Prisms and Periwinkles

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Prisms and Periwinkles
by Amalia Solara

A maternal young woman and her very special big-little girl, Leah, share a wonderful and restorative day together at home and the park, learning and exploring some interesting things along the way.

Author's Note: Since I have a handful of longer forthcoming stories in the works, one of which in particular deals with very emotionally heavy, complex, and terribly sad issues and realities, I wanted to post a lighter, saccharine little tale (yes, there are more serious references here as per the cautions, but they're minimal and are addressed only briefly in hindsight) beforehand about one of my very favorite themes in the whole world. :) While exploration of the inner child is present in nearly everything I write, I was inspired to run with this by Maggiethekitten's phenomenal TGIF, which touched my heart more profoundly than I can even describe and brightened my universe with its magic. Enjoy and please do comment if the mood strikes.

The young woman in the long, pale blue nightgown squints sleepily and brushes the grogginess from her eyes with the back of her hand, with a delicate grace all the more elegant for being so evidently unpracticed. She rolls over and glances at the digital alarm clock on her nightstand: 7:30 am. This is earlier than she normally prefers to awaken, but today is special, and so she reorganized her schedule and made sure to take a strong sleeping aid the night before, in order to set things in motion and approximate the sunny diurnality that will be necessary for the next several days. She doesn’t dawdle or hesitate before getting out of bed as usual, but instead stretches her slender arms over her head, yawns, swiftly hops right up (though in a slightly hunched-over position) and shuffles to her vanity, propelled by a charmed source of extra energy that makes her scalp tingle a little with excitement and portends a magical day.

She grabs her bronze oval-frame spectacles, the ones that emphasize the matronly twinkle behind her kind eyes, and puts them on in one smooth motion. She pauses briefly to check her reflection in the mirror. Her long chestnut hair is a little disheveled, but remarkably silky and put-together for having just slept like the dead for seven or eight hours. Her milky complexion somehow simultaneously makes her look younger and older than her actual age, a soft, taut and youthful glow punctuated lightly with the beginnings of etched-over smile lines and other wrinkles of the kind normally only visible on a woman in her 40s. There are a few miniscule pinpoint scars dotted across the area below her lower lip, but they’re not noticeable from any reasonable distance. The whole effect gives her a warm, benevolent appearance, with a round face you can trust and a countenance almost anyone would want to take refuge in.

It’s time to see if Leah’s awake, and the woman glides down the hallway to her makeshift room with straightening posture. Bright sunlight is streaming effusively through all the windows, and the illumination is especially pronounced in this mostly empty space only sparsely furnished as yet with the largest pieces—bookshelves, bedframes, dressers, couches and such—and unpacked cardboard boxes. She isn’t slated to permanently move everything into this spacious condominium for a little while, but it’s perfect for what she has planned this week with Leah. For the time being, it can be theirs, a safe place to breathe, explore what aches so badly to be actualized, and just be.

The young woman breezes into the room where Leah slept, half-expecting to have to wake her little one by cupping the side of her face with a gentle hand, but to her surprise, she’s already up, wide awake and happily milling around on her memory-foam mattress. She appears to be exploring her own feet with babyish enthusiasm, curiously wiggling her toes and pinching around them, one of her fuzzy socks removed and tossed aside. “Good morning, cutie,” the woman beams, scurrying over to sit on the edge of the bed, cluttered with a mélange of simple plastic toys and stuffed animals. “It’s time to wake up!” Leah babbles happily and wraps her arms around the young woman’s neck, glomming onto her small frame like a baby koala on its mother’s back. The woman runs her freshly-manicured nails down Leah’s back through the white T-shirt fabric, and sings her their morning song. “Wake up, wake up, time to rise and shine and face the day…” Her nasal voice cracks with a slight scratchiness; it takes a moment to find sometimes after periods of disuse even only as long as a single night. She finishes by squeezing her little angel into a hug, kisses her forehead and faintly tickles her sides, bringing forth a fountain of squealing giggles.

