Spot of Fuzzy Goodness

This photo makes me happy.

Marie + Moe :: Feb 19 ‘08

Neither PC nor surgery related - be happy, people

This is Marie.

Marie is the daughter of a very dear friend of mine (my brother-in-law’s sister). She calls me “Aunt” Sara, and I call her my niece-in-law. She is 3 years old, and as of two weeks ago - a big sister.

Yesterday, I spent a few hours with Marie, her Uncle Ben, and her Grammy. We get along really well - favorite games include “throw 12 bouncy balls on the kitchen floor at once”, and “hide from the sharks under blankets”. Good times. She also loves me because I let her use my camera, which is actually really awesome because I love seeing what she chooses to shoot.

So yesterday, Marie & I decided to give Uncle Ben & Grammy some visit time alone; we grabbed the bouncy balls and headed off to explore the (shark-infested) bedroom. Sometime while we were running from sharks… Marie bumped her head. For those of you who haven’t witnessed such things recently, let me explain what happens when a 3 year old bumps her head: it takes a little time, maybe 5 seconds, before she realizes something’s wrong, processes the shock and pain, and then decides it’s worth crying over. When that happened, Marie ran for me and hung on for all she was worth - but it only took her a few hiccups to see I wasn’t the right person to fix this. She needed Grammy.

Marie needed the only person she trusted more than her mommy and daddy to hug her tight and just love her until the tears stopped. She didn’t need Grammy to tell her it didn’t really hurt or to stop crying. She just needed time & proof of love, so she held onto her Grammy with all she had. In a few minutes, she stopped crying, and looked over at me. “Hey, Aunt Sara!”, she said (in that unmistakable “Guess what? tone). “I’m all better now!”. That cracked us all up. It was totally true, and we “grown-ups” couldn’t have put it better ourselves. “Well what happened, Marie?!” I asked - mainly just to see what she came up with. “I don’t know,” she said. There were still leftover tears in her eyes, but she’d already forgotten about them. “I just had to cry for a while. Let’s go play now.”

I have Marie days. Sometimes I bump my head, and the shock and pain send me reeling. I’ve got over two decades on Marie, but she still manages to deal with the bumps a lot better than I do. Why do we grown-ups try to make life so damn complicated? We take a whole lot longer than a scant 5 seconds to figure ourselves out. What the hell gives us the audacity to believe that age or experience grant us magical understanding of whatever life throws at us, and why does that same manufactured “maturity” stop us from humbling ourselves into the only posture of the only relationship that will really fix things? The weirdness of that concept would probably crack Marie up (except I can’t say hell or damn in front of her, and I don’t think she knows what audacity means).

So tonight, I’m trying to deal with some things like my favorite three year old would. There aren’t many who I trust; only One who I trust completely. I’m not all better yet… but I think I will be soon.