Posts Tagged "grieving children"

  Keira, my five-year-old daugh­ter, whined, “I don’t want to talk to any­one,” from under her pur­ple, fuzzy blan­ket. She did not want start going to therapy. She had recently returned from school one too many times, say­ing “nobody likes me,” or “I’m not smart,” or “nobody wants to be my friend.” But that was as far as the con­ver­sa­tion ever went. She really didn’t want to talk to any­one. Not even me. I pulled the cov­ers back, expos­ing her angry, brown eyes. “That’s just it, honey. It isn’t good if you don’t talk about your feelings.” She wrapped her front teeth around the base of her thumb’s cuti­cle and chewed on the skin. “I don’t have any feelings.” “Honey, you’ll be going to see Steve....

Tatiana, my eight-year-old daugh­ter, begins to cry. “Mom-my! I’m not talk­ing to you. You are mak­ing me so sad.” Her curly blonde hair flies every­where, as if being blown by a fan. She stomps into the bath­room, slams the door, and locks her­self in. All morn­ing, Tatiana has not been lis­ten­ing, and I’m fed up with hav­ing to repeat my words six times just to be heard. Deep breath, I tell myself. I call through the bath­room door, “Honey, come out here.” To my sur­prise, she twists the knob right away, but her sobs con­tinue ris­ing like a helicopter. “Come sit here.” Tatiana curls in my lap, mak­ing her lanky body com­pact. She blows her nose on her orange sun­flower dress. “I know we’ve all had colds and that...

Tatiana clings to me, her legs wrapped beneath my 9-month preg­nant belly, while the other Marin Day School tod­dlers push balls, rakes, minia­ture vac­u­ums, and each other around in the out­door play area of the preschool. Pri­mary col­ored toys are scat­tered everywhere—many of which Erik had cleaned only two months before, when he donated his time to Tatiana’s school to make some “minor repairs.” Erik was sup­posed to fix a cou­ple of loose locks over a week­end, but the teach­ers returned to a new gar­den of pot­ted flow­ers, re-stained benches and sand­box, and a large rain­bow play-structure that had been flipped and scrubbed from bot­tom to top. When he walked through the metal gate to bring Tatiana there the next day, the...

Erik told me about his dad, Hay­den, when we first started dat­ing. We were both 20, both stu­dents at Florida State Uni­ver­sity. Erik majored in com­puter sci­ence while I stud­ied cre­ative writ­ing. Within days of know­ing one another, it was obvi­ous that Erik’s ratio­nal, orga­nized side would com­pli­ment the artist in me. Erik spoke slowly, with quiet inten­sity. “We were on vacation.” I sat cross-legged, on Erik’s bed­room floor, soak­ing in the mas­cu­line whis­per of his words. My atten­tion was focused entirely on him. He stretched out on his back and put his head in my lap, his eyes directed at the cir­cu­lat­ing ceil­ing fan. “We were on vaca­tion, at the beach … I was eleven. It was just me, my mom,...

I admired Erik in the shower that Easter Sun­day morn­ing. Salt and pep­per hair. Deep brown eyes. Broad mas­cu­line shoul­ders cov­ered by smooth olive skin. Steam had filled the bath­room, like the fog that fre­quently hov­ered over the Golden Gate Bridge. I could only see parts of his body through the hazy, glass shower doors. He sat against the cor­ner of the tub, as he always did, care­fully scrap­ing the skin off of his well-manicured feet. I pulled out an assort­ment of mater­nity clothes from the closet and set them on the bath­room counter. Know­ing we’d be tak­ing tons of fam­ily pho­tos dur­ing Tatiana’s first real Easter egg hunt, I wanted to look bet­ter than I felt at seven months pregnant. “Ugh!”...