Spring of Parenthood

“When I’m a grown up, you are going to be dead!” Remi laughed, looking me squarely in the eyes.

“What? It’s true,” she followed, responding to the stunned confusion she read from my furrowed brows. As if repeating it made it make more sense. This was not the type of enhanced communication skills I had been anticipating from my newly minted 5-year-old.

Perhaps Remi was getting even for a similarly stark statement I had made a few weeks earlier, the day I came home from putting our dog Bean down.

“Is Bean going to died?” she asked me (employing an ironically correct tense), as I walked in the door having just carried out the most heart-wrenching responsibility of my life thus far. My heart was so tired. I could not find words to soften what I had just experienced.

“Bean died,” I responded. Remi’s eyes welled up with tears, as did mine. In the weeks that followed, it was unclear whether Remi herself was experiencing her own sense of loss or was picking up the crumbs of grief that I trailed around the house like a ghost’s coattails. My inability to wear any sort of mask as waves of sadness overcame me were clear the many nights she looked in my eyes welled with tears and responded, “I miss Bean.”

Bean’s passing occurred coincidentally on the morning of a milestone I had been circling for 6 years. Remi had turned 5 a few weeks ago, and today Sy was celebrating his 8th birthday, two ages upon which rearing my children to I imagined would kick off the golden age of parenting. Back when my belly resembled the alien pouch of pregnancy with Remi and I longed for a glacier cold martini accompanied by gooey unpasteurized cheese, I meditated on what life would look like when my unborn second child and my 3 year-old son reached the ages of 5 and 8 in May and June, 2024.

It was a vision that only one without two children could have - a Rembrandt painting of soft light, kids playing quietly with each other on the floor, and my husband and I snuggling with our feet up in the couch in the distance.

Golden-era parenting appeared to me something like this: my two kids would be sweet with each other and me, entertaining themselves when I was busy and up for anything when I wanted to hang out. Like pretty little accessories that went with everything - those vintage gold earrings that dressed up jeans or complimented a cocktail dress, ready to accentuate any occasion or outfit.

Why these ages in particular?  I envisioned them as marking the official completion of the baby stage and the entry into the era of having real kids.

It was the matriculation to this stage in which I would reach the climactic Spring of Parenthood – a blissful period of childrearing.

The winter had been the baby years – endless nights of sleeplessness and loneliness. Summer would surely be puberty - sweaty, hot, intense and stinky. I envisioned Fall as early adolescence - leaves falling off the trees exposing stark truths; a loss of innocence. And the cycle would start over the following winter during the true teenage years - lonely and cold again. But this Spring of 2024 – this was my season.

Instead, Sy’s 8th birthday celebration – a small gathering of kids in a park to play sports and eat cookie cake while I poured pitchers of margaritas for the parents – became Bean’s shiva. I quietly sobbed when those I had told greeted me with hugs and condolences. Losing Bean was a feeling of finality unlike one I had ever experienced. For 13 years she had been my living comfort blanket, nestling her warm belly against my sciatic pain in pregnancy, cuddling on my lap while I commuted from Boston to New York, and curling up with me on the couch on the many nights that Michael was at work. She had bridged an uncertain and tumultuous period of my life that I had looked forward to closing the chapter on. I never contemplated the fact that in saying goodbye to that period of life that I would simultaneously need to say good bye to her.

Her departure on the day of my arrival to this sanctified space of having two real kids, no longer toddlers, cast a diaphanous light on the loss that accompanies any new beginning. I was moving on into a long-awaited era, but what did I have to leave behind to get there?

These past few months since Remi turned 5 in May and Sy 8 in June have certainly been punctuated by the painterly moments I pictured. Sy and I went one weekend to a minor league baseball game, which we watched in the cool shade while sipping ice-cold lemonades. Remi and I put on dresses and had ladies’ lunch on the patio at a fancy Italian restaurant, ear to ear smiles as we dug into wood fired pizza washed down by ice cold Chablis and more lemonade. We hosted parties this summer during which I felt I was inhabiting a magazine ad for stemless glassware or hummus: more cold Chablis in hand, dips and chips abound, laughing with friends as our kids chased fireflies.

But moving into this new phase meant we had moved out of the last one, a loss that I only began to feel upon my children’s newfound ability to express grief.

Bean’s death coinciding with my toddler’s maturity into childhood meant I not only had to deal with my own pain of losing my pup, but that I also had to simultaneously ease Remi into a fact of life that she previously could not comprehend. This summer kicked the understanding of loss into high gear. Remi’s graduating from preschool and the cozy bubble of teachers and play that had defined her entire memory of life thus far. Sy matriculating from day camp and the tears that streamed the night before his last day.

“When can we see Miss Debra?” Remi implored.

“Will I ever see my Breezemont friends again?” Sy sobbed.

“I miss Bean!” they both cried. I missed her too. As well as my formerly unaware babies.

I had so wanted a life where my children understood boundaries and matured enough physically that they didn’t need me for the banal, boring stuff. I had totally underestimated what they would consequently comprehend when they reached this level of maturity. My excitement to leave behind the baby stage was tempered by the challenge my kids put forth: parent with your mind and not just your body. Be there for me emotionally, not just physically, they expressed. This need doesn’t subside in moments I myself am grieving, stressed, or exhausted. In fact it seemed like their state of mind directly fed off mine, as their moments of missing Bean occurred the second they saw sadness in my eyes.

I don’t know that milestones must be accompanied by loss; But I do know that growth means moving on from a state of former being. And doesn’t that inherently mean something must be forgone?

Whether she understood that or not, Remi’s reminder that I was mortal perfectly captured the delicate balance between my desire to reach the next phase of child-rearing and the loss that accompanied moving on from it.

All of which she summarized with her succinct statement that one day, when she was a grown up, I would be dead.

She was not wrong. But the painfulness in which she was right reeled the bittersweet reality of what we had to lose in order to grow together into crystal clear focus.  

We locked eyes at that moment, lamenting all that we had so recently lost, and seeing everything we would one day lose. I squeezed her tiny hand. She took my other hand and turned my palm face up, tracing and retracing my palmar creases, the ones that I had developed in the womb to help my skin stretch as I grew. The soft pad of her fingertip went back, forth and around until she was drawing a continuous circle, reminding us that what we had right here, right now, was eternal.