~o~O~o~

Strewn across this young woman’s vanity are an assortment of parenting magazines and guides for activities to do with kids, with good ideas highlighted and circled, but she has never given birth. Nor is her little star, the adorable Japanese-American girl writhing in effervescent joy on top of the covers, adopted, at least not in the strict legal sense. Chronologically speaking, though she’s often mistaken for a middle-schooler, high-school freshman or even a preteen, Leah is 23 years old, and perfectly intellectually and developmentally abled. In fact, she is—or was—a bioengineering student at a fairly prestigious university—the same one where the young woman with the oval glasses worked until recently in the bursar’s office—burdened with overwhelming pressures academic, psychological and familial, and hampered by significant mental health issues resultant from the consistent strain on a psyche more vulnerable than anyone around her seemed to recognize.

Shortly after they met, the pair became quickly besotted with each other in a most peculiar way. Something was special about their connection from the outset, and while they ate lunch together daily for months and evolved into very close confidants, her friendship with Leah had developed quite unlike any the young woman had ever experienced. It was a dynamic impossible to distinctly label back then, replete with sharing very personal tribulations and secrets and lifting each other up in rejuvenating comfort, but it was not conventionally romantic, nor sisterly, nor the type of platonic friendliness between peers on an equal level, and vastly more loving and affectionate than a mere mentorship. Though she was only Leah’s senior by barely a decade, she had immediately felt very protective of her indeed, and eventually grew greatly frustrated with the way this poor sensitive girl seemed to have slipped through the cracks in everyone’s radar to struggle and suffocate all by herself under a weight greater than that of the massive backpack on her shoulders.

From when she had first entered the office, Leah was ashen and slumped with exhaustion, drowning in deluges of responsibilities she had just fallen or been nudged into via various well-meaning but oblivious people who couldn’t see the human being straining to keep her head above water, the fragile woman behind the impeccable grades and stunning CV who probably hadn’t had much of a chance to do anything at her own pace or a choice in the accomplishments that defined her from the day she was born. That was part of why she had prompted such protectiveness on the part of the young woman, who had initially helped her disentangle some convoluted matter involving overdue fees and several different sources of financial aid. As was her curiously juvenile appearance, which at first blush caused most strangers on campus to presume that she was either a child prodigy of some sort or simply the daughter of an older student or faculty member.

Even beyond that, though, something else was different about her—from the holographic purple plastic lunchbox she toted around and the unicorn folders she carried her paperwork in, to the overalls she wore over pastel turtlenecks and the Winnie-the-Pooh characters dangling from the zippers on her backpack, all of which everyone who was aware of her actual age merely wrote off as quirky alternative fashion choices, rendering her strangely invisible. While most graduate students—especially young, socially-conscious Asian-American women in male-dominated fields who endured such condescension, stereotyping and worse from many angles as it was—would have been highly irritated if not outright offended at being mistaken for a child over and over, Leah sparkled when other adults addressed and patronized her under that assumption, as if it was making her day. Needless to say, the older-but-still-young woman then behind a desk at the bursar’s office took notice of every bit of it, and their unique bond flourished.

Like the young woman in the pale blue nightgown who teases her with an impromptu game of peek-a-boo by pulling the blankets up over her head and yanking them off, Leah is transsexual, a girl with the exceptional problem of having been assigned the wrong gender at birth. Because of her naturally feminine features and the hormone replacement therapy she’s been sporadically receiving since high school, nobody has identified her as anything but a pretty girl with a cutesy sense of style for years. Except, that is, for the parents who still obstinately refuse to accept her as their daughter despite every outward sign imaginable, and who hide their wounding stinging-nettles bigotry, acidic demeanors, impossible expectations and fiercely controlling nature behind a convenient curtain of supposedly entrenched cultural specificity. Which is, in the view of her genuinely maternal defender, as well as that of a handful of dejected would-be friends who tried to connect and spend time with her in normal, age-appropriate ways over the years only to be rebuffed by the punishing activity regimen and bizarre draconian rules to which she was obsessively subjected, a crock. Cultural considerations aside, they clearly exhibit disordered personalities, and the parenting practices that Leah is only just beginning to unravel as abusive edge on being indicative of clinical narcissism.

