Conversations with the Baby Girl






"Lets teach Baby kitty how to rockabye.... First mommy sits down in the rockabye chair...then Baby Girl climbs onto mommy's lap...then Baby kitty sits on my lap... then we rockabye...then daddy comes and puts a blanket on us so we can be cozy... except daddy's not here...mommy tell baby kitty where daddy is"

"daddy died baby kitty, he went to heaven."

Ya we did that today. Sigh.  It took two and a half years for Baby Girl to start talking about daddy. For two and a half years she barely said his name. In the last couple months though that has changed, she has started talking more and more about him. Wondering if he would like this or that. Asking me to tell her stories about her and daddy. Asking what I think daddy would have said or done. Actually telling people or rather baby kittys that daddy died.

We drove past the road to our old house today. We do that a lot, it's on our way to places. Sometimes Baby Girl asks if we can drive down there and see our old house. That usually ends in tears.  She didn't ask that today, instead she said, "mommy, and Baby Girl and the cat and baby kitty should all be living in our old house, then we would all be happy." I tried to route the conversation  "But our new house is really nice, it has a big field near bye to play in and lots of neighborhood kids to play with, and it's warm and cozy.  It's a really good house."  "Ya but mommy it doesn't have a tree house, or a secret hide out, or a place to watch the sunset over the Christmas tree farm, or a daddy. We need to live in that house because it had a daddy." 

Yup she's right, that house will always be better because it will always be the one with daddy. I totally agree, there's no getting around it. Daddy was there and he's not here.  Daddy is the one that discovered the secret hideout. Daddy is the one that cleared a spot so we could watch the sunset.  They used to run inside as I was making dinner Baby Girl would say "come on mommy it's sunset time." I would try to get out of it  saying I had to cook, Dan would grab my hand and say "no, take a break with us, it's only a few minutes."  The tree of us would stand there and watch the sun set over the christmas tree farm. Well baby Girl would sit on the fence. Beautiful pinks and oranges, picture perfect. If only we could still do that. If only if only if only.

Baby Girl was supposed to write a speech this last weekend for an after school program she is in.  It needed to be researched and studied. She didn't do it, she didn't want to, I couldn't make her.  She went to school, at lunch time she decided she wanted to do the speech. Between lunch and the end of school she researched and wrote a speech. A speech I hear was awesome and all the adults were so impressed at how prepared she was.  Uhhhhhhhh. 

Dan, Dan, Dan.  This internets in case you didn't know is exactly the kind of thing her daddy did ALL THE TIME. Procrastinated till the very end and then come up with something spectacular.  A famous Dan story goes: when he was in high school he needed to write a book report. He never got around to reading a book for it. So instead on his lunch break he made up a book in his head and wrote a report about that. He got an A on that book report. the book report about the non existent book that he threw together roughly an hour before it was due. Dan was known for pulling stuff like that.

She is exactly like her father. I always said they had the same brain and I had no clue what was going on in there. It makes me wonder what Dan would have done if I had died. Would he not want to talk about me? Would it be too hard for him to utter my name? Would the two of them had hidden out in their grief and silence and shut out the world? I think it's entirely possible, they just got each other, they knew what the other was thinking, they wouldn't have to talk.

We are almost to the end of book five of Harry Potter. Harry and his friends just rode Thesthals into london.  Thestrals are a skeleton horse like thing that are invisible to most people. You can only see them if you have seen death.  So basically Harry's friends are riding an invisible horse through the air and they are talking about how weird and scary that is. Baby Girl asks "I wonder what that would be like."  I ask Baby Girl "I wonder if you can see Thestrals?, I can."   "But I didn't see anybody die?"  "No you didn't, but you saw daddy at the funeral, I wonder if that counts?"   "Read mommy just read" Conversations are over for today.

I wrote a book about grief, you can read it here: Carry on Castle

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