Letting Go, Holding On
Today, S. let go of three distinct and important parts of her past all at once: she broke up with her boyfriend; she gave away ten bags of clothing, or 107 individual pieces (yes, we actually counted), all of which had been purchased and worn during and before her four years in foster care; and, she told me confidently and with certainty that she no longer wanted to move back to the state she is from.
Anyone who read that first paragraph is now thinking, “Wow, they had an amazing, life-changing day,” but they’d be wrong—-well, sort of. The day started out in a less-than-stellar way.
Church this morning was a nightmare. When S. came to live with me, I went back to the church I’d attended a year or so earlier, before I'd had a big falling-out with more than half the parishioners about whether the church ought to be open and affirming to GLBT people. (I wrote about this at length on this blog awhile back). It was a hard decision, but she had been attending an Evangelical church and believed that anyone who was pro-choice or believed in evolution was going to hell. I had to do something, and the church, I was confident, despite all its flaws, would at least help her see that there were other ways to be a Christian.
It was painful going back—-I wept through the first two services—-but then it became easy, because I had no expectations. I wasn’t bitter that the minister and parishioners were not reaching out to me in the way my church family might have done as a child; I wasn’t even bitter when the minister stared aghast at S. when she tried to strike up a conversation, when she answered nervously, backing away. In fact, S. and I simply joked about it—-then kept going. I didn’t care anymore if I didn’t agree with every word the minister said—-though to her credit, she did surprise me, talking about GLBT issues from the pulpit the Sunday we returned, posting signs welcoming “families of all shapes and sizes” and “GLBT people.” It was her way, I think, of trying to make things right between us, of telling me we were welcome, even though she couldn’t reach out in a more meaningful way.
Summer came and went, and we took a long, lazy, sleep-in-every-Sunday morning church hiatus. I decided I wasn’t going to push it; we do devotions on our own, and I’m able to teach her my very liberal understanding of the Gospel--but S. expressed an interest in going back this week, and so we did.
As we got out of the car, she was carrying her sketchbook and a pencil. I asked her to put it back, explaining patiently that it might distract others from the service, and that it would be impossible for her to participate with it sight. She responded, and I quote, “fuck you.” It had been a long time since she’d blown up so quickly, so I was taken aback. “What is this about?” I wanted to know, to which she responded, “Why should I have to pay attention? God never did anything for me.”
Well, no shit. If you believe in the God of the Evangelicals, some kind of magic punisher-god who can work miracles but also punishes evildoers with things like AIDS and 9-11, then it’s hard to imagine how that God could possibly allow a kid to be abused as badly as she was without stepping in. “God hates me,” she added, “And I hate him.”
“Well, then, let’s just go home,” I said. “I thought you wanted to come. I don’t need to be here. We can talk about this and God and whatever you want to talk about better at home.”
But she stomped into church, determined to make a scene. An elderly woman I love dearly was greeting everyone at the door. “I thought you’d left us again!” she exclaimed, reaching out to hug us, but S. stomped by her, right up the minister.
“God never did anything for me,” she told the minister, stomping her foot. Now, this minister is a kind woman, but she’s also completely socially inept. One of my many issues with the church is how she couldn’t and wouldn’t reach out to me in the hardest moments of the fight over becoming an “open and affirming” congregation. When I told her about the adoption, she’d asked whether S. had had a hard life and whether she was white-—she is not, shall we say, someone I consider in the top 10 or 30 or even 150 people in my support system. So, I didn’t expect any help, and she didn’t give me any-—she just stared, open-mouthed, while I said to S., “Let’s just go in and sit down and see how things go.”
We sat in back so I could make a quick escape and so that S.’s behavior wouldn’t be distracting to anyone else. But S. spotted her godmother in the front row and went right to her and sat down, glaring back at me. I stayed in my seat until it was time to greet others, at which point I moved, and S. said, loudly, “But I hate you!”
“I know,” I responded, “But you’ll get over it.” A couple people sitting near us giggled, giving me looks that said, we've been through this before. I’d promised myself from the beginning that I was never going to let myself be embarrassed by S., because her former foster family was, frequently, and she used this to her advantage, acting out whenever possible in order to heighten their reaction. I didn’t want to play that game, so I simply relaxed and tried to pay attention.
