Fourteenth Day - The Fish

I had a blog already planned out in my head for tonight but it is going to have to wait because the fish died. I should be clear, this was a carnival fish, one of those creatures that your child wins by somehow magically displaying more coordination than you ever thought he had and popping a ping pong ball into a small bowl. We gave him a few days to live, he made it several weeks longer than that. So, on the one hand I'm impressed he lived this long, on the other hand, I am totally and utterly devastated by the death of a fifteen cent goldfish.

When it became clear that Bready (my son named him that because he wanted to feed him bread) was not going to immediately die, I scoured the internet for information on how to keep a goldfish healthy. I realized our cheap bowl was not recommended, but I followed all the instructions for frequent water changes and chemical conditioning, tried to give him a recommended diet. I searched Craigslist, hoping someone would sell a larger aquarium with a filter for something more in our price range than the offerings at the pet store. I had no idea how expensive an appropriate habitat is for a "free" goldfish and it really isn't in our current budget to put up a fish in more deluxe surroundings than our own. We joked that perhaps Bready would meet with an unfortunate incident, whenever we wondered what we would do if we needed to leave town or when I grew sick of changing stinky fish water for days on end.

Still, it all came down to the kid. The kid loved the fish. He would sit and have breakfast across from him, sometimes having little conversations where he would provide the fish with an appropriately watery voice. He's been begging for a dog and a cat for over a year now and I thought, well, this is a good introduction--everyone has fish, right? So I'd change the water and wonder how much longer our luck would hold out.  As it turned out, not very long.

So tonight, when I had put the boy to bed and was cleaning up the kitchen, I noticed it. The fish. Belly up. Or rather sideways. In any case, definitively dead. What I wanted to do was to flush him and then tell the boy that we had taken him to the river to play with the manatees, but some shred of higher motherhood (and the advice of several friends) intervened and I now have a small disposable plastic container in my fridge containing a dead fish, awaiting a morning discussion with a four year old on the mutability of all things.

I know how this is supposed to work. I spent over 10 years in children's bookstores selling books like The 10th Good Thing About Barney and telling parents how healing it was for a child to learn about death, pontificating on honesty and the value of story to bridge the gap of grief. Yeah. I didn't know shit. It is one thing to talk theoretically about addressing death and the loss of a pet with a child and then to actually realize you are going to have to present your child with a little fishy corpse. I have no idea how he will react and I'm scared witless. Will he be in denial? Will he insist we put him back in water? Will he want to touch him? Will he freak out about death now? Do I say the fish got sick and if I do that will he think sickness=death? Or will he be completely unfazed or even curious? What if he asks to perform a post-mortem?

Where's my damn parents manual? I am not prepared for this. I refused to have a pet as a child because I couldn't bear the thought of it ever  having to die. I refused to even have helium balloons because I knew I would be heartbroken when they deflated. Even now, when my son's mylar balloons from his birthdays deflate I blow them up with air, reseal them and use them as wall decorations. I am not kidding. So you see, it is not an exaggeration to say I am possibly the least equipped parent when it comes to the subject of loss.

You would think I am an expert, our lives have experienced so much loss in recent years. We've lost a home, a house, jobs, career, friends, roots, security--it's all gone. We've been living on the edge for some time now, I place I never thought I would be again, made that much more difficult by the knowledge that there is this awesome little boy who looks to me and his father for every need. Our boy doesn't have a yard to play in, or the sibling we so wanted to give him or the "real" dog that he begs for weekly. (He does insist that his stuffed dogs are real and thanks God for them every night at prayers.) I think when he won the fish I thought it was some sort of a sign, finally a little living thing for him to love and befriend, finally something for him to come home to other than his tired and stressed out parents. Of course that is a ridiculous amount of pressure to put on a fifteen cent carnival fish. Come to think of it, it's probably the stress of inappropriate expectations that killed him.

So we'll see what happens tomorrow. Hopefully I'll keep it together and the boy won't be too upset and we can dispose of Bready with sufficient decorum. Hopefully this small loss, like all the greater ones, will continue to refine us instead of simply laying us low. Rest in peace, Bready the fish. We hardly knew ye.

ADDENDUM****

Bready was laid to rest this morning in a beautiful service attended by family and friends. He was buried in a wrapper made of butcher paper (no irony intended) which was hand decorated in red marker and glitter glue and accompanied by a paper effigy of a little fish created by his owner so that he might "have company". Tears were shed, prayers were offered, notably by agnostic daddy who commended Bready to God, asking his creator to look over him as he "swam in fishy heaven". All parties, including mommy seem to be appropriately transitioning through their respective stages of grief.

Thirteenth Day - The Wish

My son likes do what he calls "his wish" at night. Somehow he combined wishing on a star with saying goodnight prayers, so he goes to the window, looks out and has a little chat with God. Tonight the wish was clearly a delay tactic for bedtime, but what am I going to say--no, you may NOT pray? So okay, out of bed again and over to the window seat we go. While I am always amused by his prayers, especially since the phrase "Thank you God for stuff and stuff" usually figures prominently, tonight was definitely in the top ten.

