“I just wanted to tell you what Kelsey did yesterday,” she says.

Uh oh, thinks I.

“We were in Chapel yesterday –”

(Here’s the part of the story where I need to explain some context, since undoubtedly many of you who know Kelsey’s parents raised an eyebrow at the word “chapel.” Yes, we’re still godless heathens, but Kelsey’s going to a Methodist preschool. It was the best of all of the schools that Terry looked at (which was a bunch), and we decided that if she had to go to a religiously-affiliated preschool, at least Methodist wasn’t a bad way to go. I mean, I was raised Methodist and it didn’t seem to hurt me too much. We have absolutely no problem with her deciding someday she wants to be any flavor of Christian (or any other religion, organized or not) that works for her, if that’s what she chooses; we just didn’t want to have her indoctrinated quite yet. Anyway, back to our story.)

“– and we were carving a pumpkin with different symbols,” says her teacher. “We had hearts for the eyes, representing God’s love for us, and squares for the ears which were supposed to be Bibles, and I don’t remember what the mouth was. A fish, I think. Anyway, the nose was a cross. And when we cut out the cross and pulled it out, we asked if anyone knew what it was supposed to be.

“And Kelsey shouted out:Â ‘It’s boogers!‘”

That’s my girl.

On Monday, we lost Alex.

Any of you who know Laurel know exactly who Alex is and how traumatic these last five days have been her, but for the benefit of those of you who don’t:

Alex is the Beanie Baby lion Laurel has carried with her everywhere for more than a year — and a year’s an awfully long time when you’re still four months from turning three. We’re not sure just how old Alex actually is, but his worn, matted mane and general state of manginess lead us to suspect he’s been around quite awhile; Laurel found him in a box of old toys which used to belong to her cousins while we visiting them sometime last summer, and he’s seldom left her arms since. (The “Alex” comes from Alex the Lion from Madagascar, a movie she first saw around the same time she discovered the toy.) Alex is, in a way, part of the family: he’s never been “Laurel’s lion” or “Laurel’s toy,” but always, always “Alex.”

The last time Alex was seen was at the grocery store on Monday. Terry knows Laurel had him when they went in, but she didn’t have him when they got back to the truck with the groceries. Terry went back into the store and went up and down every aisle looking for Alex, and she left her phone number with the customer service office. She’s even been back twice checking with the store’s lost and found and called once.

But it’s obvious at this point Alex is gone.

Laurel, understandably, has been distraught all this week, though she hasn’t been able to express exactly why — advanced though her speech skills might be, expecting her to communicate emotions of that complexity is a bit much. She’s had a hard time going to sleep (Alex slept cradled in her arms every night) and has taken to pulling out her hair in anxiety. She’s been carrying around a small puppy Kelsey had given her a couple of weeks ago, but we can tell it’s just not the same — she likes the puppy fine, I suppose, but she’d had her heart invested in Alex. Unlike Kelsey, who happily flits from Most Favoritest Friend to Most Favoritest Friend with the wind, Laurel and Alex have stuck together solidly for almost half of her life.

Not quite as understandably, I’ve also been distraught this week. Every time I think about Alex’s absence, every time she asks where he is or sullenly says “I miss Alex,” I find myself having to fight back tears. (I’m sure that shatters the image of me as Tough Stoic Manly Marlboro-Man-Without-The-Marlboros so many of you hold of me.) Most of it simply has to be my not wanting to see my daughter upset, I guess, but I’m wondering if there’s be something more to it that I can’t quite get at, some childhood trauma of my own I don’t even remember.

Regardless, my daughter was upset, so I jumped into action Monday night. I crawled out of bed in the middle of the night, hit Google, and found and ordered her a replacement Alex… not sure whether I’d be able to pull off the switch, but feeling like I had to give it a shot. (Part of me felt like I was in a bad sitcom, some episode where my neighbor asks me to watch his dog while he’s on vacation and I accidentally kill the dog through some bizarrely contrived negligence and try to buy another one that looks just like it hoping my neighbor will never notice but of course he does and I learn Valuable Life Lessons about Facing Up to My Responsibilites and Lying Is Just Wrong. Or something.)

Found

Terry’s been prepping Laurel the last couple of days for Alex’s imminent return, pulling out the kinds of fantastic lies that could really only work on small children still gripped by their imaginations: “Alex went on vacation! He went to a spa to relax and get himself cleaned up, and when he comes back he’ll be prettier than ever!” We weren’t sure how much she bought it — two-and-a-half years old or not, she’s a really, really smart kid and we wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised had she seen through our film of bullshit. But we had to try.