Which was hard, because for about the first half hour of the service, S. pinched me over and over again, whispered irritating things about how much she hated both me and God into my ear. I ignored her. But by the end of the service, she had her arm around me and was singing with me, leaning into me, swaying side by side. She whispered, “I love you, Mom, I’m sorry,” at one point, and kissed me on the cheek. Perhaps she thought if she became a sweet, loving kid in the last half hour of the service I’d forget everything she’d done.
Of course, I couldn’t let this slip, as much as I secretly wanted to do so. Getting through her consequences this time was frustrating for both of us, to say the least. I asked her to list what she thought she’d done wrong, but she refused. Finally I listed each thing on a different piece of paper and asked her to write in response to four questions: how could she have found a better way to talk about her frustration with God; how could she have controlled her words and actions when she got angry at me; how could she learn to listen when I ask her to do something that is reasonable; how could she treat other people more respectfully. She enjoyed this, writing things like “I could have punched mom instead of just telling her to fuck off” and “I could have stood up in church and given a testimony about how much I hate God,” etc. Finally, after a good half hour of this, she said, “The F’s (her former foster family) just made me copy sentences from the Bible and clean my room. Why does this have to be so HARD?”
“You want to copy sentences?” I said. “I can give you a sentence to copy, if that’s what you’d rather do.” I gave her Proverb 12:1: “Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates correction is stupid.” This was a big hit. “You’re calling me STUPID? You’re going to make me copy something that says I’m STUPID? I’m telling the social workers you called me STUPID.”
“Either you can copy this or you can answer the questions seriously this time,” I said, and so she went back to the questions. We then talked for what seemed like forever about each question, went through the entire episode, talked about what she could have done differently at each step of the way. We also talked about being angry at God, and I told her I barely believed there was a God for a good ten years of my life, because how could God have taken my mother, allowed wars and genocide, made my father into the crazy man he was during my childhood? She nodded. I told her I’d come to the conclusion that God loved and trusted us so much that God thought we should run the show—or else God didn’t have as much power as so many people think God does. I didn’t know which, and I didn’t care. “Either way,” I said, “your parents really, really fucked up,” I said, “and sometimes I fuck up, and sometimes you do. And sometimes the fucking up gets so big that we can’t even fathom it, like it is in Iraq right now. And I just think that if there is a God then God is weeping furiously, so sad that this is all happening this way. But also I think God is happy when we do the right thing, make some change, big or small, in this fucked up world.”
“I think that makes sense,” she said. “I just have to figure out if I believe in the same God you do.”
“You can believe whatever you want,” I said, “but one thing I know for sure is I think God can take your anger and disbelief and whatever else you feel. The minister might look a little confused or shocked”—at this she giggled, likely remembering the grey-haired woman who stared at her like she was an alien earlier that morning—“but God doesn’t really care what you believe or how you feel about God. God only cares what you do, and wants you to act in a loving way and to make as many good changes in the world as you can.”
Right after that, S. cleaned out her closet, getting rid of ten garbage bags of clothing and toys she no longer needed. This was huge, because her belongings have perhaps been even more problematic than her long-distance boyfriend. Although she doesn’t need to talk to them at bedtime on the nights I most need my sleep, only to end up weeping in my bedroom, they are always falling to the floor and getting dragged around the house by the animals, a constant reminder of the difference in the values of her previous foster home and our home. Her previous foster parents refused to do family counseling, wouldn’t give her the horse or singing or dancing lessons she wanted, didn’t help her with homework, laughed at her when she said she wanted to try out for the school play and go to college, told her she’d never be brave enough to get on a horse. But they bought her anything she asked for—toys for much younger children, more clothes than any child should have—perhaps in an attempt to show they were using the foster care check for her benefit in some way at least. In contrast, I at least attempt to live simply, and the pleasures I allow myself all have to do with people rather than things (weekends away, dinners out, books—ok, books are things, but you get my point). S. and I argue about consumerism almost every week. It has taken her months to understand that the things art lessons and mentors and horse lessons are more valuable by far.
When I suggested she might give some of her belongings away the first time, soon
after her move, she lamented, “You don’t understand. You didn’t get torn away from everything familiar.” I realized then that she saved everything, horded things, always concerned about what she might lose if she didn’t hold on. But now there are more empty hangers than clothes, and her room is tidy for the first time since she arrived. She can throw away a balloon or an empty bottle of perfume without somehow feeling she’s throwing away a memory, a part of herself. The front entryway is full of garbage bags awaiting their trip to the Salvation Army. Progress.