The boy went over to the window, folded his little hands and looked out the window. One of the things I love about the way he prays is that it is in the same voice he uses to sell pretend ice cream to passers-by on our nature walk or when he tells strangers at the grocery store about how he is four now and therefore big enough to weigh his own fruit. He is a friend to the world, is my boy, and God is just another member of his big friendly posse. Tonight he set out to have another little chat with the Creator of the universe, saying "Thank you God for the sun, thank you for the moon. Thank you for my mom and thank you for my dad. Thank you for my good food and thank you for my doggies and thank you for my friends and thank you for my school. Thank you for my toys and thank you for the chairs and the carpets and the closet."

I think there has to be some kind of maternal girl scout patch you earn for keeping a straight face during prayers and I earned mine tonight.

I'm always glad to make the thank you list, but to be included with the carpet and the chairs? Well, that is gravy! I wish I knew what made his little mind tick. I could probably come up with a few theories about his funky little prayers and why he thinks of certain things, but at the bottom of it I believe is this one truth. My little boy loves the world. He absolutely loves everything in it. Including the chairs. He's truly grateful for things like peas and dustpans and junk mail, because everything carries the potential for transformation and delight.

It is such a privilege to parent a happy child, and I try to always be mindful of this. When I say my own prayers, my thanks are for him. My first petition is that I might raise him in such a way that I keep safe this wonderful kernel of goodness that is the core of his little soul. I know he will be tried and he might have some tough times ahead, tender-hearted children often do, but I will fight as hard as I can to give him the self-confidence he needs to send the bullies and doubters packing.

So tonight as I am contemplating a number of stressful things on my plate, I am taking a moment to be thankful for the chairs. And the carpet. Because what is good is what matters and my son reminds me daily that this world is full of goodness.

Eleventh Day - What Sucks

The last few days I've just been doing some private journaling, rather than posting. I may go back and try to glean a few bits to post, but trust me, I am sparing my small but loyal audience. (Hi Mom.) Writing is such an excellent therapy for the mind and spirit, it is easy to make any journal entry all about one's misery. After all, you get together with friends after work, you order some drinks, what's the topic of discussion? Surely not to talk your fabulous life. Unless you're that person. And if you are, we all know you're faking it, so get over yourself already.

Seriously though, when people get together to unwind, they talk about what sucks. It might be politics, jobs, family that are bleeding our psyche dry at the moment and monopolizing our waking thoughts, doesn't really matter. Very seldom do we wax lyrical about how "life is pretty much okay".

When I was in junior high, discovering writing poetry for the first time, this phenomenon was ideal. Here I was, full of angsty truth as I saw it and all I had to do was start writing and the emotion flowed like black eyeliner. It was cathartic and freeing to write melodramatic poems and stories, to wallow in my 13 year old pain and to feel quite transformed by the act of writing emotion on a page. Even when I think now of some of those awful testimonies to my long hours spent reading Sylvia Plath, I have a generous spirit towards that 13 year old. God bless my nerdy little self.

I'm not sure exactly when the transformation occurred for me, but if I could find the moment, I believe I would label it "when I grew up". This was the moment when I shifted from enjoying the catharsis of the page to understanding its brutal and unforgiving nature. It is so easy to lie with our voices, we do it all the time. You look great in those pants, the check is in the mail or no, I'm not angry. Our inflections and expressions smooth the gaps and make our little necessary lies go down smoothly so that we can interact with each other without having to resort to cudgels. Writing is a different matter. Writing is between you and the page, or rather your full self and your blank self. The only way to fill that page (or screen) is to drop that bucket down and bring something out from within, be it superficial or deep. It is possible to lie to yourself of course, but it is not easy. It takes work, and it becomes extremely evident with each editorial pass.

The day I grew up was the day I realized that the page was not my friend or confidante, but my betrayer. No matter what I intended to write, I always lay bare more than I meant to, whether it was a poem, an essay or even a letter. Why this seems to skew to the negative, the fearful and the sad, I still don't completely understand. I suppose that for me, spoken words are chatter, porous stoppers to keep the functional world separate from the negative world in my head. What is positive, loving and hopeful flows freely through the barriers as "acceptable content". Written words, on the other hand, are doorways and have the power to let out the whole rabble that lives in my brain. Opening a door, there is always a chance you won't like what is on the other side, but by the time you've figured it out, the bastard has his foot wedged and you're well and truly screwed.

There is no way out of this mess of doors and rabble and ooze but to write it out and perhaps at the end you have something you can share and perhaps you don't. Hopefully you've retained a small amount of truth from whatever crawled out of that door, sufficient that someone other than your narcissistic self can appreciate the workings of your fevered brain.

And if not, well, that's what blogs are for.