Tonight, while putting Monica to bed, she starts asking questions about Columbia. Ren calmly answers them, summing it up as “you would have had a very different life if you had stayed there.”
And she would have. We know this because she and Kelly have an older sister whose life, sadly, followed the same road as the girls’ mother. A bleak life.
Monica has misty memories of her older sister. She tries to tell us them tonight. Puzzle pieces that don’t make sense.
And 20 minutes after falling asleep we hear her sobbing.
“Hook, Hook, Hook has come,” she says. We recently watched the Spielberg movie “Hook” and she’s been trying to scare Kelly with it every week since.
Sometimes little girls describe their fears in stories and retellings of movies. Ren and I gently rub her back, kiss her cheek, and describe her real home. A fire going in the fireplace. Two dogs curled on our laps. Food on the counter. Light music playing. Books on the shelf and some in our hands. Parents, Grandparents and Tios and Tias who love them.
She falls asleep.