Soon after the closet-cleaning, we took the dog on a long walk along a bike path that meanders along a river, brushing up against what we jokingly call the suburbs, small allotments of rather large homes that are new and not in the center of town. She confessed that she liked a boy who lived in this neighborhood, pretending to be coy about who he was, but it didn’t take long before I knew every detail, though the story was followed with “but I really don’t want to talk to you about this; I want to talk to J” (her college buddy). I thought about saying, but you already told me everything—but I didn’t.
In the past, her boundaries with boys she liked were confused and confusing to say the least. With at least one boy, she’d bothered him aggressively and inappropriately enough that his mother had called the school to complain. “But I’m not that girl anymore,” she told me when we talked about boundaries, about how to handle this crush in a different way—and she is right, of course.
On that walk, she told me, offhandedly, that she planned to break up with her long-distance boyfriend “once and for all.” It’s not just about this other boy,” she told me. “I just don’t feel it anymore. I’m a different person, more mature. He can’t have a real conversation. All he does is play video games and make jokes about boobs.”
“Yeah, those aren’t good qualities in a guy,” I joked, but she was serious, and a little sad.
“I thought I was going to marry him, Mom,” she said. “I can’t believe I ever thought that.”
I didn’t say anything. The dog sniffed at S.’s ankle, randomly, then leapt forward, and she started to run, shouting, “Where are you taking me, you little mutt?” She slowed down, out of breath, and said, offhandedly, “I love my life here, and I love you. You know how I said I wanted to go back to where I’m from? Well, I don’t anymore. I think I’d rather just go to college here, where I can have a horse.” She was quiet for a minute, then added, “and where I can be close to you, and to my home.”
I wanted to weep, but I didn’t. I was speechless. Finally, I said, “That would make me very happy. It’s convenient when the things that would make me happy also make you happy, isn’t it?”
I didn’t let myself think about how hard it will be for her to get into the college where I teach. I wanted to stay in the moment. As if she could read my mind, she said, “I’m not stupid. I don’t think it would be easy.”
Just as she was getting that sentence out, we passed a man I know as he was carting the last of the garden tomatoes from his garden to the house in a giant, red wheelbarrow. He waved; I waved back. “I need to get home and do the same thing,” I said, and he smiled, nodded.
Suddenly, and randomly, I remembered a speaker at a conference I’d attended this summer for parents and teachers of special needs kids. (The fact that the sight of a red wheelbarrow made me think of this speaker and not of William Carlos Williams is perhaps the most tangible testament to date to the evolution of my primary identity from poet to parent). The speaker was the opening motivational speaker, not one of the theorists or practitioners in the “real” sessions, so I was barely listening at first. But he said something that was hard to forget, perhaps because I tend to think in image and metaphor. (The next day, I shared the story with S). He’d said that parenting, or teaching, was like pushing a wheelbarrow across a thin rope, strung between two buildings, the child’s past and the child’s future. “It would be possible,” he’d insisted, “to walk such a tightrope with a wheelbarrow—that’s what the front wheel is for, for balancing.” And then he talked about kids he knew, kids not unlike S., who’d been knocked out of the wheelbarrow or never gotten into it in the first place. At the end of each story, he’s ask, “Do you have room for John in your wheelbarrow? For Carlos? For Suzette?” and he’d want us, a bunch of timid parent-teacher types, to shout out, “yes!”—which we did, good little students that we all were in our earlier lives, though without much enthusiasm.
All of this ran through my mind quickly. I said nothing to Lisa, just sighed.
Later, as I was putting her to sleep, she showed me a note she was going to give her crush, which included the line, “I really, really like you, more than just a friend, but if you don’t feel the same way I guess I’ll live with it.” Progress, to be sure, but still, not exactly the kind of note I wanted my 15-year-old kid to give another 15-year-old whose last name she wasn’t sure of. I talked her out of giving it to him until she’d learned at least five more significant things about him; I said if she did that, and still decided she wanted to give him the note, then we could talk about it. “That will take only five days,” she promised me, confident, but then she added, “thanks for not letting me make an ass of myself.”
I sang her a Greek song, which is her favorite way of falling asleep. Just before she drifted off, the dog lying beside her, breathing into her face, the cat curled up on her tummy, she said, “I almost fell out of the wheelbarrow today, but you caught me.”
“What made you think of that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she answered.
“Was it that man we saw in his garden?”
“What man?”
We were quiet for a minute. “We had a bad start, but it was a good day in the end, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was.” She turned over, and the dog started and jumped into my arms, and the cat slid off her body lazily and curled against her side. I set the dog down, and we nuzzled against her back.
