It’s that time of year again, the time where we are forced to spend hours of our lives attending scintillating graduations. Some are more boring than others; some have speeches, some have songs, some have the painfully shy kid who can’t face the crowd. Well, most graduations that I go to have this kid, because it is usually my own.
Which is why I was surprised at my daughter’s Pre-K graduation. The night before, I cornered her and asked, “Are you going to stick your fingers in your mouth for the whole graduation, like last year, and not sing?”
To which she replied, “I was three then. I’m bigger now.” I didn’t know if that meant she would have bigger, more elaborate plans for her non-conformance to graduation standards. Maybe this meant that instead, she would lift up one shoulder in her I-don’t-care fashion, and glare at the audience, a sneer pasted across her face. Either way, I arrived ready to record her every move, to document her every facial gesture, mostly for shidduch purposes.
My daughter has an obsession with holding babies, particularly our own. Although she was devastated that he was a boy, and for Chanukah asked me to buy her a magic wand so that she can turn him into a girl, I can’t imagine this has any impact on the frequency in which she asks to hold him. If it did, then I’m extremely relieved I did not have a girl. She probably wouldn’t be able to say any other sentence aside from, “Can I hold the baby?”
And she typically asks this at the most inopportune of times, such as during a busy airport rush to the security gate: “Can I hold Liad?” No. No, you cannot hold him now when there are thousands of people pushing to get into a long line, and we are late for our flight, and somebody will step on you.
When he is buckled into his stroller and we are walking somewhere, “Can I hold Liad?” No. That is why I have a stroller. In fact, I should have brought one for you.
When he gives a tiny whimper while playing on the floor, “Liad is crying, can I hold him?” No, he just whined because he couldn’t reach a toy, and he doesn’t know how to crawl because we always carry him around. And then she asks again and again until I finally cave. She picks him up, juts out her hip, almost tips over from his weight, and then after approximately 20 seconds, brings him over to me. “Here, he wants you.” Many thanks.
Yet, despite this knowledge, I was still quite surprised that she deemed her graduation performance to be a perfect moment to ask to hold the baby. I was sitting in the front row (I know, I defied the odds and actually came early! But also with only seven kids in the graduating class, they didn’t need much more than fourteen chairs anyway. We could have all sat in the front row.), basking in the happy moment that I actually had a child who was singing and participating in a graduation, after all these years. And then it happened. Mid-song, she outstretched her arms, and loudly formed the words, “Can I hold Liad?” No. I guess that wasn’t an acceptable answer because she needed to repeat herself for almost the entirety of the performance, until the teacher finally had to tell her no as well. Of course, the teacher’s “no” made more sense than mine did, and she stopped…for a few minutes.
After the performance, she dismounted the stage with glee, and raced over to hold her baby. In her eyes, he is a crown jewel, the “show and tell” that sets her apart and makes her sparkle, even though many of her friends have younger siblings, too. She never tires of basking in that moment of extra attention, of carrying him around in front of her classmates, even though he has learned to hit and swat and push her away when she tries to wrench him from my arms. Although I foresee in their future some sibling rivalry (as most siblings are wont to do), it is my hope that she always views him as her baby, her talking/eating/ hitting doll, and that the love and pride she feels with her brother, even at this young age, never comes to an end.
Sarah Abenaim is a freelance writer living with her husband and four children in Teaneck. She is working on her first book. More of her essays can be read at www.writersblackout. wordpress.com. She can be reached at [email protected].
By Sarah Abenaim
