Illustration by Barry Falls

“You have learned something” George Bernard Shaw wrote. “That always feels at first as if you have lost something.”

Always one of my favorite quotes, I find this particularly rich when it comes to parenting. To watch a child learn — that the world can be a dangerous place, that people can be mean — is to watch them lose. And, in a guest post today, Sasha Brown-Worsham learns that the loss feels all the deeper when the subject is loss itself.

EMPATHY

By Sasha Brown-Worsham

My 4-year-old daughter, once a pretty committed sociopath, is (finally) developing empathy.

It shows itself in little ways.

For instance, when her 2.5-year-old brother cries after she smacks him so hard in the head, we can hear it in the next room, she no longer goes about her business, playing dolls and covering her ears to his cries (and our reprimands). Now she cocks her head to one side, furrows her brow and asks me: “Mommy, why he so sad?”

She still refuses to apologize. But she does hand him a doll or some small token to make up for it, which, for her, is a vast improvement.

These small developments are fascinating to watch. She is like a stop-motion flower unfolding from a tightly packed bud in real time. It was all in there. It just needed time to develop, time which during the day often seems to pass achingly slow, but by night, once she is asleep, it all seemed to pass in an instant.

One day she was a wriggling worm, the next she was a full-grown preschooler demanding her paints, dolls and independence.

In the early months, motherhood is a breeze. Despite the lack of sleep and endless crying jags without purpose, there is little psychological component.

That’s not exactly true.

There is our own psychological drama – what have I done? My life will never be the same?! But our children need little more than a few white onesies, a clean diaper and our breasts in their mouth to be happy. There are no questions, no dramas — just a seemingly endless string of nearly identical days, until one day the kid wakes up and says some words.

And then the trouble starts.

Back then, I never wondered if my daughter would be affected by every little conversation or how I should handle the bigger questions since they were still years off.

We never expect that it will only be four short years before we are walking back from a Christmas tree-lighting ceremony, snow on the ground, our breath dancing away from our mouths in smoky tendrils when she – all bundled in her varying shades of pink coat, hat, pants, socks and shoes – will start to ask us the questions we have been dreading.

“Why doesn’t Auntie Mar have a mommy?” She says to her father, who is holding her on his shoulders, looking uncomfortable hunched, ears red, cheeks flushed.

Auntie Mar is my sister. We have – or don’t have, as it were – the same mommy.

“Her mommy died,” he explains.

The questions started last year as she began to piece together familial relationships. Nana was Daddy’s mommy. Grandpa was Daddy’s daddy. Zaydee was mommy’s daddy. But Oma was not. She was Zaydee’s wife.

“So who is your mommy, mommy?” She asked then, eyes wide.

“No one,” I explain, wondering if that sounded too harsh, trying to soften it, but not to lie: “She died when I was little.”

“Dead?” She asked.

“Dead,” I explained, pretty sure that if God were handing out report cards for important conversations, I had just received a big, red F. It was the moment I had been waiting for since my mother died when I was 16 and it was nothing like I imagined.

In my head, I gathered my imaginary daughter into my arms. We both cried. I explained the loss, explained that her grandmother – my mother for whom she was named – whose pictured lined our walls, was no longer alive. I never got to the part in my mind where I explained what death was because my imaginary child understood that inherently. We talked feelings, emotions. She got it.

In my defense, my real life child was not quite as with it as my imaginary one.

“Why you not take her to the doctor?” She asked.

“Well, we did. Sometimes doctors can’t make people better,” I explained, surprised at how uncomfortable this made me. After all, I was going to be the “just the facts” mom! I was going to rock all the hard questions! Sex, death, masturbation – bring them on!

And yet, faced with my 30-month-old, I did not know how to tell her that people get breast cancer when their children are 7 and 16 and still need them. That the doctors we place so much trust in, the same ones I tell you to trust as they inject you with needles and examine you all over, actually can’t save everyone. Sometimes things die and even your mighty daddy with his screwdriver and a new set of batteries can’t fix them. The words I thought I had were not there.

And so I stopped. Whew! I thought. We got through that one.

And yet here we are, a year later. She is perched on daddy’s shoulders asking again. “If Auntie Mar does not have a mommy then neither do you,” she says.

“That’s right, honey. Auntie Mar’s mommy and my mommy are the same mommy and she died.”

“But how she die?”

“She got very sick,” I tell her, wondering the same thing myself. How? Why?

I want to add something, too: But you won’t and I won’t and no one we know will until we are all ready and old and comfortable. But it’s not true, so I stay silent.