Between all the awful levels of their total lack of acceptance and the misfortune of being incorrectly perceived as a boy, Leah never got to have much of a girlhood to speak of, not even really a faded ghost of one with any of the unconditional adoration, validation and opportunity to play that every small girl requires for nourishment before the tumult of adolescence in the course of blossoming into womanhood. It is precisely this that the young woman crossing her eyes under her spectacles to elicit peals of laughter plans to rectify—today, this week, and for as long as her little star wants and needs, to heal and feel loved. She thinks it could be a long time or even forever, given how intensely Leah’s tender and hurting little soul has yearned for this and how deeply her girlishness extends well past the superficial. It’s obviously different, but nearly analogous, she was startled to realize, to what the gender issue is like, prior to transition, for women such as themselves. At least, it's...an interrelated type of near-dysphoria, a kind of being at the core that doesn’t outwardly align and manifests in acute spirals of pronounced distress.

After a steep downward series of severe disappointments, and the increasingly unbearable pressure coming to a head while having to contend with several intersecting sources of stigma that a rotating list of SSRI antidepressants prescribed by the university clinic with a dismissive wave and a yawn did nothing to abate the searing pain of, culminating in a harrowing hour pacing and staring over the edge on top of a six-story parking garage, Leah crumbled like desiccated clay. She had cried for what felt like hours in the arms of the young woman in whose embrace she’s now grinning cheerfully, who had held and rocked her and dotingly wiped her face with an entire package of tissues. Afterwards she had gone so far as to drive her home, run her a bubble bath and build her a blanket fort in her off-campus studio apartment, stocked with plushies, coloring books, a portable TV and a stack of Disney and Miyazaki movies, into which Leah had retreated for a week straight while her faithful, motherly companion stayed with, waited on and kept careful watch over her. Ever since, their relationship has explicitly taken on the flavor that had always permeated it before.

Subsequently, with repeated assurance that her wellbeing was of the utmost priority, that it was okay and completely understandable to falter sometimes and that she deserved a serious break after everything she’d been through, contrasted against the haughty apathy of the robotic professors and blatantly self-centered classmates in her department, Leah had to radically reassess everything and face the reality of desperately needed modifications in her grown-up life. She had finally, mournfully realized that her toxic parents were probably never going to come around in any of the ways she needed them to, and took the immensely brave and terrifying step of disconnecting from them altogether. She also quit her job as a TA, and took an indefinite leave of absence from her Master’s program to focus on recovering her sanity and figuring out what kind of future she truly wanted for herself. It is a scary but exciting and unbelievably refreshing time of uncertainty, newfound freedom and drastic changes in the lives of both women, but all the adult decisions to be made and footholds to find or forge can wait, for now is the gleaming interval eked out in the eye of the storm, of escape and vital respite no less important in starting to turn right-side-up what is upside-down.

Promises that she would get to be her little self again under the guardianship of the caregiver who constructed it were all that coaxed Leah out of the sanctuary of pillows and sheets that was her fortress after the breakdown. She wasn’t quite sure yet what that little self’s favorite age was to be, however, and so in shyly requesting another week as soon as possible to be a little girl full-time, she suggested the idea of a day in which she could fluidly progress through all the stages from infancy to around 10-12. That day is today, and she couldn’t be happier.

Having felt a haunting sadness at the way her circumstances prevented her from actualizing her natural propensity for motherhood, the young woman who had astutely spotted and encouraged her relished the notion of “adopting” and continuing to nurture and help little Leah be herself, and accepted the role with a humming heart. So they are now mother and daughter in the ways that matter most, and Leah feels contented and safe in a nevertheless unfamiliar whirlwind of feelings that the lady in the pale blue nightgown is her Mommy who loves her and will take care of her always from here on out, and that’s that.

~o~O~o~

After a final tap on her darling nose with the tip of her index finger, Leah’s Mommy shifts to stand up, but clumsy hands yet to learn fine motor control skills paw expectantly at her clavicle. “What is it, sweetie? Oh, are you hungry?” Baby Leah gurgles and clutches the collar of her nightgown, trying to pull it down. “Are you sure? Hmm…it’s so early, but okay, hold on…” The pale blue nightgown is made of a stretchy material, but it also has buttons on the top that its wearer carefully undoes. Her breasts are small and kind of conical, but feeling her baby daughter’s lips latch on around an areola, she feels an indescribable surge of self-confidence and has never been more elated to have them. While Leah tentatively suckles, now cradled in her lap, she nuzzles the top of her head in a wooly torrent of oxytocin, and closes her eyes while ripples of blissful tingly sensations overtake her until she almost feels sleepy again. She wonders if it’s possible to induce actual lactation somehow in the future, and eagerly files that prospect away as something to research later.

