Broken glass
I’m working upstairs. I hear glass shatter in the kitchen. I jump up. As I do the crying starts. I run down the hallway, shout “I’m on my way!”
A broken cup, no one’s hurt.
My three year old howls heartbroken pointing down at a shattered yellow frosted souvenir drinking glass for state of Kansas. She picked it out herself at a garage sale.
“I have a quarter! I’m paying with my own money! This is a Very Fancy Glass!” She asked for it every meal. “Can I have some milk and a straw Daddy? Please put it in my canvas cup.” She can’t say ‘Kansas’.
My older kid frowns, “oh sweetie, we can get you a new nice glass at the store, and we’ll get you a toy too, right Daddy, we can get her a toy too right, to help her feel better?”
“Sure,” I say. “But I need my canvas cup! I need one that has to be exactly the same as the one I broke!”
It’s just a glass. It’s silly to be torn up about this but she is. It leaves a small hole in her heart, its own unique shape. I try to comfort her as my wife puts on some shoes - glass is all over the kitchen floor, our first priority is avoiding cut feet. “I know baby, it’s hard when something you care about isn’t there anymore.”
Her distress is cute, and it’s not. We can’t replace the glass. It’s her first loss of something irreplaceable, when she’s at an age where she is beginning to understand irreplaceability. As I hold her I keep thinking about how we’ll laugh about this some day and so many more are coming, bigger losses, bigger holes, worse reasons to cry, ones we will never laugh about afterward. Aging is in part an accumulation of irreplaceable losses. And really it’s okay, it’s worth it, it’s just part of what growing up and being an adult is and everyone lives with it, but imagining my poor sobbing (barely-not-a-) baby getting big and living through that kind of thing, it feels like anticipation of another of these losses, one of mine I mean. My kids will grow too big to hold like this, they will care about larger things, lose larger things, have parts of their lives I know nothing about, move out even though I am still used to seeing them regularly, move away. And that’s the best case scenario.
I kiss her forehead, hand her back to my wife, and pick up the broom. I focus very intently on sweeping up every last single shard of glass, thinking only of what I am doing right this moment and of nothing else, especially not thinking about nothingness and loss, just thinking about the broom, the floor, the dust, the glass.