And I was not prepared for it. Not prepared at all. I expected this conversation when she was six–NOT when she was three months away from her third birthday!<\/p>\n
Last night, after work, I offhandedly told Mark that the landscapers had found a dead mouse in his mother’s yard. I mentioned it while Ava was busy coloring, and I didn’t even realize she was listening to us. (When will I learn that toddlers hear EVERYTHING?!) But she was. She immediately began asking us about the mouse–and how and why it had died. We thought a few simple answers, such as, “The mouse was a grandma or grandpa mouse and just got tired and went to sleep” and “Animals, like people, only live for awhile; they don’t live forever” would appease her, but they did not. Oh, no. They did not.<\/p>\n
Our answers led to more questions, and eventually, Ava–who was now on my lap–turned to me and asked, “Mom, will you die?” I told her I would, and she said, “But I don’t want you to die.” Then she asked, “Will Dad die?” We also told her “yes” and gently explained that this wouldn’t happen until we were very, very old–older than Gramary or Gigi or Poom Poom (her name for my dad), or Grandpa Chuck. Then she asked us (and this is still where I want to cry, just typing it now), “Will I die?” We told her that she would someday, after she’s very, very old, but we said that she was safe and happy right now and that we were all together–and would be for a long time. She was very solemn and quiet, and then she said, “But I don’t want to die.”<\/p>\n
I can’t even begin to explain what I felt in that moment, so I won’t even try to put it into words. In fact, I can hardly bring myself to recount this story. And now I can’t stop thinking about how we handled things. And I worry (of course): Did we say too much? Were we too honest? Did we scare her too much?<\/p>\n
She seemed okay for the rest of that evening, but at bedtime, she got very anxious and quiet and kept asking for her dad–who was over at our new house, crawling around in the ductwork. She wanted him there desperately, but she couldn’t tell me why, and she was whimpering and frightened. Finally, I made up a silly story about two girls named Lulu and Mimi, and she fell asleep as I rubbed her back.<\/p>\n
But is she still thinking about it? Will she worry? Did we tell her too much, too soon? Damn that mouse!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
And I was not prepared for it. Not prepared at all. I expected this conversation when she was six–NOT when she was three months away from her third birthday!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9oLlO-ez","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/903\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nicheplayer.net\/avablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}