It’s been quite a long time since I’ve written specifically about my kids or motherhood, but something happened the other day that needed to be documented.
I killed Santa Claus in the tight confines of our downstairs bathroom as Lily watched.
Let me back up a little.
Lily is 10 now. She’s long legs and knobby knees and a freckled nose that’s usually stuck between the pages of books about dueling cat clans. She’s obsessed with non-human animals still. And actually spends large portions of her day acting like one. She will bark at passing neighbors and hiss at family members who displease her. From time to time she’ll rub her head under my chin and purr to show affection.
She doesn’t tolerate any harsh language directed at our animals. She doesn’t like when I comment on the cuteness of other dogs in front of Snacks or say out loud that cats are not helpful pets after one of our cats has done something decidedly unhelpful. She races to the defense of spiders Brad seems on the verge of squashing (OK … so do I) and she berates me anytime I try to dress a cat up in a track suit designed for a Build-a-Bear. “He doesn’t like that!” she exclaims. In my defense it was just his size. And it really looked good on him. And he really didn’t fight me at all when I put it on, which makes me think he actually likes dressing up from time to time.
Lily is quirky, pinchy, and super independent. She still displays flashes of the Lily from five or six years ago. Her dance moves haven’t evolved all that much. She enjoys playing with her two-year-old sister’s “Paw Patrol” toys as much as Annie does. She still wakes up with the birds and claims that she’s never, ever tired. But she’s not little anymore. She’s changing. Her moods are swinging and becoming stormier. She’s had crushes on multiple boys- like, blush-at-the-mention-of-the-boy’s-name types of crushes, so you’re know they’re authentic. Authentic and terrifying. More and more she pushes back on Brad and me over the most basic of suggestions or requests. The day before yesterday we told her she should take a shower and her response was that dogs and cats don’t need showers every day.
“Monkeys don’t take showers multiple times a week and they’re our closest relatives!” she pointed out.
When I asked her if she enjoyed the smell of the ape house when we visited the zoo she paused only a second, her eyebrows arching before furrowing in resolution. “Yes, I do.”
The defiance is strong in this one.
There is no sense in arguing. Though I do anyway. She’ll be a teenager in three years and if her current attitude is just a preview, I’m really going to have to up my slow deep breath game.
I can see her walking the line now. She knows she’s growing up. She’s conscious of the expanding range of her emotions. How they catch her off guard. Her interests, and her body are changing and it’s happening right in front of us. Like watching a time-lapse video of a flower growing from seed. It’s both incremental and all at once- her evolution. I suppose it’s that way for all of us.
Sometimes she seems proud of getting older. Of her shifting perspectives, her awareness of ideas beyond Legos and Disney movies. Sometimes she despises it though. She’ll come to me in that tears worried that she doesn’t care about the things she used to care about- “My Little Pony” or “Elena of Avalor”- things that seemed so critical, so hilarious, so enthralling, so necessary, now just these lifeless toys to be thrown in a bin. It’s not the things, really, that she’s sad about. It’s the awareness that life won’t be the same as it was. That she won’t be the same as she was. That childhood isn’t unending, but finite. Life won’t ever be what it was when she was little, but she can’t quite see what the future will bring and how she will fit into it.
I know that pain. I remember it intimately. The stubborn need to cling to “Tiny Toon Adventures,” Barbie, and my unabiding love for horses while my sister and my friends moved on to makeup and boys. Things I knew nothing about. Thing that were scary and foreign.
I think I knew, like Lily does now, how precious being a child is. How magical and full of possibility those little years are. Getting older felt like a death. Like the lights being turned off and the door closed to a room in your conscious that had always been filled with fairies and silliness, candy and mud puddles. And the only sparkle had left to look forward to was in the glitter eyeshadow you didn’t even know how to apply. Lily is getting to this place. I see it.
Which brings me back to the downstairs bathroom. And Santa, whose blood was on my hands.
