My Surprise Soulmate
Remi was destined to be the child that existed more separately.
Even before she was born, I distanced myself from her. I challenged myself to confront my own failures and insecurities so as to avoid passing them along to her. No human is infallible, but she would be more so than I was. Or in the least, fail differently; my lessons learned would not dare go to waste.
Remi was born indisputably looking like Michael, and our fate seemed sealed. Her big personality emanated out of her tiny 6-pound self from the beginning: she is vocal, fearless, loud - traits I would never describe myself as.
I attempt the impossible of not comparing my children, but it is a true effort in vain. Besides looking more like a Mitchell, Sy retains a baseline melancholy that similarly hovers in the shadows of my every move. This emotional commonality makes it easy for me to relate to him. The other night when I was tucking him in, a tear rolled down his face, seemingly out of nowhere. When I asked him what was making him sad, he said that he missed Cape Cod. I felt like I had found someone who understood me in my darkest and quietest moments. I often yearned to simply be at our house in the Cape, watching the blackish neon stillness of sunrise. Or feeling like I needed the salt air off the ocean in order to breathe. I understood so well the urgency to exist in the cold and quiet peace of Cape Cod, that I promised him we would go that weekend. It was a long drive, but glorious.
There are observable traits that Sy and I share as well - olive skin tone, muscular calves, a voracious appetite, a silliness for nonsensical suess-like rhyming - but I feel most connected to him through the unspoken understanding of truths that make us sad.
Remi, on the other hand, is more like Michael in her go with the flow attitude. She doesn’t drag around the weight of the world like my old soul Sy. Her lightness is something I admire and strive for, but which again, differentiates us.
It was Remi, however, that saved my life on Saturday night.
Our car was parked on a busy street, and I was buckling Remi in. As I leaned over her, struggling to get the damn clips fastened, a landscaping truck speeding up the road from behind clipped the car door that was propped open. The truck’s impact was so forceful that the door which was nearly torn off the hinges snapped shut like a mouse trap, plowing me into the car over her. I stood up, stunned and miraculously without injury, just in time to see the truck speeding up the road. It was at this moment that I understood what happened, which is that I was inches from getting obliterated by a truck in front of Remi.
Remi was quiet as I climbed into the driver’s seat and burst into tears. Sy clearly didn’t have a sense of what happened - he was already asking if we could continue on to the toy store before it closed.
When we got home, I somehow got through the functions of getting the kids bathed and fed, which for reference, was opening a can of Campbell’s condensed soup and pouring it into a pot.
Remi was difficult going down that night. She got out of her bed four times at which point I started ignoring her. The fifth time, I was brushing my teeth and pretending not to notice her standing next to me. I was so emotionally spent, I could barely ask her to get back into bed. As I leaned over the sink looking into the mirror, I saw her squaring her little body to mine, peering her head into the sink and looking up at me with wide eyes to make sure I saw her. I silently ushered her back to her room.
The sixth time she got up, I was already in my own bed with the lights off, crying over the fragility of life and the tragedy that we had so narrowly escaped. She pattered over to me, and stuck her face inches away from mine. Even in the dark, my eyes cloudy with tears, I could see her big blue eyes, pleading to let her in.
I opened the covers and pulled her into the bed. She wrapped her tiny arms around me and I nestled my head into her neck. I cried and cried. I could feel her thick eyelashes like tiny feather mops on my cheek, dabbing away the tears. Her even breathing and the realness of her body snuggled into mine calmed me. Our connectedness sent a surge of oxytocin through me as my tears subsided.
I had been reaching for observable commonalities with Remi to solidify our connection, but realized as I lay in the dark, that human connection is forged most strongly in common experiences of pain. Knowing that someone understands your sadness – in this case, profoundly so, having experienced this scary event with me – is what makes us feel less alone in the world.
It was in this moment of her hug that I grasped the magnitude of our connection, and felt closer to her than I had maybe ever felt with another human in my life. I inhaled deeply, and as I exhaled, hugged the tiny soulmate that had saved me twice that night.
