Pinkie Promise

“Mama, I’m scared.” She shivers and scoots nervously down on her pillow nestling her body closer to mine.

“It’s OK, my love” I respond, knowing what is coming next. 

“Pinkie promise I’ll wake up in the morning?” 

“I promise, my love.  I promise.” 

This is her nightly routine.  While other kids are tucking themselves in, or enjoying a nightly story and a kiss goodnight, my little girl is begging me to promise that she will live through the night. 

Months ago when this all started I would assure her with a thousand words.  I explained how the doctors would surely know if she were close to death, how she isn’t sick like that, how I will stay right there with her and make sure she’s fine all night.  A thousand words.  Eventually, though, they became repetitive and meaningless.  A simple promise is as close to extinguishing her fears as I can get.

Along with her medical doctors, we have a worry doctor who has given me her stamp of approval for my nightly pinkie promise.  In the adult world we know all too well that I can’t actually promise that.  Recent tragic events prove I can’t even legitimately promise she’ll  come home from school alive, but I view it as a promise in good faith:  With the information I have available to me at this time, I know for certain I can promise that she will make it through the night.  

So my pinkie promise comforts her, albeit for a short 24 hours.  Yet her nightly need for that reassurance haunts me every second of every day. 

I try to reason with myself.  I think I know where this comes from.  She’s lost too much in her 6 years.  In fact, she often will list each person and animal that has passed on.  The worst part is there isn’t a nice simple answer for why they died like I had when I was little.  Back then my experience was that  the only things or people that died were all terribly old.   The death Dia has known has struck the very young, the very old, the sick and the injured and so Dia believes herself vulnerable.  No matter how often I tell her so, she doesn’t have the understanding that she isn’t terminally ill.  To her?  Sick is sick and sick equals dying.   

Any fellow moms out there?  Yeah?  Well, think about  facing your child’s mortality every.single.night.  Humbling?  Hardly.  More like dancing with insanity.

It is so easy to look at Dia and see a healthy child.  I watch her laughing, swimming, running around with her friends, playing, twirling and rough-housing with her brother, riding her bike… she looks typical, normal, healthy.   It is incredibly easy during those times to convince myself that she is absolutely one hundred percent fine.  Sometimes other parents will even point out these moments and comment that “she looks fine now.”  They are right.  She does look fine then, but afterwards she comes home and basically collapses… or the fever hits again … or I get her on the scale and she’s lost weight again… or the brown skin she so proudly wears turns terribly pale and her eyes become sunken and encircled in black.  She pays for every moment she tries to be a normal kid.  She acts and looks sick and then, once again, I know this is for real.  The reality is that she is not, in actuality, a healthy kid.

I hate it.  I can feel the rage building.  I want to destroy it.  But “it” doesn’t have a name.   I need to know what dragon to slay, what demon to exorcise, what ass to kick.  I want to know what is making my child weak and unable to keep up with her friends on the playground.  I want to know what is making my daughter need a bedtime routine that is so absolutely and completely unjustly wrong.  I want whatever is accountable for this to show itself.  Let us face off man-to-man.  Let me know my enemy so I can take it in my bare hands and twist its neck until all life fades from its being.

….sigh…

I have good doctors for Dia.  I really do.  I know they are going through the processes they must to diagnose her.  I understand we have a process of elimination type of situation going on here.  I also thank God and all the angels in heaven that they aren’t just admitting her and running down all the possibilities in one fell swoop.  This particular child would be ruined by that type of treatment.  They are doing right by her.  I know this. 

And she will make it through the night.  I know this too. 

All the same?  I will stay right here next to her and make sure she’s fine.  Just like I promised.   

- kec