Skip to main content

The Distance of Love


It’s late and Elizabeth should be asleep.

We allow her to read stories in our bedroom to tire her eyes and rest her mind. She promises Daddy she’ll go to bed soon.

The phone rings -- it’s Michael’s Dad. He and his Dad talk on the phone in the family room.

“I’m hungry,” she says to me. She’s done reading.

“I’ll let you have some cheese and milk, but you must promise to go to bed afterwards, OK?”

“OK.”

She fetches the cheese. I fetch the milk. She eats. She drinks. I wait.

“I have to be quiet,” she whispers.

“Why?”

“So Daddy doesn’t know I’m still up.”

Oh.

After eating and tossing her cup loudly in the kitchen sink, she’s ready for bed.

“Do you know why I ask Daddy to take me to bed every night?” she asks.

“No, why?”

“Because I like him.”

“I like him, too. He’s a great Daddy, isn’t he?”

“He’s the best Daddy. I love him this much...” Suddenly she runs from the living room all the way into the family room -- demonstrating the great distance of her love.

Michael sees her and looks at her sternly. Shouldn’t you be in bed? he asks with his eyes while listening to his Dad. He doesn’t know why Elizabeth is standing there staring at him with a big grin on her face. She runs back to me.

“That’s how much I love him, Mommy,” she says breathlessly.

Me, too. That much and then some.


Previous Comments

 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Just Call Me Ruby

Despite recent evidence to the contrary, it's no secret -- I don't like to exercise. Especially exercise for the sake of exercise... pushups in order to do more and better pushups, etc. To inspire me properly, everything must have purpose . It must be practical. This is why I stopped taking kung fu a few years ago (well, that and it's not easy to execute a perfect roundhouse kick when you're pregnant.) After 2-3 years of working hard to become a great fighter (not that I ever became one), I asked myself, What am I fighting against? I'm not going to join the Army. I don't live in a bad neighborhood. Yet, I'm spending hours and hours of my time learning how to poke some phantom menace in the ojos (that's eyes for those of you who aren't vicariously learning Spanish through your 1st grader). Enough was enough. It just wasn't practical anymore. And thus began the steady process of me falling out of shape. I knew I was in physical decline. T...

Score One for the Bad Guys

Apparently, Lizzy and Samantha have a soft spot in their hearts for the bad guys. After all, in their world the bad guys always get shot, beaten, or killed by super heroes, they always land in jail, and they’re never attractive. So when I heard strange phrases in hushed tones coming from the toy room the other day, phrases like, take off his clothes ... and hand me that bug ... and, put that on his vagina , I had to ask: What is going on in there?! After some debate between the two of them (n o, don’t tell mommy ... it’s OK, just don’t tell daddy ... and so on) they finally fessed up that they were playing a game with Barbies and other creatures wherein the bad guys win. Here’s how it works: In this game, the bad guys torture the good guys by making them take off all their clothes and then placing mind-controlling bugs on their vaginas . The bugs contain a virus that infects their hosts, thus enabling the bad guys to control the actions and behaviors of the good guys. Ergo, the b...

Adult Beginning Gymnastics Revealed

The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself. Well...yes and no . Sometimes what we fear turns out to be OK -- in fact, it turns out to be pretty damned fun. The squadron of peppy cheerleaders turns out to be an extremely quiet guy named Ron and a nice girl named Alison who looks like Hayley Mills (but doesn't know who Hayley Mills is). The gymnastics instructor turns out to be a nice young girl woman who is easy to talk to. And I turn out to be considerably less decrepit than originally feared. Of the three students (!), I'm definitely the oldest by more than a decade. However, I was surprised (and thrilled) to see how evenly matched we were. Where one student is flexible, the other is strong. What I lack in youth, I make up for in pointy toes and perky presentation. While I'm certainly not as fit as the other students, I am not miles behind in skill. (Maybe just a few blocks away.) The first class was primarily an assessment of our current capabilities, so we c...