Leah reluctantly pulls away after a few minutes of nursing and hiccups, and satiated with her time as an infant, she begins to feel something shift in herself towards being slightly older, though still thoroughly dependent. “Alrighty, let’s get you dressed,” her Mommy says, and retrieves a pair of white socks with scalloped ankles and gray panties with tiny flowers printed on them from the top dresser drawer. Uncertain of where her baby girl is in the developmental spectrum at this moment, or whether she even knows, she asks, “Can you put them on? Or need help?” Leah hesitates for a second and lies down, wanting to bask in this balmy helplessness for just a moment longer. “Need help?”

“Mm…hm,” she mutters almost inaudibly, as her sole remaining sock is already being whisked off. Last night before bed Mommy explained how these socks were only for sleeping in to keep her feetsies warm, as the special fuzzy fabric would be dangerously slippery to walk in across wood floors. She wiggles her toes into the fresh socks like an earthworm burrowing into soil, paying no mind to how that might complicate the task. When finished, Mommy goes “Up! Up! Reach for the sky!” and thrusts her hands high up in the air. Leah mimics the movement by holding her hands above her head, letting Mommy pull the T-shirt off. The young woman pauses and clears her throat nervously before slipping her fingertips under Leah’s waistband and removing her panties, and as they come off, she sees the hint of a pained shadow cross her little girl’s face, every muscle in her body tensing up, her bottom lip quivering a bit as she turns her head away to stare uncomfortably at the wall. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think that her little one was reacting to getting a shot or had accidentally stepped in something icky. Poor thing. “Aw, sweetie, it’s okay. I know. This’ll only take a second…” In one fell swoop perfected from years of changing her dolls when she was little, she sweeps the clean ones on. “See, there you go! Much better.”

Leah relaxes and smiles again, then jumps up and runs excitedly over to the closet, almost colliding with the door in her enthusiasm to select an outfit. “Careful! Now, let’s find you a dress…” She seizes her filmy, fancy princess gown, the one that Mommy had ordered for her all the way from Japan as a surprise, off of its hanger and holds it out proudly. “Oh, no, sweetie, I’m sorry, I don’t think that that dress will work today.”

“Whhhhhyyyy?” she whines, and dashes back over to the bed to bury her face in the pillow.

“Because, sweetie, it’s not very practical. We’re going to the park today and I’m afraid something will tear or stick to it. We don’t it to get ruined, now do we?” The young woman knows that Leah will be older and extremely well-behaved at the park in any case and that nothing is likely to soil it, but, although taken off guard, she suspects that this is cathartic and plays along. Her voice is patient and sympathetic, without a trace of anger, and the burgeoning conflict is forgotten instantly. Leah bounces back—literally—and sits at the foot of the bed. “Now, let’s pick a different one. It’s going to be hot today, so I think these two are good.” Mommy reaches into the closet and withdraws two different cotton sundresses, one with big yellow sunflowers and a black-and-white checkered one. One in each hand, she asks, “This one? Or…this one?” shaking the hangers to differentiate them. Leah can’t decide—even her big, grown-up self has had lots of trouble making decisions recently since the doctor pulled her off the Lexapro—and points first to the checkerboard dress.

“That one! No…that one!” she says, pointing to both at the same time.

“You can’t wear both, silly girl! Which one? Come on, we don’t have all day! How about the sunflowers? This one’s more summery, don’t you think?”

“Yeeeeah. Sunflowers.” Leah pads over and Mommy slips the sunflower dress on. She produces a brush and runs it a few times through Leah’s thick, long and beautiful but rather low-maintenance jet-black hair.

“Okay, now Mommy has to go get dressed. Put your shoes on and I’ll be right back.” Big Leah has a whole bunch of different shoes, but little Leah definitely knows which ones she wants to wear. Her feet were just tiny enough that she’d been able to find the white Velcro sneakers in her size, and on the bottom there were cool blue lights that actually lit up! Now maybe about 5 or 6 and quite capable—she already knows how to read, thank you very much, even though if she had to tie her shoes she might have some difficulty—she straps them on and twirls in front of an imaginary mirror.

