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Conversations with a Preschooler on Death and Dying

April 9, 2019

This morning Everest and I took a walk and passed a sweet little cemetery in downtown Palm Springs. He immediately scrambled up the stone wall that surrounds the cemetery, positioned himself to hop down, and declared his intention to pick a flower for me. A flower from a grave.

He’s never seen a cemetery before, so he didn’t know. I shouted “No no no no no!” Then I explained to him what this place is, and how we respect the dead. We don’t touch monuments or headstones. We don’t stand on a burial place. And we never, ever pick the flowers.

He climbed off the wall and ran to my side.

“There are dead people there?”

Yes, I said. He and I talk about death a lot, which I didn’t expect to do with a preschooler. But our cat died a couple years ago, and Ev always has questions about that, and we talk about my mom, who is dead.

I try to be very clear and straightforward about this: There is no rainbow bridge in our conversations. I don’t use any euphemisms or evasive language. And I don’t promise him an afterlife. There is simply the body, which is buried or cremated, and the memories, which live on.

He asked more questions about the cemetery: Who are the people buried there? Will I be buried there? Will he be buried there? Why are they under the ground? And as I answered him, I mentally congratulated myself on this healthy conversation about death and dying and how well I had explained everything.

“It’s just weird,” Ev said as we walked away.

“What is, baby?”

“How all those people died right there. And in a line too.”

I will always remember this place

February 16, 2019

This is my view when my dad’s cancer diagnosis is confirmed. My body is rigid, pressed up against a frosty window, unable to move or else I’ll lose the phone signal. 

I don’t have much to say about it yet, but I can tell you he is hopeful, and he is angry. 

“I have things to do,” he says. “I don’t have time for this crap.” 

Long after the call ends, I keep my cheek against the window. It is cold, and it gives me something to feel other than scared. The drizzle is steady, and I hear the groan of snow as it is pelted with raindrops.

I should get back to writing, but first I need to listen to the snow’s complaints for a while.

A confession: The biggest mistake I’ve made as a parent (so far)

June 28, 2018

If I’d just purchased pretzel twists instead of pretzel sticks, we never would have had a problem. 

Here’s what happened instead. 

Everest whined for a snack, and I tossed a bag of pretzel sticks to him in the backseat. Not the healthiest snack, to be sure. Also maybe not the safest to have in the car. But it was a 40-minute drive from our house to the child care facility, and that can feel like 40 days when a child is profoundly unhappy. 

“Mommy, look!” he called to me from the backseat. 

I didn’t want to look because I was driving.

“Look,” he urged. “It’s our savior.”

At that point, I LOOKED.

Everest held two pretzel sticks in the air, arranged like a lopsided X, more like a cross. 

“Our savior,” he said again. 

You know when you get a migraine and your vision sparkles and blurs at the edges, and the world becomes sharp and throbbing? It was like that, but rage. A ragegraine. 

“Our savior?” I said. “Where did you learn that?”

“At school.” 

White hot rage with a little bit of blue fire at the center. 

I want my child to learn about Christianity eventually — I believe it’s a necessary foundation to understand a lot of literature, art, history, so on — but I want him to learn it in the context of other world religions. 

“Our savior,” Everest repeated. “I like our savior.”

Honestly, I had hoped to delay this part of parenting. I don’t feel equipped to teach my child about religion, because I continue to struggle with spirituality myself. My own belief system is constantly in flux — currently a bizarre Buddhist Hindu Quaker amalgam, informed by a childhood steeped in the Lutheran church, plus a dash of Catholicism. And I was furious that someone forced me into that situation when I wasn’t ready. 

“What do it mean?” Everest asked, and I didn’t have any answers.

Just a few months earlier, our beloved cat passed away. Everest struggled with the concept of death and continued to ask about Kung Pao Kitten daily. How could I possibly explain what the cross symbolizes without having another difficult conversation about what it means to suffer and die? 

From the school parking lot, I contacted a few parents who also had children in that class, and I told them about the “our savior” thing. They were shocked — but they insisted their children never said anything even remotely similar. 

Then I tried to casually discuss it with the teacher: “Everest said the funniest thing today … do you know where he could have picked that up?”

After the teacher denied having any religious discussions in the classroom, I had a meeting with the school director, who also assured me that the facility is religion-free. 

