Slippery stuff, six

Dear Sophie Bean,

Just two full days and four more hours and nine minutes until you’re six years old. Time is hard to explain to you, still. It’s slippery stuff, time. I don’t try very hard to explain it to you; it seems to me that you’ll figure out how time works soon enough. You don’t need me for that.

You don’t need me for much these days. Already, you’re tuning me out. Brilliantly. I don’t blame you. I’ve been less than enthralling, always reminding you to stop rubbing your mouth and move your shoes off the stairs and enough with the milk-gulping already I’ll give you five dollars if you can just drink your milk without gulping like an orca. You are driving me crazy these days, and the feeling is clearly mutual. They say this is how it goes, sometimes, but it’s no fun for either of us.

You want to go to Boston for your birthday—no party! no big presents! your preferences, amazing to me—just a trip Beantown for Sophie Bean, with your best pal, Merrie. (I get the feeling you’ll let me and Merrie’s mama tag along.)

You have big dreams for Boston. You wanted first to Google fun things in Boston, and that’s what we did one night, cuddled in my big bed, a rare moment of solidarity for us. I watched and helped you painstakingly write out your Boston Birthday Wish List: Duck Boat Tour, Japanese house at the Children’s Museum, fancy hotel with cookies and milk for kids at bedtime, the 5-wits.com Egyptian adventure, Full Moon restaurant in Cambridge.

I didn’t have the heart to tell you that I don’t think we could afford to pay for everything on the list. Maybe not even a quarter of the things on the list. Like time, the concept of money is still slippery to you. I don’t want you to know just how slippery it is for us, your parents, either. Not yet. I don’t want the harsh realities to come from me alone. I don’t want to be the bad guy, because these days, I play the bad guy to your plucky superhero-spy-dressmaker-veterinarian too often.

It’s easier with your father. I can see that. He stays still for you. I run.

I know I was a better mom to you in the beginning, when I could nurse you, let you cling to me like a solemn, watchful monkey for hours. It was straightforward between us then. I miss that us. Do you?

The current us is harder terrain to navigate. I feel like I am failing you with my inconstancy, my inconsistency. Sometimes I wake up sick and panicked and quite certain that you would be better off with another mother—a slower, kinder, more focused mother—maybe a female version of your father. My mind whirs and lurches and lunges, and I worry for you, living with a mother like that. I go too fast for you; I go too fast for me.

I am on a dangerous horse I have no business riding. If I knew how to get off this horse, I would. Meanwhile, you—my pale, wan, long-legged, dark-haired beauty—are left in my wake, your face unreadable. You were inscrutable at birth, and you have not lost your talent for it, not one bit. I worry that I leave you no choice but to go inside yourself, to wave a perfunctory wave to me from your threshold, and then quietly shut the door.

I hear that you are a delight at school. This gladdens me, then saddens me. I don’t know where I fit into your life, my small, clever, mysterious love. School is your place, not mine. You don’t want to tell me what happens there. I wish you would. I want so much to hear it from you and not just from your teachers, but you don’t want to talk about it. You have at least five diaries with locks. I told you—you made me promise—I would not peek. I told you I wouldn’t unless I thought you were in danger, or were planning on murdering someone. This made you laugh. I will take what I can get.

I try to fit in too much, or too little, into your world. I can’t find a middle ground. Often, you sigh and say, “You’re crazy, Mommy” and shake your snarly hair at me, the hair I can’t seem to brush or comb without hurting you. I’ve tried to tell you that long hair has a price, that long hair comes with a cost, that there will always be painful knots that need to be combed out. But still you wince as if I’ve mortally wounded you.

I assume I have, already, somehow, and that the fallout will come in time, rain down on our heads, hunks of splintered glass and tangled hair and tears. I am a glass-is-half-empty mama: I look in the crystal ball in my head, and I see you on Jerry Springer, I really do. I see you at your first therapist. I hear you phoning me, saying Mom, I can’t talk to you this year, my therapist and I are working through a lot of serious issues that involve you and the pain you’ve caused me over the years.

Your daddy thinks I’m overreacting. I want to be overreacting. But I have a seriously impressive track record, of finding out in life that, no, I wasn’t overreacting, even after everybody told me I was overreacting. I would prefer you avoid Jerry Springer and Montel if at all possible. Therapy, I can take. Springer and Montel, not so much.

You are on the verge of six. I am ridiculous, to write like this. I know this. I am a ridiculous human being.

Why you got me and I got you, I will never know. Glass half full: Please know that I was very good at nursing you. You gave me your very first smile, long before “the experts” said you would, as I nursed you. It was nearly dawn, and we were in our New York apartment. I was rocking you in the living room, in the green glider that always pinched my fingers. You were four weeks old, and my breasts were larger than your head. As I nursed you, I began cooing, Big boooooobs! Big booooobs! Mommy has BIG BOOOOOOBS. Ridiculous began early. The dawn was breaking over my shoulder, and in the dim rosy spring light, you smiled. You stopped nursing to smile at this enormous, silly, moist woman, crooning to you about her boobs, and you kept smiling. New York City had never seemed that quiet or golden. There was nothing to do but smile back into your murky eyes, and smile, and smile. You weighed no more than six pounds then (being only four pounds at birth), and I had no idea what you could see, but I hoped you could see me as clearly as I could see you. It’s a short list, and I wanted you on it.

The other day, on the way to school, you asked me who my favorite superhero was. I told you Catgirl. Or Catwoman. I couldn’t remember. You told me she didn’t exist. I told you, yes, she did indeed exist. You asked me what she did for a living. I told you she whipped people and wore a great black bodysuit. You were skeptical. You told me your favorite superhero was Wonderwoman. I asked why. You said because she was strong, and she had 18 muscles, at least. I said, Well, I have 18 muscles in my baby tunnel alone. Then, you said, Wonderwoman had 24 muscles. I said, Well, then, I have 24 muscles in my baby tunnel alone. I said, Did Wonderwoman push two babies out of her baby tunnel? Could Wonderwoman have pushed one of those babies out with no pain medication? I said all mothers were superheros, way more superheroic than Wonderwoman or Catgirl.

She said, Mommies aren’t superheros.

Oh yes they are, I said. You wait and see.

I saw you roll your eyes in the rear-view mirror. You’re crazy, Mommy, you said. I did not correct you. There was a kindness to your words that I was hungry for. I am too hard on you most of the time, and you weren’t off base, after all.

When we got to school, I asked your teacher in front of you if her daughter thought she was crazy. Your teacher said, Yes, only all the time.

You smiled at this, then skipped off to play before Circle Time. No kiss, no hug. I didn’t force the issue. I force too many issues with you, I know that.

I let you go. I walked away. I got into my empty car. I like a quiet car.

But I like you better. I’m sorry if I haven’t been good at telling you that or showing you that. Five has been hard. I don’t know if I can buy you a night in a fancy hotel in Boston. But maybe I can give you something better this year.

I love you, beauty.

Mom