"I’ll always catch you,” I whispered, running a finger across her forehead.
“I know,” she whispered back.
Anyone who read that first paragraph is now thinking, “Wow, they had an amazing, life-changing day,” but they’d be wrong—-well, sort of. The day started out in a less-than-stellar way.
Church this morning was a nightmare. When S. came to live with me, I went back to the church I’d attended a year or so earlier, before I'd had a big falling-out with more than half the parishioners about whether the church ought to be open and affirming to GLBT people. (I wrote about this at length on this blog awhile back). It was a hard decision, but she had been attending an Evangelical church and believed that anyone who was pro-choice or believed in evolution was going to hell. I had to do something, and the church, I was confident, despite all its flaws, would at least help her see that there were other ways to be a Christian.
It was painful going back—-I wept through the first two services—-but then it became easy, because I had no expectations. I wasn’t bitter that the minister and parishioners were not reaching out to me in the way my church family might have done as a child; I wasn’t even bitter when the minister stared aghast at S. when she tried to strike up a conversation, when she answered nervously, backing away. In fact, S. and I simply joked about it—-then kept going. I didn’t care anymore if I didn’t agree with every word the minister said—-though to her credit, she did surprise me, talking about GLBT issues from the pulpit the Sunday we returned, posting signs welcoming “families of all shapes and sizes” and “GLBT people.” It was her way, I think, of trying to make things right between us, of telling me we were welcome, even though she couldn’t reach out in a more meaningful way.
Summer came and went, and we took a long, lazy, sleep-in-every-Sunday morning church hiatus. I decided I wasn’t going to push it; we do devotions on our own, and I’m able to teach her my very liberal understanding of the Gospel--but S. expressed an interest in going back this week, and so we did.
As we got out of the car, she was carrying her sketchbook and a pencil. I asked her to put it back, explaining patiently that it might distract others from the service, and that it would be impossible for her to participate with it sight. She responded, and I quote, “fuck you.” It had been a long time since she’d blown up so quickly, so I was taken aback. “What is this about?” I wanted to know, to which she responded, “Why should I have to pay attention? God never did anything for me.”
Well, no shit. If you believe in the God of the Evangelicals, some kind of magic punisher-god who can work miracles but also punishes evildoers with things like AIDS and 9-11, then it’s hard to imagine how that God could possibly allow a kid to be abused as badly as she was without stepping in. “God hates me,” she added, “And I hate him.”
“Well, then, let’s just go home,” I said. “I thought you wanted to come. I don’t need to be here. We can talk about this and God and whatever you want to talk about better at home.”
But she stomped into church, determined to make a scene. An elderly woman I love dearly was greeting everyone at the door. “I thought you’d left us again!” she exclaimed, reaching out to hug us, but S. stomped by her, right up the minister.
“God never did anything for me,” she told the minister, stomping her foot. Now, this minister is a kind woman, but she’s also completely socially inept. One of my many issues with the church is how she couldn’t and wouldn’t reach out to me in the hardest moments of the fight over becoming an “open and affirming” congregation. When I told her about the adoption, she’d asked whether S. had had a hard life and whether she was white-—she is not, shall we say, someone I consider in the top 10 or 30 or even 150 people in my support system. So, I didn’t expect any help, and she didn’t give me any-—she just stared, open-mouthed, while I said to S., “Let’s just go in and sit down and see how things go.”
We sat in back so I could make a quick escape and so that S.’s behavior wouldn’t be distracting to anyone else. But S. spotted her godmother in the front row and went right to her and sat down, glaring back at me. I stayed in my seat until it was time to greet others, at which point I moved, and S. said, loudly, “But I hate you!”
“I know,” I responded, “But you’ll get over it.” A couple people sitting near us giggled, giving me looks that said, we've been through this before. I’d promised myself from the beginning that I was never going to let myself be embarrassed by S., because her former foster family was, frequently, and she used this to her advantage, acting out whenever possible in order to heighten their reaction. I didn’t want to play that game, so I simply relaxed and tried to pay attention.
Which was hard, because for about the first half hour of the service, S. pinched me over and over again, whispered irritating things about how much she hated both me and God into my ear. I ignored her. But by the end of the service, she had her arm around me and was singing with me, leaning into me, swaying side by side. She whispered, “I love you, Mom, I’m sorry,” at one point, and kissed me on the cheek. Perhaps she thought if she became a sweet, loving kid in the last half hour of the service I’d forget everything she’d done.
