She\u2019s three. It\u2019s a Saturday, late morning, in early December. They\u2019re making the walk to the neighborhood playground, eight blocks from their home in the college town that doubles as an up-and-coming city.<\/p>\n
This walk always makes him nervous. She moves so quickly, sometimes darts suddenly. She\u2019s always honored their rule about how if she gets to the end of a block without him, she has to wait for him before crossing the street. They always hold hands when they cross. But he worries that one time she\u2019ll forget, and a person driving a car onto the path won\u2019t see her in time. He also frets about her tripping and falling onto the hard pavement, like the time when she was walking a neighbor\u2019s dog and something alarmed the dog and it took off in a sprint, causing her to trip over the leash and land, head-first, on the stony sidewalk.<\/p>\n
He wishes he could push her to the playground in a stroller. But she\u2019s never been able to tolerate riding in one of those. The last time he tried to walk her to the park in a stroller, she screamed and wept from the buggy to the point where passersby stopped and stared. When he pulled her out, she said, \u201cMy do it!\u201d her funny way of saying, \u201cI can do it,\u201d and she pushed the empty stroller the rest of the way. She\u2019d always been especially active, and willful. As she explained to him when he asked why she never wanted to ride in a stroller, \u201cI\u2019m a moving girl, Daddy.\u201d<\/p>\n
He knows the time at the playground will be good. Ever sociable, she\u2019ll likely hang with another toddler they happen across there. They\u2019ll run around and play on the swings and slides and climbing structures. He always likes watching her have a nice time. Then, she\u2019ll be tired by the time they get back home a few hours later. After lunch, she\u2019ll surely take a nap for an hour or 45 minutes or so. He thinks about how peaceful that\u2019ll be, to have that little window of time where she\u2019s not moving, and he doesn\u2019t have to worry about her falling or getting hit by a car or choking on something she grabbed and stuck in her mouth while roaming about.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re halfway there. As he watches her, yet again, suddenly pick up her pace and get several steps ahead of him, he indulges himself in a fantasy that\u2019s become a recurring daydream for him. He pictures a vast open area, somewhere out in the country. Like a huge spread of farmland. Acres and acres of ground and no cars will ever pass over it. There are also no objects of any kind that she could run into or trip over. Best of all, the surface is made of foamy material, so even if she does trip and fall, she\u2019ll have a harmless landing. He watches as she gets to the end of a block before him and just barely stops herself before stepping into the street. He thinks about that farmland with the foam ground. If only.<\/p>\n
They\u2019re at the park. He sighs in relief. And he thinks about that safe time they\u2019ll have after, when she naps. If she just survives the walk back home.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
She\u2019s 17. It\u2019s a Thursday evening in early December. She\u2019s in her room, in bed, with the lights off and her AirPods on. She\u2019s been in there, like that, since 3:30, when he brought her home from the mental health facility 20 miles away. She\u2019s in a partial hospitalization program there, being treated for severe depressive disorder, among other afflictions. She goes from 9:00 in the morning until 3:00 in the afternoon each weekday.<\/p>\n
He knows she should be doing schoolwork, which she does independently, and remotely, now. An education liaison at the facility has been working with her and her high school teachers, to try and keep her on track with her studies, so she can graduate in June. It\u2019s an uphill struggle. He knows she hasn\u2019t done anything for school since she got home, probably hasn\u2019t even logged in to see what assignments she needs to do to catch up. He starts to go in there to say something to her about it. But then he remembers the email he got from the main facility counselor, that he saw when he looked at his iPhone after he got her home from there. \u201cShe had an especially tough day here today. I can provide details later but just wanted to mention it for now.\u201d Probably not the best day to nag her about homework.<\/p>\n
He thinks about calling his ex-wife, her mom. They\u2019re supposed to tell each other if something especially concerning happens with their daughter on their respective days with her. His ex would want to know that the counselor said their daughter had a bad day at the clinic. He starts to call her, but then puts his phone down, promising himself he\u2019ll do that later. He feels guilty about putting the call off, because they\u2019re supposed to be cooperatively co-parenting post-divorce. At the weekly family counseling sessions they have at the clinic, he\u2019s promised to be a good team player in that way (a better team player than he was during the marriage). But those calls are always such a strain on him.<\/p>\n
Earlier, a little after 6:00, he knocked on his daughter\u2019s door to ask her if she\u2019d be having dinner with him. She listlessly said, \u201cYes, ok.\u201d But when he went back and told her the pasta with pesto sauce and salad was ready, she said she wasn\u2019t hungry yet.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust leave everything out and I\u2019ll come get some later.\u201d<\/p>\n
