Nothing but the truth

A few days ago, Marty, my six-year-old daughter, caught me crying. She looked at me, her eyes wider than usual and asked why. I’m not sure anymore what my answer was; I think something about feeling pain in my eyes because of the medication I was applying regularly. It was a lie, of course, because the pain lay elsewhere although it did have something to do with an inability to see clearly.

I thought the eye excuse would do, but a minute later, she says to me. "Mommy. I never want to be a mommy. I watch you all the time and it is just too hard."

Marty’s like that – she is astute and wise beyond her years – an indigo child if I ever met one. She sees right through me and understands more of the world than I did at six or even at 26. She understands the simplicity of truth - of recognizing it and not being afraid of it.

When she was five, she started to cry to me about love. "Mommy, when I meet my true love, do I have to marry him?" I asked her why, intrigued to find out where the fear was coming from. "Mommy, will I have to meet him? Does everyone have to have a true love? I don’t mind having none. Will anyone force me to marry him?" I told her my own love story – my thrill in meeting her father; the relief in finding someone who loved me completely. Not to be assuaged, I told her to give herself some time and not to be so quick to make a judgment. That was surreal.

At moments like these, I find myself figuring out how to raise a daughter. With her, it is different. I fear the world for her. I am more compelled to protect her. I am under the assumption that the world has so many secrets I need to teach her. Perhaps because much of what is taught about womanhood is false or worse, kept secret. People who raised me never taught me about sexuality, femininity, true love, power or grace. Faced with her honesty, I feel that I owe her nothing but the truth. And truth and parenting, sometimes, is very, very difficult to do.

To do this, I must be truthful about my own self. This process of truthfulness has gotten me studying my understanding of wifehood, motherhood and personhood. I try to balance all that I am, across all that I would wish to be, on a fulcrum of all that I must be, and the seesaw of my life balances precariously. How do I tell her at her core is a person? And like a child, this person is continually figuring things out. Motherhood does not make one person perfect – only more accepting of imperfection.

If she were to ask me if I am a good wife, can I say with full conviction that I am a good wife? This is my 11th year of marriage and more now than ever, our differences have come to the fore. These differences could be lived with via a myriad of devices in the first decade – repression, suppression, displacement, grand gestures of love. In the next decade, I have a suspicion these methods will no longer work. How then to survive these glaring differences?

Marty sits on her father’s lap during family dinner. She is having a hard time apologizing to a cousin she has hurt. I tell her that apologizing is necessary even when it is difficult. My husband looks at me and I wonder whom I am addressing. I look into Marty’s eyes and tell her Mommy and Daddy say sorry to each other all the time. Her daddy silently mumbles, "Although Daddy apologizes more often." I am quick to retort, "Because Daddy is more often wrong." He corrects me, "No, because Mommy’s pride is large." The gauntlet is thrown.

I look at the interior of marriage and wonder what it is I must say to Marty about true love and marrying your true love. When she looks at my marriage, what am I teaching her? How do I show her that happiness is work?

The intricacies of marriage rest on one simple ingredient: the capacity to sacrifice. Every day is a certain kind of demand for sacrifice. Who showers first, what to buy at the grocery, who suffers leaving earlier with the banned car, who will bring the kids to the emergency room if necessary, who will put the kids to sleep because the other must study or work, who is in charge of ordering the birthday cake – the giraffe one, the precise one the kid ordered because God knows getting the wrong cake just spells the difference in all the world?

We make these sacrifices unknowingly, quickly, naturally, even. They creep up on us as we think we are acting on instinct. What it has the capacity to do is to suddenly fashion a life that can sometimes be accidental. Did I really want to be here? I see my husband ask this question more and more these days. He has had to make the most sacrifices, it comes to me now; in spite the years of counting labor, afterbirth pains and breastfeeding immeasurable and therefore unbeatable. Because of my choices, to be a teacher, to quit work to rest my heart, to need time for reading and staring, to have time to sing and write, he has to stay put where he is, in order for me to… daydream.

I have become good at this qualifying exercise – thinking marriage and love are things I can put in equations and make equal. Marty has begun to learn mathematical concepts and it looks very clear to her as they appear in apples and oranges. I tell her while we do her assignment:

"Marty, how many are Mommy and Daddy." She says we are two. I tell her, "What happened to Mommy and Daddy when they become two? Do we dissolve into the number two and disappear?" She looks at me quizzically because she knows me well. She knows it’s a trick question.

The other week, she began to have tantrums practically everyday. Eventually battered by having to deal with tantrums from my special son and my daughter and my toddler, I collapsed in tears and told her my heart could not take it anymore. I begged her to release me by just telling me what it was that bothered her so. Her answer was simple: "I want to be special too, Mommy. I want to be allowed to have tantrums."

I was rendered speechless by such honesty. She has begun to resent it actively that her own assertion of self is compromised by the presence of siblings. She is younger than her brother, but because he is special, she must give in to him often. She is still a child, but because I rely on her to help me with the toddler, it is demanded of her to be of help. These are things I never thought the need to question. But she is absolutely right. Her tantrum is an act of defiance. And yet she must learn that no matter how much we want to be alone, she will always be shape-shifting herself because of the presence of someone else. That’s what it means to be family, I guess. Or what it means to be human.

We play this game Lemonade when we wait in the car for her brother to end therapy. It is one of the few ways to get her out of a bad mood. She resents having to wait for a brother who might probably pinch her when he gets in the car. In the game, we sing a song that determines what part of us will disappear. If the song ends with you clapping last, you lose first your hand, then your arm, then your shoulder, until you are rendered armless. In play-form, it is funny. We look at the new shapes we have taken and laugh even harder when our arms reappear. In love, and life, it is not always so funny. What wise child thought of such a game?

We teach our children relentlessly and hope that what we teach will be enough to help them find their way. Marty will soon tread the world of the painful grade school years where peer pressure lights the way. I must be a beacon of truth. I must remember that to do that, I must always be truthful to myself, like she is.

Later on, she would reveal to me what it was that scared her so about finding her true love. The answer was very simple. She said, "Mommy, because it means I will have to grow up." She is absolutely right.

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You may reach me at Rica.Santos@gmail.com.