“Were you very sad?” she asks me and I am off guard again because until now, my daughter has been a tiny narcissist, barely registering others’ needs for food nor shelter, let alone for feelings.

“I was very sad. I am still sad.”

She nods, accepting it for a moment, but then there are more questions: Did you get a new mommy? Is that Oma? Why couldn’t the doctors fix her?

And there are other questions, too. Ones that hang, unasked: What happens if you die? Who will take care of us?

Those are the questions I dread the most because I don’t have an answer. My husband and I have gone to draw our wills a hundred times and every time we stop. We say it is because we just need more time to make the decisions, but I know it is because we are scared.

“Who do you want to raise your kids if something happens to you both?” the lawyers have asked. And we always say we’ll get back to them, but we don’t.

After all, I know all too well what a real possibility this is. And there is only one answer:

No one.

No one can raise my children like me.

Who would know my daughter has to wear something purple every single day? Who would know that she only likes one kind of whole grain, flat bread and that it comes together with two sides, but she only likes one side so you have to take the one side from two pairs? Who else could possibly understand that my son likes to play “naked bum” for at least 10 minutes every night, but that if you go any longer than that, you will definitely have a puddle on the floor? Who would know that the trick to getting Sam to clean up her room is to tell her you are “playing Cinderella”? No one else knows that Sam likes her back tickled every night before she goes to sleep, but with Alan it’s all about the cheek stroke.

I am their mommy, their protective, loving mommy who knows that no one will ever love my babies like I do. And much as we all know this, few of us really know it as intimately as a person who has lost it.

People promised it would get better once I had my own kids, but it hasn’t. It is much, much worse now.

Because I know now what my mother felt and how it must have been to leave her children so young. I know how she loved me. How my pain was her pain.

When the doctor rolls up my son’s pants and injects his pudgy thigh with a vaccine, I feel the prick. When my daughter falls and skins her knee, wailing like her arm fell off, my knees burn, too. When I brush the snarls out of her thick, curly hair, there is a painful tug on my own scalp as well.

My daughter is seeing that connection a little more every day. She rocks her dolls after boo-boos and pats her baby brother on the back when he falls. She kisses him and tells him, “Love you so much,” and I believe that she does.

But not as much as I love her.

And I know this when I am at the lawyer’s office and I know this when I am getting on a plane barreling across an ocean away from them, terrified that some idiot put a bomb in a body cavity where even the TSA with their pat-downs and x-rays can’t find it and because of that, I am going to be in pieces in the Atlantic while my children go on without me.

“Did you get a new mommy?” My daughter asks me.

“No,” I tell her. Because I didn’t. You only get one, I say to myself, but not to her because it scares me to say out loud.

She nods and stops asking questions. And I get why. I have my own questions, though:

Why her? What did my mother do to deserve this? I want to know, too, but the answer will disturb me more than the question. Nothing. She did nothing. It just happens.

And there will be more questions from my daughter, I know. She will bloom more and more and I will have to think of answers. It is harder than I expected.

Empathy is a new complexity for her and I have to get to know her in a new way. Before she was a pudgy baby with a monkey brain. Now, she is growing faster than I am and I have to catch her.

The questions are going to get more complex and so are my fears. In two months, my husband and I will get on a plane alone for the first time since she was born more than four years ago. I have gone away alone, which was scary, too, but then she had her daddy. This time she will be alone.

If I don’t live my life, then the terrorism – or the breast cancer – has won. But getting on that plane requires at least two Xanax and a Hail Mary from this Jewish mama.

I man up, I walk away, the memory of their soft cheeks and cold hands still in my head.

That is the reality for a motherless mother, but it is not one I want to pass on to her.

So when she asks me questions, I am trapped between my desire to be honest and my desire to spare her. When my mother’s mother died last month at the age of 88, my husband told me not to tell her.

“She barely knew her,” he explained. “Why upset her?”

She will never know my mother at all. She will never know the woman who gave her that crooked smile or her broad nose. She will never know how my mom – her grandmother – laughed with her mouth wide and showed her fillings, how when she sneezed, she always said ha-ish-na. She will never know how soft her hands were or how the thick hair we all share came directly from her.

I want to protect her from my pain, from all of our pain. But I also know I can’t.

And so I will answer her questions as best I can and tell her I have so many of my own. Because there are certain questions even mommy can’t answer. Things I can’t expect a 4-year-old to understand.

“Do you still love your mommy?” She asked me last night as I was putting her to bed, one last question before lights out.

“I will always love her,” I tell her. Because it’s true. “Just like you. I will always love you. You know that right?”

She nods, and then tells me I can turn out the light. It’s enough for now.