with her captivating face and tall grace, and who astounds as she points to an animal in a medieval painting in a museum and declares, “That’s the narwhal, the unicorn of the sea.” While I fear she may battle her own demons born of innate insecurity one day, Mia is my adventurous eater and the one who I suspect will follow in my footsteps in learning multiple languages and traveling to the far reaches of the world.
But Belle (who is more stubborn than a mule—she would rather starve and faint than eat what she doesn’t want to eat, for instance) is my ageless soul, my uncannily intuitive child, who understands people and life with a precociousness well beyond her years. She is my child who talks to ghosts. When she had just turned two and a half, as I was pushing her off the elevator in her stroller one morning, out of nowhere she asked me, “What happens when we die, Mama?” I didn’t know how to respond, for I would never have expected that kind of question from a two-and-a-half-year-old child.
It was also around that time that Mia was being especially difficult—so difficult that I felt like she and I were already having those raging fights I’ve heard occur between mothers and their teenage daughters; my mother and I didn’t fight like that. One Sunday night, Mia had pushed me over the brink and I let loose on her, yelling and ordering her to her room. She went running, tears streaming down her cheeks and screams echoing with the slam of the door. I cried hysterically on the couch, beating myself up for being the worst mother ever. Josh told me to retreat to our room so Isabelle wouldn’t have to see me so upset—he thought my crying would scare her. In response, Belle turned to her father and declared in her sweet voice, “Mama is just really tired now. She’s gonna cry for a little bit and then she will be okay.”
During my illness, the children have witnessed my emotional outbursts—the crying, the screaming, the rage. I’m sure many child psychologists believe that Josh and I should hide our emotions and the truth from our children, that they are fragile flowers that should be protected. Josh and I don’t subscribe to that thinking. We do not believe in hiding from our children. They are not fragile flowers that will wilt under the strain; rather, they are highly intelligent little girls with an enormous capacity to understand and grow stronger with every hard reality that awaits them in their lives. Facing hardship with a solid foundation of familial love from an early age will strengthen them. I know this to be true based on my own life.
When I lie in bed crying, Mia usually stays away, or she’ll run into my room to grab her stuffed animal Pinky and her blanket and run right out to watch TV—she internalizes her fears, worries, and sadness. Belle, on the other hand, comes to check on me every couple minutes, opening the door ever so quietly to stick her head inside to look at me with her concerned brown eyes. Sometimes, she crawls into bed with me and gives me a hug and kiss. “Mommy, it’s going to be okay,” she reassures me, like she knows all.
But on that particular Monday morning, Belle was not the reassuring voice she sometimes is. I cried into her neck as she sat on my lap in the hallway outside her classroom. We have to kill thirty minutes every morning between 8:30, when Mia’s class starts, and 9:00, when Belle’s class starts. I sat there on the floor listening to other parents cheerily greeting each other and comparing notes about their holidays as if they didn’t have a care in the world. Our holidays had been awful, completely poisoned by cancer. At that moment, the sounds of normalcy were more than I could handle. In our little corner, I tried to hide as I sobbed, holding Belle even tighter. There were no questions or other words this time, no “Mommy, why are you crying?” or “Mommy, it’s going to be okay.” Instead, she just sat staring at a spot on the wall with that look in her eyes that told me she was seeing something I couldn’t see, in a place to which I could not go with her, the look that scares me because I know she knows that there is worsening metastatic disease.
Her