The grains beyond age

By Beck

Yesterday started off oddly, with me waking up to a silent computer. “What will I do now?” I thought, and then set about my day – getting all of us off to school (I was volunteering for the morning, The Baby crabbing alongside me, sorting and counting the supplies for the school’s breakfast club. It’s a poor area and many kids need something extra in the morning.), running to a kind friend’s house later to quickly use her computer and then visit at my leisure, returning home to wash the floor and polish the woodwork and then bake some cookies with The Baby, who was in a good mood FOR ONCE.

Later, The Baby and I hauled an old orange check tablecloth outside and ate cookies while lounging in our yard, the newly-appeared leaves a hazy soft green against a clear skyblue sky, and the yard full of the brazen cheerfulness of dandelions. We went back inside, into our house smelling of lavender and beeswax, The Baby’s hands full of yellow tulips sharp against her pink dress and my heart felt full of gold, a sudden unfurling after months of misery.

And then the ringing black phone was my husband, telling me in a grim voice that arrests had been made in the disappearance of an Ontario child, arrests made for her murder.

One thing that I am reserved about is the tendency online for the deaths of children to become these public outpourings of grief by people who did not know the children at all – even virtually – while living. I think it springs often from a natural kindliness, a maternal love of children and a natural horror that any mother should have their child taken from their arms, and of course I share in that. But there is also – and I can only speak for me here, but I don’t think I’m that rare – an aspect of warding off cruel fate, too, that if I am publicly grief-stricken enough, I will keep some dark thing from my own doorstep.

And so as I cried yesterday, grieving over the death of a child I did not know, who was I crying for?

Was I crying for an unknown child, made suddenly dear to me by the grievous horror of her death?

Was I crying for my own children, so close in age to that poor little girl and the dangerous world they must live in?

Or was I crying for myself, for my own vulnerable mother’s heart, and for my knowledge that since I have children, I can never again be easy in this world?

It is another bright, cloudless day here. Yesterday’s tulips are still brightly yellow and upright in their vase, the morning sunlight falling about my house like a promise of joy, a promise of languorous, carefree summer days to come. But within me, within my dark maternal veins, a knowledge of something else whispers its bleak words, and yesterday’s golden happiness seems suddenly like fairy gold, a fragile pretending.

Is a fragile pretending all we can ever really have?

My Baby – not a baby at all, but still sweet – is dancing across the living room, dancing in the sunbeams in the window. The happiness I feel at watching her feels like a physical thing, something I could pick up and jar away for some cold winter to be opened as needed, the nourishing, uncomplicated joy that is, of course, the other side of the coin. This world is at once hard and terrible and beautiful and lovely and fragile and we live in it with our pretendings and our brief empathy and then run out again into the sunny day like we will have an endless number of them, stretching before us forever and ever.

Beck blogs at Frog And Toad Are Still Friends.