For the last fifteen years I have entertained thoughts of raising my daughter. I can't say I outright desired to do so, but once you have a kid you think about these things - how old she'd be now, what you'd be doing with her. Emily at two, at five, at ten, at fifteen... I used to go to the grocery store and see some child writhing around on the floor and screaming, only to be offered a Snickers bar for his trouble and I'd think, I could be a better parent than that. I imagined teaching a five-year-old to ride a bicycle, or building a model of a California mission with my fourth-grader, lecturing on economics when I went with my thirteen-year-old to open her first bank account.
The reality is far different.
I know Hazel isn't my daughter. I have limited experience with teenagers, but insofar as she's representational of her age and sex... I'm not sure I got the short end of the deal on raising my kid. I don't say that because I don't like Hazel - I say that because it's harder to take care of a fifteen-year-old than I really thought it would be. And if this is what Hazel is like at fifteen, how much harder would it have been if she'd appeared on my doorstep at a younger age?
The latest thing is nightmares. I didn't know about this. On Monday night I walk out of my bedroom in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, and see the light on in the kitchen. Hazel is there, sitting at the kitchen table, Basil rubbing against her leg. She's shaking.
"Hey, peanut," I say. I don't know where the nickname came from, but it flows better than Hey, Hazel.
"Hey." Her voice is very small, and she doesn't look surprised to see me.
A crisis is the last thing I want to deal with tonight, but I go and sit down anyway. Between her and Mia, it's nice to be needed. "You okay?"
"Yeah," she says, in a way that means exactly the opposite.
"No, you're not." Maybe it will be easier if I'm not sitting here looking at her. I get up and take a glass from the cupboard and fill it with water. "What's up?"
"Nightmare."
"Yeah? What about?"
A shrug. It might be an invitation to press but I don't. There are a limited number of things that Hazel is really afraid of, and I know that her demons are big and scary to even grown adults. I hand her the glass of water and sit down again. It takes her awhile to get it out.
"You ever had to relive something over and over?" she says after a minute. "Like some regret you had or something embarrassing that happened to you?"
"Every day, kiddo. I think we all have something like that."
"Oh." She looks at me. "What do you do to make it stop?"
"Wait."
This isn't the answer she wants to hear. It takes her a moment, in fact, to realize that I have answered her question and have not requested her patience. She sighs.
"Is it the thing you told me about earlier? Or is it something else?"
"It's that thing."
The
worst part of it is that even though I complain about her, I like
her, and it just kills me that I can't comfort her. If I put an arm
around her, I'll make it worse. "You want to talk about it?"
Except I don't really want to hear about it. To my relief, she says
no, and after another few moments, once she's convinced that she's
okay, she gets up and she goes to bed.
It's things like this that make me question the commitment I've made. Parenting is making problems go away, and I can't even chase the demons out of a little girl's head. I can't afford to pay someone who can. And I'm glad that it's Hazel who illustrates my inadequacy. If it were my daughter I don't know what I'd do. At least with Hazel, I'm allowed to fail. At least with Emily, I never had to.
She tells me the next day that they happen nightly now. And then she goes off to school and pretends to be normal.