Meanwhile, the young woman in the pale blue nightgown exchanges it for a burgundy blouse and ankle-length sand-colored maxi skirt, feeling the wave of relief that’s never gone away at the sight of her reflection as she changes. Renewed by estrogen, her skin is radiant and healthy, and all the fat is distributed where it should be to shape her curves. Remembering something, she takes a lonely prism off of a bare shelf and heads to the kitchen, where she packs everything they’ll need today into a small green backpack, aside from the picnic blanket already in the trunk and the prepared basket in the fridge, containing a thermos of iced herbal tea, untraditional onigiri filled with honeyed apricots instead of anything pickled or salty, and cucumber and cream cheese bagel sandwiches. She gathers some additional snacks—a few pretzel sticks, and green apple slices coated in lime juice to prevent them from oxidizing. Despite teasing that they were far too sour for so sweet a girl, the Granny Smith apples were Leah’s favorite. A few books to read by Satomi Ichikawa, a kaleidoscope, binoculars just in case, and art supplies, including a sketchpad and an assortment of colored pencils and oil pastels. That should do it.

Having wisely donned a sunhat, Leah emerges from the hall clutching her caterpillar. Bright green with round segments, lots of legs, a smiling face and yellow antennae with felt balls at the ends, the caterpillar is her very favorite stuffed animal that she cuddles whenever she’s happy or sad and means everything to her. Mommy doesn’t know where it came from, but suspects that it may be the only one she had since big Leah was little. She moves its head with hers to look around, standing on her tiptoes, and asks politely if there’s anything she can help with. This Leah is about the age she usually is by default when little, somewhat quiet, reserved, intelligent and thoughtful. Despite not having been allowed any leeway whatsoever for misbehavior the first time through, she still tries to be the best-behaved, most responsible and considerate little girl she can be, which tugs on her Mommy’s heartstrings and makes her tear up with grateful devotion.

Although her big self’s experience doing so in college went all awry and turned out to be super stressful, little Leah also loves to learn, and her Mommy delights in teaching her new things to broaden her golden perspective, particularly introducing her to complex concepts in a simple, comprehensible fashion to spark her curiosity. Of course, somewhere in the part of the back of her mind that grown-up Leah has domain over, she holds this knowledge already—however, when her little self learns it for the first time all over again, something wondrous happens and it seems so much more novel and interesting.

Mommy shows her the triangularish clear object she’d noticed and examined the night before, holding it up to the luminous rays of light coming through the window above the sink. “Look, Leah, remember this? It’s a prism. I couldn’t really show you last night since it was dark and cloudy, but look what it can do!” She angles and adjusts it carefully, and a beautiful rainbow appears on the kitchen counter.

“Wowww, it makes rainbows?” Transfixed by how pretty the colors are, Leah stares into the glass and passes her hand through the chromatically dispersed beam underneath, as if attempting to see if she can catch the rainbow. She then ages up a few years to inquire in a clear, impeccably articulated voice, “How does it do that?”

“Well, you see, light that we see as white is actually made up of many different colors—all the colors of the rainbow! When it passes through a prism a certain way, it gets separated out into these pretty colors, which are called a spec-trum. There are some rays of light in the spectrum with colors we can’t even see, too. Real rainbows—the kind that appear in the sky after it rains—happen because water droplets in the air separate sunlight out into its spectrum like this prism here.” Leah’s mom-teacher thinks to herself that this is perfectly appropriate for today, because her little star, her sunshine is radiating lots of beautiful light as well, and that bright Leah-light is comprised of a full, dazzling spectrum of ages and stages of all different frequencies that she is helping big-little Leah refract. It’s sometimes visible as one or a few colors, and sometimes all together in a brilliant white beam, revealing the most maternal and shimmering parts of her muliebral psyche that hadn’t before seen the light of day. Today is all about beholding the breathtaking resplendence of that rainbow.

Leah slowly absorbs all this new information with her head adorably tilted to the side. “That’s interesting! But why can’t we see all the colors all the time? Why do we need a prism-thingy…or, raindrops?”

“It’s pretty complicated, sweetie, but that’s a very good question. Light is actually waves of energy, and…well, it’s hard to explain without teaching you a lot more stuff and drawing out diagrams, but would you like to learn more about light soon? We can go to the library and check out some books on it sometime if you’d like.”