A couple days ago, Lily was stalking around the house, her eyebrows furrowed. Her sighs heavy.
“What’s going on?” I asked. “You seem like somethings on your mind.”
“NOTHING!” she snapped. But she softened after a beat. “Well, there is something. But I don’t want to talk about it.”
When Lily admits to there being “something” even when she says she doesn’t want to talk about it, secretly she wants to talk about it. As I’ve learned, the rough translation of, “I don’t want to talk about it” is “Something is upsetting me. I want to talk about it, but I’m worried about how you’ll react, so I’m going to say I don’t want to talk about it.” If there’s something she really doesn’t want to talk about, it won’t ever be mentioned.
So, naturally, I started poking around. Like a doctor trying to suss out the diagnosis by checking various vitals.
“Are you angry at someone?”
“No.”
“Did someone say something to upset you?”
“No.”
“Is it something I did?”
“No.”
“Dad?”
“No. “
“Jovie?”
“No. “
“Annie?”
“What?! No! I could never be upset with her- she’s too cute and adorable!” (At this point I refrain from reminding her of Annie’s habit of pushes Duplo blocks across the wood floor in a manner that creates an … unpleasant, high-pitched screech that causes Lily to convulse and plug her ears.)
“Did it happen recently?”
“No. Well. It was like a week ago.”
“So like, Christmas Day?”
She frowned. “Like Christmas Day and Christmas Eve.”
“So something that happened one of those days?”
“Yeah. It was something I saw.”
At this point of the interview, I had a sense of what was bugging her. A little inkling. But I didn’t want to say it outright, lest I was wrong. No need to risk unleashing a new realm of despair in her.
“OK,” I said slowly. “So something you saw on Christmas Eve is bugging you.”
Tears started collecting in her eyes. She told me she didn’t want to say what she saw. I stayed neutral and kept an arm around her.
“Was it something scary?”
“No.”
“Did it make you mad?”
“No.”
“Did it make you sad?”
“Maybe, ” she said. “And confused.”
“Confused?” I replied.
She paused. Then started talking.
“I was looking for Peanut Butter [our cat, not the condiment] on Christmas Eve and I checked under your bed and I saw something there.”
Bingo, I thought to myself, knowing what was stashed under our bed Christmas Eve.
I asked if she might want to talk in some place a little more private. Away from Annie and Jovie. We ended up in the downstairs bathroom. Once the door was closed, we sat on the floor. Lily told me she’d seen one of the gifts Jovie had gotten for Christmas the next day.
A gift from Santa.
How could it be under the bed though? She wondered. Before Santa even came.
I looked at her. Note quick-witted enough to spin a story. Aware that Lily was already writing the story herself. I knew she knew. She just couldn’t say it.
I don’t remember what I said exactly. How exactly I broke the spell. But I will never forget the look on Lily’s face. The mix of sorrow, confusion, and anger.
The words that came out of her mouth.
“You lied to me? You’ve been lying to me?”
I couldn’t see my own face, but I imagine it looked sheepish and apologetic. What is the appropriate face for being called out on a decade-long hoax of mythic promotions?
“We wanted you to have magic,” I said. “We just wanted Christmas to be magical for you.”
The gears kept turning in Lily’s head. I could see them as she tried to makes sense of the truth bomb I’d just detonated. Though we are super Jesus-y, I invoked Jesus. How Jesus isn’t with us on Earth anymore and hasn’t been for thousands of years, but we still try to follow his teachings because he set such a wonderful example for how to be a good human.
“I don’t see what the has to do with Santa,” she said. “Jesus was a real person.”
She’s so smart, so quick.
Really, I’m no match for her.
I continued fumbling. Trying to make connections. “Jesus and Santa are alike,” I said. Regretting my choice in analogies immediately. Where was I going with this?! “They’re both generous people who want to bring joy to others. We wanted you to expderience that. We wanted you to experience that sense of magic.”