He must have learned it from another kid, I decided. 

“I bet it was that asshole Beckett*,” I texted to a friend.

On the way home that afternoon, Everest said it again. And again, I stewed. 

I brought my child to school the following day, but it was only to gather his things. We’d had enough. There were other issues, so it wasn’t entirely about “our savior” — when Everest moved from the toddler ladybug room to the older geckos, he never really warmed up to his new teacher. Several items of his clothing went missing. Twice he came home wearing some other kid’s underwear. And once that asshole Beckett called me a “sick pervert” for giving Everest a kiss goodbye. 

So I pulled Everest from the school. 

We found a new school, one that’s only a 7-minute drive away, not 40. He’s happy there. The place doesn’t have an enormous outdoor play area or a garden like his former school, but it makes up for that with a terrific staff, a great program, and some really wonderful families. I’m grateful we were able to find a spot there. 

It’s been about 9 or 10 months since Everest switched facilities — long enough that the current place isn’t his new school anymore, it’s just school. He’s bigger now and more developed. He’s learned so much. His vocabulary is expansive, and he can enunciate far more clearly.

Recently, I gave Everest pretzel sticks as a snack. 

“Mommy, look!” he said. Again, he had the two sticks positioned like a cross. 

Not again, I thought.

“It’s an X,” he said. “Like my friend at my old school. Xavier.”

That’s when the reality of what I’d done hit me with a gut punch. I pulled my child from his school for saying the name of his friend. X-avier.

Not our savior.

 

 

 

*Name has been changed to protect the real a-hole toddler

Very superstitious

January 1, 2018
Bunches of green grapes hanging on a vine

New Year’s Eve 2017: A brief screenplay

INT. MAGGIE’S HOUSE – NIGHT

ME: We have to do the thing where we eat 12 grapes at midnight to bring luck in the coming 12 months.

HUSBAND: What?

ME: It’s a thing. They do it in Spain.

HUSBAND: But why do we have to do it?

ME: I’m not going to risk it. I’ll take all the luck I can get.

HUSBAND: Fine.

ME: Oh, we also have to sit under the table when we do it. Or leaping over the threshold of our home? I can’t remember. Anyway, I have to wash the grapes. Meet me under the table in 5 minutes.

INT. UNDER THE KITCHEN TABLE – FIVE MIN. LATER

HUSBAND: Are you sure we have squeeze under the table to do this? My back hurts.

ME: Pretty sure. Now hush. Eat your grapes.

HUSBAND: I don’t even like green grapes. You’ll have to finish mine.

ME: Great. I’ll be the only prosperous one. Fine with me.

HUSBAND: It’s not even midnight.

ME: It’s well past midnight in Spain.

HUSBAND: (chewing)

ME: Maybe we could have just had a glass of wine instead.

HUSBAND: (still chewing)

ME: Also I think I made up the table thing.

 

My hope for 2017

January 1, 2017

It’s New Year’s Eve 2016. I’m freshly showered, about to get ready to go out.

I’m sitting in my bathrobe when my son, Everest, notices a cut on my leg. First, he crouches down to examine it. Then he kisses it, because that’s how health and wellness works for 2-year-olds. Find the hurt, press lips to it, make it better.

A minute later he carries a pillow over, carefully places it on my leg and says, “Right here. Hold it right here.”

“Why?”

“So you won’t get hurt again,” he says.

It is a fragile thing, this love. Sometimes I don’t want to move for fear of crushing it.

I hold the pillow to my leg for a long time, afraid to let the moment go.  When I finally do, I tell my son that I’m all better, and it’s true. The cut is minimal, unremarkable. It will not leave a scar. But I want my child to know that what he did matters. I want him to know that tenderness has the capacity to heal. That his love is momentous even in its smallness.

Too often it feels like the world is whooshing past, like I’ve been plunged into a loud and rushing river, and this — this tangle of love — is the knotted rope that gives me something to hold on to. It’s pure and precious and good.

We are just a few hours into the new year now, and the future is too far away for any of us to see. It will certainly bring battles and wounds. Some of us will carry scars. Some will never heal.

My hope for 2017 is that as we move forward, we find ways to protect rather than inflict. That in the face of fear, confusion, blind panic, and downright evil, we move from arguments into action. That we find a pillow and apply it liberally.