Leah nods three times with a big goofy smile, stands up on her tiptoes again and leans in to get a kiss from Mommy. The young woman sets the prism down on the counter and presses her lips to her forehead, feeling so warm and lovely inside that she hardly knows what to do with herself. “Alrighty, my smart girl, we definitely will. But for now let’s get to the park, yes? I think I’ve got everything all packed up here.”

When they exit through the front door of the home-to-be which already feels like home, there is a middle-aged lady perched on the stairs leading up to the rest of the complex, anxiously alternating between sending text messages and gazing off into space. When she sees the childlike girl in the flowery sundress whose age she can’t quite place (dressed like an elementary student, looks about tall and developed enough to be a teenager at least or maybe an adult, yet has a stuffed caterpillar tucked under her arm?) she half-raises an eyebrow and looks to her cohort, the bespectacled woman toting a picnic basket who she has spotted a couple times carrying boxes in at all hours of the night. But when Leah says “Hiiiiiiiii!” in a singsong voice and gives an exaggerated wave, her expression morphs into a compassionate smile, everything suddenly and wordlessly clicking together for the woman on the stairs about what this girl’s deal is, and the two women present who are adults in spirit as well as chronologically exchange a kindly, knowing mutual glance and nod.

Leah climbs in the back seat of Mommy’s silver sedan—she’s big enough not to need a booster seat, but still has to ride in the back, in the safest spot behind the driver’s seat. She’s quiet on the way there, contemplating everything she learned about prisms today, and when they arrive at the park she feels closer to her oldest little selves. “You know how you said there’re colors of light we can’t see, Mommy?”

“Mmhm, yes, sweetie, what about them?”

“Is one of them UV? I remember learning somewhere that the sun has ul-tra-vio-let light which helps your body make Vitamin D which makes your bones strong. That’s why it’s important to go outside sometimes. I didn’t know what ultraviolet means, or what it looked like, but…”

“Yes, that’s right! Good girl! It sounds like you know a lot about this. Ultraviolet is one part of the spectrum beyond what our human eyes can see, so it’s invisible to people. Some animals can see it, though. And too much ultraviolet radiation on your skin can give you a sunburn and be very bad for you, but you’re right, we do need a little from time to time.”

As they traverse the gravel path to the wide grassy area sparsely occupied by other parents and children playing Frisbee and setting up picnics like they plan to, the blue lights on Leah’s shoes glittering as she skips along, the mother-and-daughter duo observe all the gorgeous flowers and point out different plants to each other. This section of the park includes some haphazardly-placed community gardens, and most of the pretty flora and vegetables are marked with small placards that indicate their scientific and common names. When they reach one that says Tomatoes - Solanum lycopersicum, Leah bursts out in a fit of giggling.

“Mommy look!” Her voice is a tiny bit quieter and more subdued, because a large group is passing by and she doesn’t want to draw too much attention, but Leah can hardly contain her amusement. “There’s no tomatoes in there! Do those look like tomatoes?” Her Mommy glances over to see what she found so hilarious, to find that she’s right—there are no tomatoes of any kind in sight anywhere, and right behind the sign is an abundance of tiny bluish-purple flowers growing through and outside of the section. She chuckles and readjusts the backpack, thick fluffy blanket and picnic basket.

“Hmm, I suppose they ought to change that sign, huh?”

“They’re pretty though. If ultraviolet was a color we could see, I think that’s what it would look like,” Leah says definitively.

“Well, not quite, sweetie, but they are kind of a purple-violet color. They’re called periwinkles, if I remember correctly, and their color is called periwinkle too. I don’t think they’re supposed to grow there! As a matter of fact, I don’t think they’re native to anywhere around here. They’re what they call an invasive species.”

“In-va-sive? Sooooooo….ummmmm…how did they get there?”

“Yep, just means they weren’t planted there on purpose, but people just brought some in nearby a long time ago, I guess. From there they just kind of make their own way. They seem to like it there, and they’re pretty cute, so it seems like the gardeners just leave them alone.”

“If they’re not on purpose, then that means they don’t belong to anybody. So, um, then, can I pick some?”

“Sure, sweetie, I don’t see why not. Just a few, okay?” Leah squats down and picks a couple of the eye-catching flowers. She tucks them behind her ear and they continue along.