Of course, I couldn’t let this slip, as much as I secretly wanted to do so. Getting through her consequences this time was frustrating for both of us, to say the least. I asked her to list what she thought she’d done wrong, but she refused. Finally I listed each thing on a different piece of paper and asked her to write in response to four questions: how could she have found a better way to talk about her frustration with God; how could she have controlled her words and actions when she got angry at me; how could she learn to listen when I ask her to do something that is reasonable; how could she treat other people more respectfully. She enjoyed this, writing things like “I could have punched mom instead of just telling her to fuck off” and “I could have stood up in church and given a testimony about how much I hate God,” etc. Finally, after a good half hour of this, she said, “The F’s (her former foster family) just made me copy sentences from the Bible and clean my room. Why does this have to be so HARD?”
“You want to copy sentences?” I said. “I can give you a sentence to copy, if that’s what you’d rather do.” I gave her Proverb 12:1: “Whoever loves discipline loves knowledge, but he who hates correction is stupid.” This was a big hit. “You’re calling me STUPID? You’re going to make me copy something that says I’m STUPID? I’m telling the social workers you called me STUPID.”
“Either you can copy this or you can answer the questions seriously this time,” I said, and so she went back to the questions. We then talked for what seemed like forever about each question, went through the entire episode, talked about what she could have done differently at each step of the way. We also talked about being angry at God, and I told her I barely believed there was a God for a good ten years of my life, because how could God have taken my mother, allowed wars and genocide, made my father into the crazy man he was during my childhood? She nodded. I told her I’d come to the conclusion that God loved and trusted us so much that God thought we should run the show—or else God didn’t have as much power as so many people think God does. I didn’t know which, and I didn’t care. “Either way,” I said, “your parents really, really fucked up,” I said, “and sometimes I fuck up, and sometimes you do. And sometimes the fucking up gets so big that we can’t even fathom it, like it is in Iraq right now. And I just think that if there is a God then God is weeping furiously, so sad that this is all happening this way. But also I think God is happy when we do the right thing, make some change, big or small, in this fucked up world.”
“I think that makes sense,” she said. “I just have to figure out if I believe in the same God you do.”
“You can believe whatever you want,” I said, “but one thing I know for sure is I think God can take your anger and disbelief and whatever else you feel. The minister might look a little confused or shocked”—at this she giggled, likely remembering the grey-haired woman who stared at her like she was an alien earlier that morning—“but God doesn’t really care what you believe or how you feel about God. God only cares what you do, and wants you to act in a loving way and to make as many good changes in the world as you can.”
Right after that, S. cleaned out her closet, getting rid of ten garbage bags of clothing and toys she no longer needed. This was huge, because her belongings have perhaps been even more problematic than her long-distance boyfriend. Although she doesn’t need to talk to them at bedtime on the nights I most need my sleep, only to end up weeping in my bedroom, they are always falling to the floor and getting dragged around the house by the animals, a constant reminder of the difference in the values of her previous foster home and our home. Her previous foster parents refused to do family counseling, wouldn’t give her the horse or singing or dancing lessons she wanted, didn’t help her with homework, laughed at her when she said she wanted to try out for the school play and go to college, told her she’d never be brave enough to get on a horse. But they bought her anything she asked for—toys for much younger children, more clothes than any child should have—perhaps in an attempt to show they were using the foster care check for her benefit in some way at least. In contrast, I at least attempt to live simply, and the pleasures I allow myself all have to do with people rather than things (weekends away, dinners out, books—ok, books are things, but you get my point). S. and I argue about consumerism almost every week. It has taken her months to understand that the things art lessons and mentors and horse lessons are more valuable by far.
When I suggested she might give some of her belongings away the first time, soon
after her move, she lamented, “You don’t understand. You didn’t get torn away from everything familiar.” I realized then that she saved everything, horded things, always concerned about what she might lose if she didn’t hold on. But now there are more empty hangers than clothes, and her room is tidy for the first time since she arrived. She can throw away a balloon or an empty bottle of perfume without somehow feeling she’s throwing away a memory, a part of herself. The front entryway is full of garbage bags awaiting their trip to the Salvation Army. Progress.
Soon after the closet-cleaning, we took the dog on a long walk along a bike path that meanders along a river, brushing up against what we jokingly call the suburbs, small allotments of rather large homes that are new and not in the center of town. She confessed that she liked a boy who lived in this neighborhood, pretending to be coy about who he was, but it didn’t take long before I knew every detail, though the story was followed with “but I really don’t want to talk to you about this; I want to talk to J” (her college buddy). I thought about saying, but you already told me everything—but I didn’t.