“So you lied to me?” she said again, making the whole thing sound a whole lot worse than it was.
I mean yes, technically, we lied to her. Like millions of good Christian and pseudo Christian and culturally Christian parents do every year. What’s the difference between Santa Claus and pretending to be Santa Claus (the red suit, beard, workshop full of elves in the North Pole and eight reindeer aside).
“So wait,” Lily said, a tiny gleam returning to her eye. “Does that mean you and dad eat the cookies we put out?”
“Yes.”
“And do you give the reindeer carrot to Snacks?”
“Yes. That’s right. We look forward to the crunchy noises he makes when eating the reindeer carrot.” Then I reminded her that this year we had to leave lettuce for the reindeer because we ran out of carrots.
“Dad ate the lettuce,” I told her. “He didn’t even get a fork. He just stuffed it into his mouth with his hands.” The visual had the desired affect. Lily erupted in giggles. “Dad’s actually a really good Santa,” I added when she’d calmed down. “He does all the wrapping and has special Santa handwriting. He puts a lot of thought into how the presents are arranged under the tree and around the house. He wants it to be special for you.”
I checked in with her throughout the conversation. Trying to gauge how she was handling the new information. I told her that now she could be a Santa, too. She could help us make Christmas magical for her little sisters. She brightened at the prospect. Giving Lily the opportunity to participate in something so official, something that Jovie and Annie wouldn’t know about, like she was being added to the parental circle almost. Like she was third in charge. That right there was better than any present Santa could’ve given her anyway. Now she could be complicit in the farce.
Lily continued to run through emotions for the next few minutes. Jumping between the pain of the deception and the satisfaction of a mystery solved. The glee of knowing the truth when others didn’t. The sadness of the magic of Santa and his reindeer and the elves evaporating.
I told her about how I found out about Santa. “I was in fourth grade and I went downstairs Christmas Eve to get some water or tell my parents something and I found them carrying wrapped boxes in from the laundry room.
“Santa left the presents in the garage this year,” one of them said. And I knew then. They didn’t need to say anything else. I mean, I kind of already knew. But that was when it was official.
“I’m glad you told me,” Lily said, crawling into my lap. “Because now I can tell you thank you for everything.”
She was crying and I was crying. There we were, huddled in the downstairs bathroom, clinging to one another as Santa Claus took his last few breaths.
I reassured Lily that we lied about Santa, but that was the ONE lie. That we were honest about everything else.
“Well what about the Easter Bunny?” she said, a sly smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
I cringed. That ruse was up a couple years ago. Even Jovie- always so willing to believe- even she knew the Easter Bunny concept was absurd.
“It’s just a guy in a suit,” she told us.
“OK. Except Santa and the Easter Bunny. Those were the only two.”
Lily laughed. Like I suspected, she told me that she’d been piecing the Santa thing together for awhile.
“Awhile” is so non-specific. I think it encompasses years. Lily sees and hears everything. She’s always aware of the ebbs and flows. The comings and goings of our household.
I suspect she’s known about Santa for years and that she never said anything because saying it out loud might fundamentally change something about her reality and her childhood. Maybe she didn’t want to take that away from her dad and me. So we’ve all lied to each other to preserve the magic. To not ruin something for the other. And maybe that’s the deeper magic. That dance we do around each other. When we inevitably step on each other’s toes or bump heads, all we can do is laugh and apologize and keep dancing.
She hugged me again. Thanked me again for being honest. For inviting her into the conspiracy. She’s been stopping me in the house to kiss my cheek and thank me for telling her. She’s already plotting what she could do to help us out next Christmas.
One down two to go.
Jovie skipped into the kitchen yesterday, reminding us that she still hadn’t decided on what she was going to do with the tooth she lost on Christmas Eve.
“I just don’t know whether I want to give it to the Tooth Fairy or not,” she sighed.
Then I sighed.
Make that three big lies.