After the hellish world of suck, I still had to pick up Billie from school and go grocery shopping.
Grocery shopping with a hyperactive 4 year old is like trying to bottle lightening.
Anyways, while in the store, she sees a princess Tiana costume.
….Now, Billie already has costumes. Loads of ’em. That child lives her life in costumes. But I have never seen her eyes go so big or her smile get so wide.
“MOMMY! SHE LOOKS LIKE ME! THAT COSTUME IS FOR ME!! She has curly hair like mine, mommy!! She’s pretty like me. And she’s a princess!! Mommy. I have never seen anything more beautiful. Have you seen anything so beautiful?”
There were four other people around us at the time. Two women with a kid, and an older, middle-aged, white guy with glasses. The women with the kid gave me an understanding smile, but it was when the man with the glasses made eye contact with me that I realized he was about to cry.
He said, “if you don’t get her that costume, I am buying it for her.”
So now, in addition to all the others, we have a new costume. But this one feels particularly special to me.
Billie’s school has decorative tile that spreads across the entire campus in opaque lines of blue and yellow. Where there are no decorations, the tile is replaced with the obligatory champagne tile that was all the rage in the early 90’s.
Regardless of the tile’s origins, Billie has decided that all the “white” tile is infested with alligators.
This makes our morning walk through campus quite entertaining. While all the other parents shuffle their students in lethargic, herd-like fashion, I weave in and out of the crowd trying to follow my monster as she screams excitedly and narrowly avoids certain death by imaginary alligators.
This morning Billie almost collided head first with a little boy walking with his father, still sleepy and fully unaware of his egregious error of not sharing the blue tile. Billie smacked head first into him, expertly rolled off his shoulder, tip toed around him, and continued on her quest of not getting eaten while simultaneously screaming, “WE NEVER KNOW WHERE THEY ARE! THE ALLIGATORS! THEY COULD BE ANNNNYWHERE.”
I look at the father apologetically. “I’m so sorry,” I say, “the white tile is infested with alligators.”
“Oh,” his eyes widen with empathetic understanding, “I totally get it.” He smiles and looks down at his son who is now asking him about the alligators.
“Yup,” he responds genuinely, “you heard her, there are alligators in the white tile. You’d better run!”
His son paused a moment, looked at me, looked at his father, then ran after Billie screaming, “Ah!! Wait for meeee!!”
The father laughed with his whole belly before looking at me and saying, “This’ll get him to class faster. Good trick. Thank you.”
I made the mistake of leaving the room while the T.V. was on this morning.
Billie’s program ended in my absence and was replaced by some sci – fi movie where some dude takes another dude’s eyes out with a pencil.
I only know this happened because Billie calmly walked into the kitchen and informed me, “Mom. I just saw a man get his eyeball ripped out of his head.”
I tried to tell her it was pretend. I tried to explain that it was make believe. And that mommy would be more careful with trusting daytime television programming. Of course, none of that logic stopped her from telling everyone in the world that her mommy put a bad T.V. show on and scarred her for life.
“Daddy, did you know that mommy put on a bad show and I saw a man stab a man in the eyeball with a pencil and RIIIIPPPP it all the way out of him? ALL THE WAY OUT, DADDY.”
It has persisted into bedtime. She’s currently in her room with her covers up over her head wishing away the evil eyeball snatchers of the world. Occasionally I hear her saying things like, “But I have beautiful eyes. I like my eyeeeesss” before shivering back under her comforter.
This is the problem with imaginations, folks. They make what you saw so much worse. They amplify and magnify every crazy, scary, beautiful thing and propel it into a realm of psychotic proportions. And it does not shock me that some of us lose our imaginations as we grow older. Who can blame us? Every nerve, every synapse, every iota of you gets completely wrapped up in a reality that only exists to you. And sometimes it is so beautiful and fragile, like a bubble garden made entirely of blown sugar, that one small step, or unkind word shatters the whole thing. Other times it can be so consuming and devastating that you feel trapped inside it with no escape. It brings you to the best parts of yourself and holds a mirror up to your greatest fears.
What a fucking weight to carry.
But I can’t help but admire it. I can’t help but want to foster it and hold her in these dark times just to show her that she can conquer this. She can wrangle it and learn to use it in powerful ways that no one has even dreamed of yet. She comes to me constantly with pictures of winged serpents fighting ferocious dragons and giant squids battling sharks and I think she already knows this. She knows enough about the frightening things to want to identify with them and tell their stories. She sees the fear. She processes it. Then she headbutts it with an artistic fervor that I can’t help but be awed by.
The squid battling the sharks
And, again, here we are at that super cheesy revelation that inevitably comes as I write these things: She’s helping me. Don’t get me wrong- my imagination is pretty on point and always has been. But I think she’s showing me how to process the fearful parts.
You lean in.
With blind hope, faith, and sometimes unapologetic rage. You handle the squids and the sharks and the creepy eyeball stealers in your nightmares, then your dreams, then on paper. And, slowly… eventually… they become as fragile as the page you drew them on. They become characters that no longer frighten you. You begin to realize that, even in your imagination, only you can frighten you.
Cuisine Du Billie (complete with translations):
“Chocolate sandwich” = Nutella and toast
“Pancakes with square pockets for extra syrup” = Waffles
“Soup pasgetti (spaghetti)” = Pho
I just walked in on Billie on her hands and knees with a bag of ice in her mouth, tearing her face back and forth vigorously.
“Um. Whatcha doin, love?”
Her mouth goes slack and the bag of ice drops to the floor. She looks at me disapprovingly before saying, “Don’t you remember I’m a badger? Badgers don’t talk.”
She sighed as if exhausted by my lack of intellect, picked up the bag of ice with her teeth, and went back to shaking it ferociously; growling and drooling all the while.
Before this month we had never really met the three year old boy in the apartment above us. He’s lived there for over a year but, despite our many efforts to set up a play date, we very rarely saw him.
Then, three weeks ago, his father passed away.
The mother and grandmother asked us for help so, for the last 3 weeks we’ve been watching him a couple days out of the week, 5-8 hours each time.
In all that time, he’s said 3 words to me. He refused to speak or look me in the eyes. I rarely saw him smile.
But today we had a breakthrough. He hugged me. He told me jokes. We chased squirrels together. He accidentally called me “mommy.”
Billie noticed the change, too. She said, “Wow. You’re smiling now and you have so many words!”
He responded, “Yea. My smile is getting fixed slowly. I have words now.”
I’m doing everything I can not to bubble snot cry on this here playground. That kid just showed me that it’s possible for the heart to shatter and heal at the same time.
Billie's Momma 