Grandma Likes It When I'm Dead
I acknowledge the potential turn-off to use a superlative here, but my daughter has the best imagination. Though she generally prefers to be in someone's face and talking while also running in circles, there are days she will play by herself with animals and make dresses out of blankets and build rocket ships out of pillows and paper and string and stickers. Lately, she wants to pretend she's dead and wait around for True Love's Kiss. When I told her I don't like to pretend she's dead, she said, "Grandma likes it when I'm dead." So, there's that.
Having kids broke me open to mortality violently. I've heave-cried having witnessed time passing through each tooth popping through gums, through each leg roll emerging and disappearing. This weekend, I saw a photo of my grandparents and their kids (my mom & her brothers) when they were so young. My grandparents were even younger than I am now. They were just two people happily married with kids, struggling to raise them all, rarely sleeping, getting peed on, etc. My grandma passed away 3 years ago. She would've loved my babies so much, and they would've loved her.
My grandpa is a farmer and a hobby taxidermist. Maybe I've mentioned this before, but all three walls of his garage are covered in the heads of animals. While we were there, he introduced Phoebe to a few of his smaller projects in the house--a baby raccoon, a tiny fawn, and a not-small black bear. While petting a fawn, she asked if it was real, if someone killed it. Between cottages and supper clubs and museums, she has seen a lot of taxidermy in her lifetime, so she has a general understanding of why these real animals sit so still. It used to bother me when she talked about dying and death so matter-of-factly, as though it were just as easy to talk about as taking a walk or playing at the park.
But then once at the Public Museum, we saw a diorama of Native Americans pushing a heard of buffalo over a cliff and shooting them with arrows. She saw the arrow in the tiny buffalo and the red paint dripping down its belly and nearly cried. We talked about the necessity of eating meat back then, how they used all of the animal to survive, but I could tell she wasn't getting over it. We moved on to the dinosaur exhibit, where a T-Rex had taken hefty bites out of a Triceratops, leaving his guts exposed. It's an exhibit she refuses to return to.
Having kids broke me open to mortality violently. I've heave-cried having witnessed time passing through each tooth popping through gums, through each leg roll emerging and disappearing. This weekend, I saw a photo of my grandparents and their kids (my mom & her brothers) when they were so young. My grandparents were even younger than I am now. They were just two people happily married with kids, struggling to raise them all, rarely sleeping, getting peed on, etc. My grandma passed away 3 years ago. She would've loved my babies so much, and they would've loved her.
My grandpa is a farmer and a hobby taxidermist. Maybe I've mentioned this before, but all three walls of his garage are covered in the heads of animals. While we were there, he introduced Phoebe to a few of his smaller projects in the house--a baby raccoon, a tiny fawn, and a not-small black bear. While petting a fawn, she asked if it was real, if someone killed it. Between cottages and supper clubs and museums, she has seen a lot of taxidermy in her lifetime, so she has a general understanding of why these real animals sit so still. It used to bother me when she talked about dying and death so matter-of-factly, as though it were just as easy to talk about as taking a walk or playing at the park.
But then once at the Public Museum, we saw a diorama of Native Americans pushing a heard of buffalo over a cliff and shooting them with arrows. She saw the arrow in the tiny buffalo and the red paint dripping down its belly and nearly cried. We talked about the necessity of eating meat back then, how they used all of the animal to survive, but I could tell she wasn't getting over it. We moved on to the dinosaur exhibit, where a T-Rex had taken hefty bites out of a Triceratops, leaving his guts exposed. It's an exhibit she refuses to return to.
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