He knew she probably wouldn\u2019t, so wrapped up what was left and put it in the fridge, after eating by himself. He didn\u2019t put any Newman\u2019s Own balsamic vinaigrette dressing directly on the salad, though, only squeezed some into his own bowl, not wanting to let the lettuce, cucumbers, and tomatoes get soggy from the liquid, in case she did come out and eat later.<\/p>\n
By 7:00 he\u2019s ready for his evening drink of Jim Beam and water. He figures he\u2019ll sit in the living room and sip that while catching up on the news via Erin Burnett Out Front on CNN. He fishes his keys out of his pocket and heads to his bedroom. To get to the bottle of bourbon, he has to unlock it from the little safe in his room. Per the instructions on the safety plan that was made for her at the mental health facility, the written agreement which he, his ex and she all signed, both parents have to keep all alcohol locked up in their respective houses. Along with all medications and \u201csharps,\u201d or sharp objects. He\u2019d had to go into the locked box earlier to get the serrated steak knife he used to chop the cucumbers and tomatoes for the salad. Part of him thinks this strategy is silly. He sometimes shakes his head and sighs when looking at the scissors, knives, his shaver and spare razor blades, the bottles of Advil and Hydrogen Peroxide, etc. in addition to her daily medications she takes for depression and anxiety and attention deficit disorder, in the box. He knows that if she gets determined to kill herself, she could just shatter a drinking glass and use the sharp edges to cut herself open. He keeps thinking he should recycle those glasses and replace them with plastic cups but hasn\u2019t gotten around to that yet. \u00a0Anyway, she could also hang herself in her room. Or flee from the house and commit suicide somewhere else. But he understands about removing objects that could become means. And he definitely sees the need to lock up his whiskey, after the alarming things the counselor at the facility drew out of her, about how much she\u2019d been drinking in private in recent months. So, he adheres to the safety plan. He pours his Jim Beam and water on the rocks in the kitchen, then returns the bottle of liquor to the safe and locks it up.<\/p>\n
He\u2019s not paying much attention to the news. Burnett and her guests are saying all the same old things about COVID, the partisan gridlock in congress, and what Christmas will feel like this year. He goes to his desktop computer in the room that serves as a study, fires up the machine and looks at old pictures from when he still had a digital camera separate from his smartphone. He finds one of her playing with another kid at the local park, from when she was three. He takes a sip of bourbon and water and simultaneously smiles and produces a tear. He remembers how willful she was then, how she refused to ride to the park in a stroller. And how he always worried that she\u2019d step out into the street at an intersection and get hit by an oncoming car. He reflects on that and wonders if all his anxiety about her getting hurt afflicted her and is part of why she\u2019s pathologically anxious now. We fuck up our kids no matter how hard we try to do right for them, he thinks, and walks away from the computer after logging out.<\/p>\n
Heading back to the living room, he thinks, how did my \u201cmoving girl\u201d 3-year-old turn into a 17-year-old who sometimes never leaves her bed for whole days? He partly thinks there\u2019s a thousand different reasons for that, partly thinks there\u2019s no reason at all, it\u2019s just something that happened in her organically and can\u2019t be explained.<\/p>\n
Erin Burnett\u2019s show is still on when he gets back to the living room. But he still doesn\u2019t focus on it. Instead, he indulges in a daydream he has a lot lately. In the vision, his daughter\u2019s in her late 20s. She\u2019s a professional psychologist who works with troubled teenagers. She helps kids work through the same problems she had when she was their age: severe depression, acute anxiety, substance abuse, estrangement from their families, an inability to cope with the demands of high school due to all of the above. He loves that vision. She was always so empathetic, before her own problems got so big that she didn\u2019t have the emotional bandwidth to help anybody else. But when he\u2019s asked her if she thinks she\u2019ll want to become a counselor later in life, she\u2019s just shrugged. She\u2019s talked of trying to get into modeling \u2013 people have always stopped her in the street and in stores and restaurants to admire her striking blue eyes \u2013 and has also said she wants to buy a van and just roam around in it. Later, he\u2019ll lull himself to sleep by cozily imagining her driving around in that van, content and safe from harm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
How did his \u201cmoving girl\u201d 3-year-old turn into a 17-year-old who never leaves her bed for whole days? He thinks partly there\u2019s a thousand different reasons for that, thinks partly there\u2019s no reason at all, just something that happened organically and can\u2019t be explained.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":182,"featured_media":23904,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[4440],"class_list":["post-23027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fiction","tag-greenes_circles-twitter-x","writer-brian-greene"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/182"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23027"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23027\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23906,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23027\/revisions\/23906"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mrbullbull.com\/newbull\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}