In our house a cup of water is a big deal. Around bedtime a cup of water, and how we handle it, can actually be a deal breaker–the difference between a bedtime story and just lights out. One night last week it was just lights out. For the record, I would like to say that giving someone a cup of water is an act too simple and kind to refuse. I’ve heard stories and seen pictures of soldiers who after capturing or mortally wounding each other, offer each other a canteen of water. (If you’re wondering how things might have played out differently had they only offered each other the water first, so am I.) So I ask you: what reason have we in heaven or on earth to withhold a cup of water, a little chug, a slight sip? If enemies can get this right on the field of battle, how hard can it be for a daddy and daughter at bedtime? Very.
It all began with a routine question. “Hey, aren’t we going to read a story?” She was sitting on her bed, her paisley comforter pulled back, her polka-dot flannel sheets looking ever so inviting. On most nights we cuddle up together, side-by-side to hear what Sophia the Princess or Amelia Bedelia has to say to us. Tonight I just stood in the doorway to her bedroom, one foot in and one foot out. A new episode of Modern Family was due on any minute.
“Not tonight sweetheart. It’s late,” I told her.
“It’s not that late. We always read a story.”
Honestly, she was right on both accounts, but she doesn’t know how to tell time.
“Not tonight,” I said again. “It’s late.”
“Well then get me some water.” This is how she said it: it wasn’t a question: it was a sassy statement.
“Excuse me,” I snapped. “You don’t get a cup of water when you ask for it that way. We’re done for today,” I ordered. “You can try again in the morning for a cup of water.” I just turned and walked away. No goodnight kiss, no “I love you.”
I stood in the kitchen, my elbows resting on the edge of the sink. My hands, as if folded in prayer (I don’t know, maybe they were) hovered just under the faucet, which was dripping. We had pancakes for dinner. My two-year old son wanted to help flip them on the griddle. It felt a little too suicidal, if not for him than for me. I convinced him to wash some sippy cups in the sink instead. He obviously hadn’t turned the water off completely. Two full hours of droplet drippings had now collected in the Mickey Mouse cup. I couldn’t help but notice it was overflowing.
From around the corner and down the hallway came a still sob for water. It had a note of pathetic to it. “I won’t survive until morning! I’m crying! Don’t you care?” I was at a classic impasse. I knew she would make it till morning and yet I didn’t know if I would make it 10 more seconds. She wanted water. I’m quite sure a sip would have satisfied her deepest thirst at that point. I peered down at Mickey. For a moment I thought evil, like maybe he had a few droplets to spare. I picked him up thinking about how sassy, sassy-mean, she had been. I knew she didn’t mean to be. I knew she’d been awake for 14 hours, which is a really long time when you’re 4. I knew she had her Valentine’s Day party at pre-school that day. That it had been canceled twice on account of harassing snow and that she had handed out over 20 homemade cards, each one made out of two pieces of construction paper that had been sown together with yarn, cut into the shape of a heart, stuffed with a Tootsie Roll, and exquisitely decorated, and she and she alone made it happen. I knew she was getting in the car tomorrow morning to drive 5 hours to visit her Grampy who is still in rehab, who is still not at home where she would like him to be, pushing her on her swing, dragging her around the neighborhood in her wagon. That she doesn’t really get how someone can lose their arms but how it really doesn’t matter to her. By combining ridiculous jokes involving Pu Pu Platters with a bowl of spoon-fed ice cream, she makes it look like the world is just the way it’s supposed to be. I knew that had she known it was going to make me look so mean in return, she would have asked for water by saying “please” first. I knew I was taking advantage of her inability to read a clock. I knew, and I know still, that I wanted her to have a cup of water (a whole gallon straight out of Poland Springs!) and that the real reason she still wasn’t going to get one was, I didn’t know how to give it to her.
We had both been mean and it had caused me to forget just how easily certain things come to us. Maybe we had both forgotten, or just not yet realized it.
I tipped Mickey over and walked back down the hallway to her bedroom. I passed through the doorway without stopping and sat down on the edge of her bed. Downstairs the washing machine was filling up for the third time in four hours. Outside her window I could see a few icicles dripping winter’s glory to the ground. The weather man says it’s supposed to be 50 degrees tomorrow and that we ought to watch out for puddles. Yet I’ve read that a woman in Africa walks 4 miles a day on bare feet through the desert to collect water from a well. She gets up early to get there early, lest the well be emptied before she has her chance. Her jugs are dirty from also having been used to mix a batch of cement, which her family uses to build their house. If the well is riding low today than a decision will have to be made about the water: drink it or mix it? For now she just fills the jugs as much as she can, slings them on her shoulders, and hikes home. She’ll need a couple Tylenol in the morning. Good luck swallowing them without…you know…
I don’t blame my daughter for not knowing this. I don’t really want her to know this, at least not yet. And I never want her to come to realize it–what it’s like to walk so far without water to get water only to not have water. She doesn’t need a lesson in water purification either. For now we can just be glad that tomorrow she’ll want to put her purple-flower rain boots on to splash about the very puddles from which her brother may risk a drink, because all he knows is, water is water. In no particular order you can mix it with sand to build castles, mix it with cement to build a house, carry it around in a jug, carry it around in your shoes, drink it. The great and terrible truth of course is that water really isn’t water, that there is a world of difference between having no water to drink and not being given water, and that for better or for worse, we’re going to have to learn this.
I once heard it said that truth is like water, it always finds it way. I take this to mean that on its way to wherever it’s going, water, like truth, can often wreak havoc and chaos. Indeed, for truth to be truth, it must leave a little rupture in its wake.
Some say that God created out of chaos. That before there was any oak trees, any slugs or aardvarks or any saints or sinners roaming the earth, the spirit of God was hovering over the waters. If there was chaos, it must have been one ballistic spirit at work, stirring up a perfect storm of grade 5 proportions. But then, as the story goes, God, the same spirited God who brewed chaos over water, stills the water to a perfect calm. “Let there be light! Be still!” God orders it, but not like us. There is no sass. Just the hope that if we would only step into the light, we might see each other for who we are: a daddy, a daughter, being warmed by polka-dot flannel sheets, with closets full of shoes.
I slipped my hand onto her back and slowly rubbed her to sleep. “Sweet dreams, be still.” I was still whispering it as I clamored downstairs to change the laundry over.
PleaseGrace 