This afternoon, a small box was waiting for us in the mailbox when we got home.

Both girls were asleep in the truck, so I grabbed the box and we drove around a little more so we could examine Imposter Alex before presenting him to Laurel. He’s not exactly the same as Original Alex; in addition to his much better overall health, his eyes are a little different and the underside of his jaw is white, details we were hoping she wouldn’t notice. (My suspicion is that Original Alex was actually a cheap knockoff of Imposter Alex, who has his pedigree: he’s an Authenic Ty Beanie Baby.) But the body’s largely the same, and I was counting on that being the aspect she’d focus on: how he felt in her arms.

After we got home and got the girls inside, I snuck back out to the truck, cut the tag off and set Imposter Alex up on the ground right outside the front door. If we were going to ride this lie, we were going to ride out to the end: Terry knocked on the wall where Laurel couldn’t see, and we encouraged Laurel to go answer the front door. We helped her pull the door open and directed her gaze groundward, where Imposter Alex was looking up at her expectantly.

“Oh,” she said quietly. “Oh.” She looked at Imposter Alex for a minute.

And then she picked him up.

And she didn’t put him back down for the next three hours.

“This is Alex,” she said to Terry later. “He’s my lion. He’s very special to me. He came back to me.”

(Here’s where I completely demolish the rest of my image as Macho Man Holt by admitting that after it became obvious Laurel was accepting our ruse, I cried. Hard. I felt like I’d done something Good: I’d managed to alleviate my child’s pain and anxiety. I realize there’s benefits to your child learning how to cope with loss and grief, that children need to learn to deal with those emotions, but dammit, not just yet and not with her very favorite toy.)

Epilogue

The book Kelsey picked out for me to read to her tonight was The Velveteen Rabbit — a book she’s never had me read to her before, a book I wasn’t even aware we had. If you know this story at all — and being that most of you were once kids, you most likely do — you can appreciate why that book hit me a little hard tonight. (If you don’t know this story, I’d like to introduce you to my good friend Google.)

I hate The Velveteen Rabbit. I’ve always hated it, ever since I was Kelsey’s age. Tremendously. (That hatred either is symptomatic of whatever real or imagined childhood grief guided my actions this week… or possibly was the root cause of it. I’m honestly not sure.) Yeah, okay, it’s a happy ending for the rabbit and al, but I’ve always felt just awful for the kid, who had all of the toys and books which were meaningful to him taken from him — especially that damn rabbit.

But when I got to the end of the hated story tonight, I tried to reframe it within the context of Alex Lost and Alex Regained, and it made me hate the story a little less:

I imagined that some night, Laurel (who’s maybe five or six now) will be sleeping peacefully in her bed when she’ll be woken by a noise just below her window: a soft, playful growl. And she’ll go to the window and look down into the bright, clear night to see a majestic lion standing beside the swingset in the backyard, smiling up at her with a familiar spark in his eye, moonlight dancing through his mane. And she’ll look down at the now-well-worn lion in her arms, the lion that she can’t remember ever not sleeping next to her. But she’ll smile at the familiar-looking lion in the backyard and she’ll wave and maybe she’ll blow him a kiss, and then she’ll climb back into her bed and snuggle down next to her Alex and return to her peaceful sleep.

(This article was also posted at Allen’s blog, Do or Do Not.)

Laurel with Bubble

Taken at the Marblehead (Mass.) Arts Festival, July 4, 2006.

Let me first say that we weren’t intentionally neglecting her. Since she’s a child who really prefers being left alone, we thought we were doing fine by her; she had some time alone with the Little Einsteins while we each did some work upstairs. The older child flitted back and forth between the upstairs and downstairs like an A.D.D. bumblebee, so we asked her to give us status reports about the younger one’s behavior and mood.

“She’s fine, Daddy,” the older one said. “I think she’s sleeping.”

No, she wasn’t sleeping. She wasn’t quite being evil, either, but evil certainly was afoot. Notice was served to the parents: Keep it up, leave me alone for this long again, and you’ll live to regret it. Alternatively, you might not.

Her messages had all of the forethought and cunning of those Jacques Saunière initially left in the Lourve for Robert Langdon. [1] First was the diaper; I found the child lying naked on the floor (much in the manner M. Saunière himself was discovered), her diaper removed and resting a couple of feet from her head. The diaper, thankfully, was empty except for some urine; this was Warning One.

I could have had a toxic poop stew in there, Father, and could have used my butt like a big poop paintbrush. Consider yourself lucky.

