Photo: King College, London
“It’s not hard,” she said. “Here, I’ll show you.”
“You make a circle …” she demonstrated. “Then you make eyes and mouth and little bit of hair and hands and legs. See?”
She held the drawing up to show me. Lines for arms and legs sprouted out of the crooked circle ‘head,’ topped by a few smaller lines of a sparse mohawk.
“Then,” she planted the paper back on the table, “you go to the hospital and the doctor makes magic and it’s a baby.”
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Photo: Amitai Asif
“Can animals be naked?” he asked, his little forehead creased in perplexed concentration.
“Naked how?” I responded. “Animals don’t usually wear clothes. People may dress their dogs with coats or booties if its raining or snowing, but even that only sometimes.”
He waved me off. “I’m not talking about dogs, even.”
I smiled. The kindergartener’s contenance was a smaller version of adolescents’ exasperation at the ‘know-nothing-adults’ they are somehow expected to live with.
“Oh, okay.” I conceded, “I guess I misunderstood. What did you mean, then?”
“Other things. Like, um … snakes.”
“Snakes?!” I repeated.
“Yeah.” He moved his head up and down for emphasis. “Because I think maybe a snake took his clothes off and ran away and now he’s naked.”
Comprehension slithered in to lift my confusion. “Was this when you went to visit your grandma in Arizona?”
He nodded again. “It looked like a snake but it was only snake clothes.”
I grinned. “I think you saw a snake skin shed! How cool! But don’t worry, it still has skin on its body. You see, when a snake’s skin is too small for it, it grows new skin underneath and then it wriggles out of the old skin and sheds it inside out like a sock.”
The little boy narrowed his eyes and inspected my expression to see if I was perhaps pulling his leg. What he saw in my face must’ve reassured him.
“Good,” he said. “Because I didn’t want everyone to see his privates.”
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Photo: Craftgawker.com
“I have a cavity in my mouth!” she announced, elated.
“You do?” I couldn’t suppress a smile. The contrast between the child’s delight and the mom’s anguish was too funny.
“Yeah,” the girl expounded, lisping all the way. “It’s a hole! The dentist has a special magic mirror for my teeth and she looked all over and she said I have a cavity.”
“Wow,” I managed and raised an eyebrow at the mom, who nodded solemnly.
“Next week,” the mother sighed. “I’m not looking forward to it …”
I understood why. This little girl could raise roofs at the mere sight of needles. Just ten days prior the mom had shared with me her mortification at the horrified looks people had given her when she’d emerged with her child from a routine blood draw. “Everyone in that waiting room must have been convinced we were slicing her in pieces,” the mom had vented. “I can’t believe they hadn’t all called Child Protective Services or 911.”
“Laughing gas …” I mouthed.
The mom inhaled and shrugged and nodded all in one. Skeptical and perhaps a little hopeful.
“Not next week,” the child pointed out. “Tonight!”
The mom and I exchanged looks.
“What do you mean, tonight?” the mother asked. “Doc Dee said she’ll see us after lunch next Tuesday.”
“Yeah,” the little girl waved this information away. “But I have a cavity,” she stressed. “So the Tooth Fairy is going to get it first.”
She opened her mouth to give us both a good look before turning to me. “I don’t know why the dentist needed a magic mirror,” she added and her voice rose in puzzlement. “I can see my cavity right away already.”
She held her mouth agape and pointed to a newly lost incisor. “See? It’s right here.”
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Photo: Atara Katz
“How did you learn how to know everything?” she asked.
“I don’t think anyone knows everything,” I responded, only half-attending. A siren from a fire-engine distracted me. The driver leaned on the horn. Someone must have not given the emergency vehicle the right of way.
“But how did you learn how to know everything?” she insisted.
The First Grader’s tone brought me back to full attention. She hung her big brown eyes on me.
“You mean, how do people work on knowing more and more?” I tried.
A shadow of a frown passed over the small visage, then the girl seemed to decide this not-at-all-what-I-asked-about-reframe is as comprehensive as this adult in front of her can probably muster at the moment. She nodded.
“Different people may have different ways of learning,” I replied, “but for me, I like finding out new things. So I observe and try to listen. I read a lot, and I ask plenty of questions …”
“… you do ask a lot of questions,” she interrupted. “But sometimes I think you already know the answers.”
I grinned. “Sometimes I do … And sometimes,” I teased, “I think you know the answers to your questions, too …”
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Photo: Inbar Asif
He didn’t want to have his dinner.
Only dessert.
“I’m kind of allergic to the salad,” he proclaimed.
“And the stew?”
“That, too.”
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Photo: Pinterest
“It’s a zoo over there!”
She exclaimed. Out of breath.
Cheeks still red from the stairs
And the cold evening air.
“It’s a zoo in the store.
It’s a zoo in the park.
It’s a zoo … at the zoo,”
Her smile grew.
She cracked up.
Couldn’t stop.
Her delight
Only matched
By the first time she ‘got’
“Slipped my mind” meant forgot.
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Little Roo. Photo: Marnie Russ
The runt of the litter. The smallest of smalls.
A birth’s afterthought. The last of the lot.
She was given some frowns.
She was given less hope.
She was not much to look at.
A long shot, underdog.
Yet inside her she had something fierce
At her core
She was never the winner
But she was something more:
She worked harder than hard
She learned patience from woe
She grew up,
She believed
She perceived and she saw,
She found footholds in smiles
She made steps from each praise
She climbed up rungs of hardship
Found her stride
Found her ways
To amaze.
Click her for more about Little Roo’s story
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Photo: Daniel Foy
She is deliberate. She takes her time.
Each line is drawn with distinct goal. Each color chosen with remarkable concentration. Each curve labored on in exact determination.
After all, the letters aren’t ‘just’ a prelude to a word expressed. It is none of it ‘just’ idle practice …
It is her name she’s working on, a profound soul-expression.
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Photo: Atara Katz
He shook his head
At jam and bread
Objected to any other
Kind of spread
And lectured mommy
From his seat
That cookie’s the only
Thing to eat.
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Photo: AMDB7 on Flickr
She doesn’t know who her mom is. She was left as a newborn, wrapped in a piece of old bedsheet, under a pew in the church. Or so the story goes.
She spent her first year in the orphanage. Many mewling mouths and too few holding arms. She found a way to survive.
Halfway into her second year she got picked up, fussed over with odd sounds, carried out of the room that had been her world. It was confusing. It was good. It was a lot.
She has a family now. They love her. They are patient. Most of the time. They try.
She’s a big girl. Almost ten. She understands. Sometimes.
She still can’t help but wonder who she is. What made her undesirable. Why she was left, naked not only of clothes but of clues.
She still can’t help but wonder about the woman who’d had her, then left without a sound. The woman who isn’t even mist and fog of memory and yet she still is tethered to in heart and mind. Her Mystery Mom.
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