst.

“OH MOMMY I FOUND SOME MORE OVER HERE! THIS ONE IS YUCKY! OH MOMMY! HERE’S ANOTHER ONE! EW!” A cross between Ethel Merman and Tinkerbell. This is the voice.

“Keep pointing at it! Freeze! Hold that pose!” I yell.

That’s how it goes. Over and over. Sophie watches the trees, sits very still. Always an observer, intent.

There is nothing like searching for dog poo as the smells of BBQ compete for airtime. But this, my friends, is how we roll. You have gleaned by now that we roll a little differently, our family.

Sophie’s cozy nest is a bright blue Adirondack chair that belonged to my late aunt. David sets out some other chairs, and once the poo is whooping it up in another part of the forest, we join Sophie for dinner. We talk about our days, we talk about the garden, we talk about the grill, the dogs, the shed, and the skunks that live under the shed.

The phone rings inside the house. We ignore it as the air grows cool. It stops ringing.

The ice cream truck (which now psychotically shrieks HELLO! HELLO! HELLO! whose idea was this?) makes its first neighborhood pass of the season. Sophie tears into the house, grabs two dollars from her stash and with David, buys two fudge-banana popsicles.

The phone rings again, then stops. We are settling back into chairs, and in no hurry to talk to anyone. The girls rip off the wrappers and go to town on the enormous popsicles. It is quiet, bittersweet, normal, and not at all normal. All at once. Peaceful. Sad. Calm.

The phone rings one more time. David gets up and heads into the house to answer it.

Sophie sighs and rolls her eyes. (Another new talent.)

“They called during another sensational family moment,” she says.

I eye her, searching her inscrutable face, inscrutable since the first moment I saw her, when she was all of four minutes old.

“Wait,” I say, “did you just call this a ‘sensational family moment’?”

“Yes. What does sensational mean?”

“It means super excellent, unbelievably great. Is that what you meant?”

“Yes.”

“Seriously?”

She looks at me, mid-chomp, and I can see there is no irony going down here. Not today, not now.

“Seriously,” she says.

I nod. I can only nod, right now.

*****

There are times when I think we are the Lifetime movie in which everyone roots for us and knows that, by the end of the film, divorce will be off the table and everything will turn out peachy keen. The Parent Trap, minus the twins, with more dog poo.

But a new chapter has already begun. The pages turn of their own accord, slowly, and we scan them for clues.

I promised this would not be a divorce blog, and it is not. It is simply a life in progress, no more, no less. I watch it unfold, as Sophie does, but with less grace than she does. I kneel when I pray, but I am too shy to pray that way, so I make sure I am scrubbing the floor as I do so. My prayers come easier with Pine-Sol and bleach. I pray we will find our way, I pray that we can continue to roll a little strangely, a little oddly, always affectionately.

I am naive, perhaps. I am not as old a soul as my elder daughter, whose blue-gray-green eyes already possess a wisdom that takes me aback, always takes me aback. Four minutes old, and as the blood ran out of me and I held her for the first time, I knew those blinking eyes were seeing more than anyone in the room could see. Sophia means ‘wisdom,’ and we named her before we ever saw her. It felt right. It is right.

But she needs us, her parents, to be the wise ones right now. We struggle with this, in our own ways. I search my naivete for some scraps of wisdom to give her. I keep coming back to the impossibility of un-loving. Some insist it is possible, to un-love someone. We’ve talked about that here. But it’s all I have right now, so I revisit it, daily, wondering who the magic people are, these possibly lucky souls, who have learned to let go and un-love.

Instead, I tell our girls that keeping our hearts open is the best thing we can do. Because I believe that.

I tell the girls some days will be very sad, some days will not, but that we will all love each other, still. That Daddy will always be welcome here, and that I hope to be welcome there. That we will do things to make the house extra-girly, that I need to make some changes so I will feel less sad. I ask them if they’d like to paint the shed pink.

“YES! WITH PURPLE BUTTERFLIES!” yells the H-Bomb.

“Ooh, or with polka dots! Blue! And purple!”

“Done,” I say. A plan.

*****

We have plans, and we don’t. It is very much one day at a time. Some days, the reality slices me open, flays me wide. The medicine cabinet, for instance. I stared long and hard at my still-husband’s toiletries a few days ago, then gently closed the cabinet door.

I went downstairs and said to him, “I am going to miss your toiletries.”

He considered this. He said, “I could leave them.”

I said, “No, you’ll need them. I’m just saying.”

He nodded. Like me, he frequently finds himself speechless in these situations. Unlike me, he has the stolid grace to simply nod. I tend to press on, thrashing through the speechlessness, frantically, idiotically—trying to find meaning, trying to find words that will do the trick, words that will defuse what hurts, words that will bind together as a bridge to this new life we are entering, apart. Because it’s just no fair to let these little girls be that bridge, the only bridge between us. The change will burden them plenty as it is. We will need other bridges. I can see in his eyes that he knows this too.

*****

There are plenty of warnings out there: “Make sure you have a lawyer of your own,” “Make sure s/he can’t take away X or Y or Z,” “Get that in writing—you never know.”

Except you do know, you do. Or at least, you can know, if you choose to. Some things. I know we are not adversaries. We are sad, frustrated, confused, hurt, of course. But we are not adversaries. We are not sensational, but we can still have the occasional sensational family moment. I feel like we can, and we will.

If that makes me naive, then I will be naive, because I can’t bear it any other way. Someone has to be, I figure. My 7-year-old has already developed too much irony from this ironic world. If she looks to me, and she will, I want her to see that naivete and idiotic earnestness has its own brand of wisdom too.

And so I will keep praying on my knees in puddles of dirty mopwater and diluted Pine-Sol. I will clean house, and look for guidance behind the dishwasher, and in the grime and crayon stains of several years’ of family togetherness on the legs of the kitchen table. This is the only way I know how to proceed.

The world has enough cynics, enough jaded eyes. So I will ruin my jeans and keep praying my own way, soaking in, soaking up the mess. This is prayer too.