I then turned and noticed Warning Two, which was actually her most devious as it called back to one of her most infamous (and messiest and mother-trumatizing) misadventures. The bottle of Cremora was on the floor in front of the television… unopened, but threatening. The child knew — she had gone to fetch the Cremora (don’t ask me how she knew where it was or how to get it, but she did), knowing the spine-tingling, nerve-jangling message it would send to her parents, especially her still-scarred O.C.D. mother.

I could have opened this and made it snow right here in the living room. But I didn’t. You remember that.

Warning Three was in a similar vein to Warning Two: an unopened tube of K-Y jelly sat menancingly on the coffee table. I don’t even know where we keep this stuff, yet the child had found it, had left it out in the open where she knew we’d see it — and would notice that it hadn’t been used to lubricate the rug.

Nothing is safe from me, Father. I know your secrets. You may think you can hide your little toys for a while, but I’ll find them eventually. Remember.

Honestly, I’m not sure what Warning Four meant: she’d removed one of the collapsible poles from the bag holding the tent we sometimes set up for the girls in the playroom. And she’d managed to un-collpase it, to extend it back to its full six feet and leave it on the kitchen floor; perhaps it was a dastardly trap, or part of one which she hadn’t had time to complete before the siren call of the Little Einsteins beckoned her to rejoin them.

God may work in mysterious ways… but I am more mysterious than God.

The final warning was by far the most disturbing. While I was collapsing the tent pole back down, I heard what sounded like a high, muffled barking. The barking clearly wasn’t Tommy, the great dumb dog who follows at the children’s heels hoping to catch the occassional falling Cheerio, and I didn’t think it was the older child, who was upstairs. I tiptoed carefully into the playroom, following the sound, looking amongst the scattered toys with trepidation, and then I saw it: hanging from the crossbeam of their easel was a stuffed mechanical puppy, blowing gently in the breeze from the open window, the string around its neck suspending it above the floor and causing it to bark over and over in a sad, strangled wheeze.

This time, the puppy, Father. Next time… you.

I surveyed her devious messages of mayhem and walked back into the living room. I looked down at this naked child, one arm a pillow behind her head, two fingers of the other hand stuck in her mouth in her common comfort gesture. She noticed me staring at her, and I’m sure she must have seen the fear in my eyes: she smiled wide around those two fingers and laughed, that beautiful laugh which normally tickles my soul… but on this early July afternoon, that laugh, that mellifluous, horrible laugh drained the blood from my face and made me shiver cold.
________________________________________
[1] If you didn’t find the opening to The DaVinci Code particularly cunning, feel free to substitute a pop-culture reference more to your liking. And tell me in the comments what it was so I can file it away for later plagiarism.

LAUREL, in something of a sing-song voice, over and over again:
We like to move it move it, we like to move it move it, we like to move it move it, we like to… MOVE IT!!

KELSEY as SOFTPUPPY, to LAUREL as ALEX
Hey, Alex, you want to come play [something indecipherable] with me?

LAUREL
No, thank you. We movin’ right now.

Kelsey: “Daddy, what’s that pigeon’s name?”
Allen: “Well, if I had to guess, I’d imagine his name is ‘pigeon’.”

How to get the crying demons to eat their dinner? Like so: Terry sits at the table with one child on each leg (Laurel on her left knee, Kelsey on her right), a bowl of spaghetti and a drink glass in front of each one. Her left arm is wrapped around Laurel, her hand cupped at the base of Laurel’s belly, catching the noodles that inevitably fall from Laurel’s over-filled fork.

Please note that Terry really, really doesn’t like to get food on her. Now, of course, she’s covered in spaghetti sauce, little orange dots and strips of noodle covering her shirt and jeans.

So happy third birthday, Kelsey Grace. May you someday know for yourself the beauty you’ve brought to my world.

(Yeah, yeah, Laurel’s cool, too, but today’s about Kelsey.)

You never can tell these days with
a modern woman, a twenty-first century kind of gal, a
“domestic goddess,” if you will, just what kind of crap
she’ll give you if you don’t heap
enough gifts on her on this “holiday” –
needlessly “celebrating” twoo wuv
in such an overly commercialized way, in such a
tepid fashion that it cannot, it will
not actually manage to convince
even the most romantic of women (or men!)
love is anything more than just
a cheap marketing gimmick. So long ago I
vowed not to play along with the game, not to buy in…
yet here I am, incredibly, ridiculously in love.
Perhaps all this time I’ve been an ass.
Perhaps I should just tell her she’s adored, she’s loved
and offer up my heart with a kiss and wish her a
Happy Valentine’s Day.

Can you read the hidden message in the poem? I couldn’t. He had to point it out. Regardless of his little tricks, the poem rocks. I’m ROFL’ing. He’s so getting dessert.