Whatever Condition
Monday, July 13th, 2009

She is fascinated by soap shaped like seashells. Anything she finds in the house to her liking she takes down from the shelves and display tables, countertops and bureaus – even the bath tub ledge – and stuffs them into her baby stroller to push around the neighborhood like a miniature bag lady.

The stroller isn’t meant for real babies. The model she’s taken to is a miniature one intended for baby dolls with small wheels to carry light loads around a living room or to be pushed up and down a sidewalk, gently – not to carry the enormous weight that results from her collecting sprees. She loads the seat and its undercarriage with stuffed animals, puzzle pieces, pinecones, marbles, synthetic flower stems with the blossoms cut or fallen off, potato chip bags, a backpack and a hippo figurine.

Her stroller goes with her everywhere: to the swimming pool, across the house’s three stories, to the bedroom when she falls to sleep. The neighborhood pool is a quarter mile away and she insists that it go with her though nothing in it is going to come in handy later or be valuable to her in any way. But she insists it go along by showing real concern and disappointment for it. She turns up her bottom lip and her eyes widen and turn damp, and she asks in her best Shirley Temple voice, “Ah, why can’t I take my stroh-lah?” And she says it just like that.

So the stroller is in for the trip. About 100 yards along the way, her father – I – am pushing it across the smooth blacktop past the beach houses and the tree shadows. It’s an easy push with a reward at the end. If it gets too hot, you can jump in the pool. But a few feet is all she can stand and then it’s my turn to fill in.

Her treasures are the innocent kind and so is her flightiness. But the junk she collects is insight into her mind.

She has no idea what is important. She has left everything up to her parents in shaping her life. Her concern lies in the little things. They are more important than where her parents live, what color the house is, what street it’s on, where her father sleeps, what school she goes to, who her neighbors are and all those real questions that adults concern themselves with.

My daughter – three years old – has slept with me the last two nights. She is consistently the most difficult one, the one that is often the toughest to fall asleep, so when she asks that I tickle her to sleep every night, I do it. Beginning with her back, she lays face down and pulls her nightgown up to her shoulder blades and tells me to tickle her. So I do. After a few minutes, she slips an arm around behind her and I tickle it, too. She shifts her head from side to side, moving it in the pillow softness and breathing softly. She opens one eye to me to see if my eyes are closed, if I am about to sleep, which of course I would be if wasn’t for her demands. And we smile. She knows. This happens in the nightlight’s orange glow.

Earlier in the day, she found some old glasses lying on the countertop and put them on. She looked so much like her mother. This beautiful girl, it reminded me, is part of two people. One face, depending on which parent’s perspective is taken, is now a disappointment to the other. In the beginning, when two people are in love, neither can do any wrong. In the ending, you can’t stand to see each other. When there are children, it’s no so easily resolved.

Here is what I know that my daughter doesn’t: The only way that value should be attributed to everything in life is if you live every day from that viewpoint … if you count everything as a blessing, completely wondorous about it’s value and impact on your life, no matter how miniscule it might seem to be. And here is what else I know that she doesn’t: her parents didn’t live that way, together.

My little girl collects random things because they are all beautiful to her, wherever she finds them, whatever condition they are in. She’ll live through this divorce. Her parents aren’t going to change in her eyes. They are like seashell-shaped soap, another priceless item for her collection.

Tags: Kids