In the past, her boundaries with boys she liked were confused and confusing to say the least. With at least one boy, she’d bothered him aggressively and inappropriately enough that his mother had called the school to complain. “But I’m not that girl anymore,” she told me when we talked about boundaries, about how to handle this crush in a different way—and she is right, of course.
On that walk, she told me, offhandedly, that she planned to break up with her long-distance boyfriend “once and for all.” It’s not just about this other boy,” she told me. “I just don’t feel it anymore. I’m a different person, more mature. He can’t have a real conversation. All he does is play video games and make jokes about boobs.”
“Yeah, those aren’t good qualities in a guy,” I joked, but she was serious, and a little sad.
“I thought I was going to marry him, Mom,” she said. “I can’t believe I ever thought that.”
I didn’t say anything. The dog sniffed at S.’s ankle, randomly, then leapt forward, and she started to run, shouting, “Where are you taking me, you little mutt?” She slowed down, out of breath, and said, offhandedly, “I love my life here, and I love you. You know how I said I wanted to go back to where I’m from? Well, I don’t anymore. I think I’d rather just go to college here, where I can have a horse.” She was quiet for a minute, then added, “and where I can be close to you, and to my home.”
I wanted to weep, but I didn’t. I was speechless. Finally, I said, “That would make me very happy. It’s convenient when the things that would make me happy also make you happy, isn’t it?”
I didn’t let myself think about how hard it will be for her to get into the college where I teach. I wanted to stay in the moment. As if she could read my mind, she said, “I’m not stupid. I don’t think it would be easy.”
Just as she was getting that sentence out, we passed a man I know as he was carting the last of the garden tomatoes from his garden to the house in a giant, red wheelbarrow. He waved; I waved back. “I need to get home and do the same thing,” I said, and he smiled, nodded.
Suddenly, and randomly, I remembered a speaker at a conference I’d attended this summer for parents and teachers of special needs kids. (The fact that the sight of a red wheelbarrow made me think of this speaker and not of William Carlos Williams is perhaps the most tangible testament to date to the evolution of my primary identity from poet to parent). The speaker was the opening motivational speaker, not one of the theorists or practitioners in the “real” sessions, so I was barely listening at first. But he said something that was hard to forget, perhaps because I tend to think in image and metaphor. (The next day, I shared the story with S). He’d said that parenting, or teaching, was like pushing a wheelbarrow across a thin rope, strung between two buildings, the child’s past and the child’s future. “It would be possible,” he’d insisted, “to walk such a tightrope with a wheelbarrow—that’s what the front wheel is for, for balancing.” And then he talked about kids he knew, kids not unlike S., who’d been knocked out of the wheelbarrow or never gotten into it in the first place. At the end of each story, he’s ask, “Do you have room for John in your wheelbarrow? For Carlos? For Suzette?” and he’d want us, a bunch of timid parent-teacher types, to shout out, “yes!”—which we did, good little students that we all were in our earlier lives, though without much enthusiasm.
All of this ran through my mind quickly. I said nothing to Lisa, just sighed.
Later, as I was putting her to sleep, she showed me a note she was going to give her crush, which included the line, “I really, really like you, more than just a friend, but if you don’t feel the same way I guess I’ll live with it.” Progress, to be sure, but still, not exactly the kind of note I wanted my 15-year-old kid to give another 15-year-old whose last name she wasn’t sure of. I talked her out of giving it to him until she’d learned at least five more significant things about him; I said if she did that, and still decided she wanted to give him the note, then we could talk about it. “That will take only five days,” she promised me, confident, but then she added, “thanks for not letting me make an ass of myself.”
I sang her a Greek song, which is her favorite way of falling asleep. Just before she drifted off, the dog lying beside her, breathing into her face, the cat curled up on her tummy, she said, “I almost fell out of the wheelbarrow today, but you caught me.”
“What made you think of that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” she answered.
“Was it that man we saw in his garden?”
“What man?”
We were quiet for a minute. “We had a bad start, but it was a good day in the end, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was.” She turned over, and the dog started and jumped into my arms, and the cat slid off her body lazily and curled against her side. I set the dog down, and we nuzzled against her back.
"I’ll always catch you,” I whispered, running a finger across her forehead.
“I know,” she whispered back.
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