“Do you want to talk about her?”
“Okay,” Charlotte said, still clinging.
“Tell me your favorite memory.”
“My birthday.”
“Which one?”
“Ten.”
My sister had been really stable for a short period that year, taking her meds, getting out of bed, trying to make up for lost time. So she’d gonebigon the kids’ birthdays to make up for several years of ones I’d planned to various levels of success.
“What’d you do?”
“We went to the theme park.”
“That sounds like a lot of fun.”
“We rode all the rides over and over until Liam threw up.”
“Not you, though?”
“Nope.” She paused, lingering in the memory. “Mom was happy that day.”
“Yeah, I know she was sad a lot. That must have been hard, huh?” Charlotte nodded.
“I tried to cheer her up.”
She did, too. She was always bringing her mom special treats and gifts. She was forever climbing into bed with her mother and trying to tell her silly stories just to get a smile out of her. She was usually not very successful. But she never stopped trying.
“Of course you did. Because you’re the sweetest kid.” Charlotte sniffed, reaching between them to wipe her eyes. But not wanting to move away yet. “But it’s not your job to cheer upthe adults, either,” Alara went on, repeating something I knew Char’s therapist had been saying. “Sometimes those feelings are too heavy for a little girl to carry, y’know? And it doesn’t leave a lot of strength left to hold your own feelings. And those are just as important.”
Charlotte nodded. “Yeah,” she agreed. “Sorry I cried on you.”
“Don’t ever apologize for that. Crying is good. Because if you don’t let yourself cry, you can get really angry. And no one wants that for you.”
I could hear the personal experience in her words.
Like she’d been someone who didn’t let herself cry.
Which made her clinging to me in her bathroom all the more meaningful.
“Is that pancakes?” Charlotte, always able to sniff out a sweet treat, asked.
“It is. Your uncle is making breakfast. Maybe you should go get washed up.”
“Morning, Char,” I said, rubbing her head as she passed me in the doorway.
At the sound of my voice, Alara turned.
“I probably should have let you handle that.”
“No. No, I think it was good that you did. She looks up to you. And she doesn’t really have any women in her life that she looks up to right now. So hearingyoutell her that her feelings are valid, and she should cry if she needs to, and that it’s not her job to regulate everyone around her, I think that meant a lot.”
“I never stopped to think she might confuse me with her mom when she wasn’t fully awake.”
“It’s bound to happen here and there. It hasn’t been that long.”