“Speaking of ultraviolet, some flowers look very different in ultraviolet light,” Leah’s Mommy explains. “I think these periwinkles stand out a lot more, for example. Because bees can see it, it helps attract them to pollinate. I think I remember reading somewhere that some flowers even have parts that light up under UV almost like little runways to show them where to land!” They stop and lay out the picnic blanket under a big shady tree. Some of the leaves on its droopy branches almost get caught in their hair.

Starting to get hungry, Leah sits down criss-cross-applesauce style while her Mommy unzips the small green backpack and takes out the extra snacks. She ravenously munches through an apple slice and most of the pretzel sticks while Mommy sets out paper plates and the rest of the food, giving her caterpillar a bite of all the apple slices. They enjoy their lunch of sweet onigiri and cucumber sandwiches, and Mommy realizes that she forgot to bring any teaware or even disposable cups. Leah loves tea parties at all her little ages with spoons, sugar bowls, saucers and honey dippers, but today they have to make do with just the lid of the thermos, which they share to drink their raspberry-flavored iced tea.

Tummies full and satisfied, they lie down on the comfy blanket for a while and look for shapes in the clouds. Less lethargic after having time to digest, Leah sits up and wants to try and find butterflies and look at birds through the binoculars, then plays with the kaleidoscope. She proclaims that she wants to make her own kaleidoscope, and then that she’s bored. Since her little one seems to be bursting with too much physical energy to sit still enough to read or draw yet, Mommy teaches her some hand-clapping games. Kneeling across from each other, they clap their hands on their thighs and together in synchronized rhythms while reciting funny nursery rhymes about girls named Mary Mack and Miss Lucy and one about something called “pease porridge”. That’s the first one Leah masters, and they say the words perfectly in unison while adding more steps to the pattern:

Pease porridge hot, pease porridge cold,

Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old;

Some like it hot, some like it cold,

Some like it in the pot, nine—days—old!

Leah doesn’t like peas one bit and takes umbrage at the idea of nine-day-old porridge made out of them, so they decide to change it to “Leah’s porridge”. With all the rhymes she starts off extremely uncoordinated and her Mommy has to be very patient, taking her wrists in her hands and guiding her through the clapping motions, but she quickly adapts and combines them in an accelerating frenzy of thigh-claps, hand-claps, together-hand-claps, ground slaps and finger-snaps. Sometimes as they go faster and faster even Mommy gets left and right mixed up and it devolves into a giggly noodly mess of rubbery arms, stinging palms flying everywhere and falling over.

Finally tired out enough to settle down, Leah snuggles into her Mommy’s lap, their backs supported by the tree trunk, and works on drawing some pictures in the sketchbook with the oil pastels while Mommy idly plays with and tries to braid her hair. She uses the colored pencils for anything requiring finer detail.

“Do you remember all the colors of the rainbow, Leah?”

“Um, red orange yellow, green blue violet, and…uhh—"

“Do you remember the other one? There’s one more!”

“Ummmm…purple?”

“No, honey, indigo. I guess it’s kind of a weird one you don’t hear about too often.”

“All done!” she announces. “For you, Mommy.”

Giving up on the braid she was attempting, the young woman takes the sketchbook and raises it above Leah’s head to look. “What did you draw, sweetie? Let’s see here.” She adjusts her spectacles. It’s a picture of what are obviously bumblebees, cartoonish but skillfully detailed, with fat little fuzzy bodies, cute faces and circles of some sort around their heads. Behind them is an indistinct yellow-red-orange jumble of scribbles.

“Aww, they look so happy! And what is this behind them, sweetie, their hive?” Leah is staring hopefully up at her Mommy’s reaction, grayish-hazel eyes wide with optimistic thirst for approval.

“No, that’s the sun! They’re space bees. That’s why they have their helmets on.”

“Ohh, I see, that’s what those are! I love how you blended the colors together! And why would these space bees be on the sun, hmm?”

“Because there’s lots of ultraviolet light there!” she declares matter-of-factly.

The young woman’s chest swells with love and pride. “This is beautiful, my brilliant little star. I will hang it up when we get home and cherish it always.”

