When large things loom

Us
Originally uploaded by Citizen Rob

When large things loom, it's the small things that save.

Someone recently told me that for all my efforts on Schuyler's behalf, the reality is that I'm the one who depends on her. My happiness, my sense of personal worth, my very identity as a person is dependent on Schuyler and her own success, not just in school but in life.

And I suspect that's absolutely true. Well, I'll go so far as to say that of course it's true. And I also suspect it's something like a universal truth. I imagine 90% of the parents who just read that said to themselves, "Well yeah, no shit."

For parents, that emotional dependency makes life... complicated. There's a fear that grows, for example, out of the risk of loss, or of failure. There are the choices not made, or at least not made easily, because risking your own happiness is one thing, but it's never really just about yourself, is it? And who can ever understand the relationship you have, not just with your child but also with your fear? It becomes like another family member. Or perhaps one more monster.

But there's a flip side to that relationship, that dependency. There's a kind of comfort that comes from the innocence of a child. Their lives aren't easy, but they are pretty simple. They focus like we do, on some level, but that focus comes in the service of a child's world and the basic elements that drive it. It's an intoxicating place to visit.

If you've been following my more recent entries, you've probably noticed a certain level of anxiety in my writing, and in my life. It's been a particularly rough week, lots of fear of loss and anxiety over the future.

But I have a world I can visit, one that's not so full of fear and loss and sadness and regret. It's the same world that Schuyler lived in all by herself for all those years, and its a world that she now shares with me, happily and without guile. Tomorrow, it'll include a trip to Chick-fil-A (which she's been asking about all week) and an early showing of The Last Airbender, which she's wanted to see ever since I first showed her that they were making a movie out of her favorite tv show. That world is going to include a weekend full of fireworks and baseball.

And tonight, as she got ready for bed, that world revolved around a few games of Hello Kitty dominoes, played by a very fluid set of rules known only to Schuyler. I don't know if she knew how much I needed that, but I'm grateful to her for it all the same.

When Schuyler was younger, even before she had much in the way of communication tools, she always seemed to sense when I was running out of whatever that stuff is that keeps you going through the deep water. When I was sad, I could always count on a tiny hand reaching out to me, and a wordless little girl from another world putting that hand on mine.

And tonight, it was Hello Kitty dominoes. Schuyler doesn't understand the large things that loom over her broken father any more than he does. But somehow I think that on some level, she understands better than any person in this world how the small things might just save her dumb lost daddy.

Sometimes, often even, I feel disposable. I think maybe I am. But Schuyler believes differently, and while I think she might be wrong, I'm going to go with her instincts on this for a little while longer.

If nothing else, I'd like to figure out her rules to Hello Kitty dominoes.