“Mommy, I don’t love you.” My two-year-old stands in the bathtub, smudging foam onto her belly.
All tagged child
“Mommy, I don’t love you.” My two-year-old stands in the bathtub, smudging foam onto her belly.
I consider his marshmallow roasting technique: expectant, leaning forward, cautious not to catch his treat aflame as he rolls the stick between his hands like he’s molding spaghetti out of Play-Doh.
I ran barefoot across the street and yelled, “I’m a pediatrician! It’s going to be okay.” It wasn’t okay.
I was anxious and bumbling. Compulsively feeling his forehead for fever. Joining him in crying jags.
Father motions her behind the steering wheel. We’re on the field he graded with a landing strip in mind, so where’s the harm?
She sees me and freezes. Our eyes lock. Coincidence, not genetics, that they are the same blue.
A tiny human just tried to shove me down the basement stairs. And giggled about it.
Relief licks my bones. Our infant son will not die.
Born of fierce independence and intent on passing this on to his children, my father required us to learn from his excellent financial acumen.
Already I miss the three-year-old cyclone blasting from room to room, a jaunty ponytail streaming behind her.
I’m staring at your hands. You’re using them to clarify medical words; to make shapes; to draw diagrams to help me understand what my brain can’t make sense of …
Tantrum. We've dealt with her public meltdowns for years.
“Rock, scissors, paper, shoot!” His tiny hand forms a fist which I tenderly enclose within my own, wishing as I do that I’ll never have to let it go.
I race towards home, holding up the watercolour I painted at school.
To feel safe, I lock myself into bathrooms.
Even though I’d attended my proudly multicultural school for years, they cut up my name.
I was drowning. Or so I thought. My head kept bobbing under and I was taking in gulps of lake water again and again.
The four of us sat together on the bed he and I had shared, where we woke to classical music, where he brought me coffee, where their bright faces greeted us in the morning …
“It’s important to be calm and quiet because we don’t know how these dogs will react to children,” I remind my six-year-old in the parking lot of the animal shelter.
Little fingertips prod my eyelids, scouting before the assault.