Other visitors in the park gradually ebb away, and a cool breeze makes all the leaves rustle. Leah snuggles in tightly and they read all three books Mommy brought. One of them is about a little girl whose toys come to life after her grandmother tucks her in to bed, collecting all the stars in the sky for her. By the end of the story, Leah starts to doze and wraps part of the picnic blanket around herself and her caterpillar like a little cocoon. The young woman has noticed that her sleep schedule intriguingly seems to shift towards that of an actual/chronological child whenever Leah is little. She can’t explain it, except to think that perhaps big Leah was very tired before the break and was accustomed to getting up ultra-early for her favorite class, Introductory Bioinformatics.

The sun is now low in the sky and evolving from gold to a deep fuchsia. Leah drowsily gets up and helps get everything together, but on the trip back she falls asleep again in the car. Unconcerned about anyone seeing them and wondering, her Mommy opens the back door, undoes her seatbelt for her and nudges her snoozing girl awake in the parking lot when they get home. She’s been paying much less attention to how people are looking at her and worrying less and less about what they’re thinking about her since adopting little Leah. It’s happening by accident—she just noticed today that her mind wasn’t besieged with fretful self-consciousness nearly as much as usual—but it feels liberating.

Though Leah is recharged from her nap and animated again, Mommy suggests that she get into her sleepwear for the night so that she’ll be all ready for bed when she gets tired, so she changes out of the sundress and into the long T-shirt, star-print panties and fuzzy socks she wears to bed. She admires Mommy’s sophisticated nightgowns and wonders if maybe she’ll buy her some. Since they ate such a large lunch, they decide to just have some miscellaneous snacks like cold veggie pizza left over from yesterday, Goldfish crackers and popcorn for the evening meal. Nestled in beanbag chairs on the carpeted living room floor, they play a few games of Go Fish and a special card game about prime numbers found at the edutainment store, as well as a board game where you have to assemble plastic insects and one called Don’t Break the Ice! in which they take turns carefully tapping blocks out of a platform with a little mallet, trying not to be the one to dislodge all the ice cubes and send the figurine of a figure skater positioned in the middle crashing down into the cardboard “lake” below. Leah sits on the edge of her beanbag (if beanbags could be said to have an ‘edge’) and sticks her tongue out a little when it’s her turn in an adorable display of laser focus, tapping away at the plastic ice carefully as if she’s meticulously excavating a precious gem. When someone makes all the cubes fall down, she squeals and always immediately swoops in to rescue the little figure skater, poised in a permanent twirl. She has her caterpillar give the skater many-legged huggles for a second to warm her up while Mommy sets up the blocks again.

~o~O~o~

As a now-pleasantly exhausted Leah drifts off to sleep again—having taken her caterpillar and the little skater figurine and abandoned her beanbag chair to snuggle into her lap like she did earlier at the park—her Mommy, the young woman who used to work in the bursar’s office, caresses her arm, hums her a lullaby and thinks many things to herself, in the quietude of this house-in-progress that has already been made a home. She thinks of how this is the greatest intimacy possible, a clearer, purer version of what everyone is truly striving for in the confounding myriad landscape of adult relationships. She thinks about how the longer she has taken care of little Leah and let her be herself, the more the permanent pallid veil over her sweet girl’s face is being erased, like a shaded patch of graphite being smudged and lifted from the page to make room for whimsical doodles and the text of the rest of her life story yet to be written, the pencil in her own hand this time. She smiles a crystalline smile to herself, with tears in her eyes, and thinks most of all about how sometimes, like the periwinkles, you have to make your own way, when there wasn’t a chance to be deliberately planted and lovingly raised up from a sprout with enough sunlight or anything close to the right fertilizer and you’re labelled something completely different.

With some strain she slides her arms underneath her back and lifts Leah’s limp, relaxed frame, carrying her and her cuddly caterpillar to bed. Leah’s sleepy eyes flutter open and she sighs serenely into a hug as her Mommy lays her down gently on the mattress and tucks the comforter around her shoulders. “I love you, Mommy, so much.”

“I love you too, my little star. Always and forever. Night night, sweetie. Sweet dreams.”

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Comments

So sweet

this is a lovely story.

I thought it was so sweet and would love to hear more about Leah and her new mum.

Thanks for reading!

Thank you for leaving this comment. I'm glad you liked this story, though it was definitely intended as a one-off solo I'm afraid. But you never know--maybe I'll write another little vignette about them in the future sometime. :)