The List

That day, my two daughters and I had distracted ourselves from after school until early evening, driving around, running errands and occasionally crying. Now we were in the brightly lit noodle restaurant, each of us with our own version of our favorite staple food. In this place and time both safe and urgent, I dove back into the one thing I wanted to make sure was said:

Write down your list now. The adults that you know you could call or text anytime day or night if you felt like you couldn’t talk to your friends or your mom or dad.

My 10-year old’s eyes were huge: But I can always talk to momma and dada.

That was the lemonade and buttered noodles answer. But it couldn’t be today’s answer. I had to push, and I had to push right now, today, because the girl that this was all about was only 12.

I know that is how it feels right now, but your brain is growing every day and sometimes as your brain grows it can feel like a deep, dark hole forms. I don’t know why or how but sometimes a hole can just open up. On one side of the hole are all the people who love you and on the other side is everything that you feel bad about. There can be times when you may feel stuck on the bad side of that hole. On those days you may need a hand to hold onto to leap across the hole.

I look at them both and don’t know if they are understanding or pretending to understand. But I go on. In case someday I need to know that I tried. So I continue.

And sometimes that hole gets bigger and for whatever reason sunshine and trees and happiness are far away and even your friends and your mom and dad end up trapped on the wrong side of the hole. So right now, when that feels impossibly untrue, I want you to write down the names of people you know and trust to hold your hand and help you jump across that hole.

My 10-year old looked me in the eye and nodded and finished her list; my 12 year old had finished too. Then we took out their phones and made a ‘favorites list’ for these people, and we talked about how you can call them one right after the other, until someone responds. And how it would be ok to reach out now, to make it a habit, every day to remember you aren’t alone.

We finished our meal and headed home.

Then that night as they were sleeping, I visited their rooms one more time and rested my hand gently on their ribs to feel their breath ease in and out of their bodies, amazed and terrified by love and their lives, just like when they were babies. And I considered how this ridiculous pact of parenthood leaves you always vulnerable to unspeakable loss.

Walking away from their rooms and down the stairs to the kitchen I thought, what if there was a day for me too? Isn’t the worse crime, right now, to feel invulnerable. To feel as if I don’t have to make a list too. To feel as if a hole too deep and too wide could never form in my brain. Perhaps it is the lesson not just of parenthood but of life itself, that days like today demonstrate how terribly fragile every moment is.

So, I wrote my list too.

Of the people I knew I could call.

That is what I did tonight, alone in my kitchen. I sent a few of the people on my list a text. A simple hello, or a funny meme, to let them know I thought of them.

But really, I was saying: I’m here, do you need a hand today? I may need one someday too.

Originally published on the Author’s Wordpress site Ren’s Reasons on December 2019