Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of women, nonbinary and gender-diverse writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you’ll find in this column, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation.
“Mom, when am I going to die?”
My 6-year-old asks me this question nonchalantly as she’s multitasking — eating a snack, drawing an alicorn and watching TV. Her expression is curious, but not sad or concerned. Not fraught with dread the way mine is when I think about death.
She started elementary school last year — a notable milestone in a person’s life. I know parents often tell their kids, “Don’t ever grow up!” And while I understand the sentiment — the days are precious, our time together is fleeting, it all moves too fast — I cannot bring myself to utter that phrase. I want my daughter to grow. To live a wild and free and happy life, to reach adulthood, and to get to do everything her older brother never got to do before he died. And I desperately want to see her do it.
Watching her march into her school entrance — head high, backpack on her shoulders, no socks (she hates that they’re “too tight”) — I marvel at how much she already knows. How independent a first-grader can get. How she already tells me I’m embarrassing her. I used to stand over her and watch her breathe. Our first-born didn’t know how to do that — how to breathe. I couldn’t trust that her body would know either. But it did, and it does. I struggle to force myself to make sure she’s learning her sight words and is able to count by fives to 100 when she’s already doing all I could possibly ask of her. She’s here. She’s breathing.
We have to function in this world. We can’t just ride it out in our house, surrounded by figurative bubble wrap. We have to create good in the world so that the bad doesn’t overwhelm us.
I, like many parents, first toured my child’s elementary school with a critical eye. I tried to avoid picturing large guns in the same hallways where crayon self-portraits and mosaic boats hang on the walls, but I couldn’t help it. And now, every day, I force myself to make her go to school anyway. I don’t think I’m alone as a parent when I say that I want to pour every ounce of my being into making sure our daughter knows she’s loved and safe, but I also know how overbearing that can be. I know a kid can’t thrive with an adult standing over them, watching their every move, smothering them. We have to let them jump and fall, and get scraped and get back up again. The biggest test is letting our children go out into the world where we can’t protect them. Where we can’t see what’s coming. It can be scary for them, but it’s scarier for us.
I try my hardest not to pass my anxiety on to her. But I often alternate between two extremes. My daughter is terrified of tornadoes, likely because I visibly shake every time the team behind Nashville Severe Weather goes live on YouTube; yet when she recently broke her arm, I barely registered her pain until my husband insisted it was broken. (He was right. But also, she is OK in the grand scheme of things. In the life-and-death of it all.) It’s the eternal struggle of parenthood not to pass our own problems onto our kids — weird body-image issues, hostile familial relationships. But in society today, where do we draw the line? How much do we let them know?
Another night, another comment. “I wonder what it’ll feel like when I die?” I wonder too. I hope it’ll be painless and quick and not scary, but I don’t know. I have death anxiety. But my daughter does not. I admire that she hasn’t let the unknown overwhelm her, and I wish that same curiosity would replace the fear in my own heart. She asks calmly, without emotion, and I answer as I always do: “None of us knows when we’ll die or how it’ll feel. But I hope you don’t die for a long, long time. I love you so much.”
She groans. “Stop saying you love me. You’ve said it too many times.”
