Small Bites of the Apple

A friend of a friend had to bring in a pediatric grief counselor to help her four year old son.

“Understanding that his dad died is like a big apple that your little boy can’t eat in one sitting. Just give him one bite at a time, slowly, throughout his childhood.”

One bite at a time. That advice, made for someone in a very different situation than mine, resonated deeply with me as a fost-adopt mom.

We, too, are figuring out out to give our daughter one bite at a time.

The apple is always there, but we can put it back on the shelf for awhile. Take it down, take a bite, put it back.

It’s a strange space, understanding so much more of a painful reality than what your kid cognitively understands, but knowing she still feels it, fully and deeply. I feel like I’m witnessing and shepherding her more than raising her sometimes.

I’m carrying a box of answers - not all of them, but some of them - the cognitive framework that explains “Why do I feel this way? Why do I struggle with x or y? What happened when…?” But it’s not time to open that whole box.

We have a few close friends who know a lot - as much as we have been able to offload on them. Our daughter’s court records are sealed, and what we were legally allowed to have in paper form was so slim, such fragments of nothing. We are her parents, but also play the role of the record keepers and memory holders, waiting, waiting until its time to tell this piece or that piece. This is what that was. This is where all this stuff comes from. You are not wrong to feel what you feel.

As someone who loves my daughter, I’m humbled and honored to hold the box, but it feels heavy and lonely sometimes too.

I realize that foster care and adoption are not the only place where parents feel like this - highly aware of their role as the ones managing the apple, watching each small bite to see how it goes down.

But not every parent, right? I don’t know what it would feel like to be a mom without also carrying that box of trauma, and sometimes, I wish that I did. Sometimes I wish that we could just be where we were at the time - infancy, toddlerhood, preschool, elementary school - without feeling the presence of that box, that apple, always in the corner.

I know life isn’t so simple, and that people who give birth to their kids have plenty of problems and challenges too. I don’t want to gloss over that reality or pretend those parents have it easy. But so many of them - from the outside at least - don’t seem to have the box.

For me, it feels like such a huge part of my role as my kid’s parent - and yet it’s absolutely invisible, unseen. And that’s hard, having it be so present and so potent and yet so unacknowledged at the same time.

Hearing about what my friend’s friend was going through - the sudden loss of her husband - was both scary and awful, and in an odd way, connecting. Other people have kids who go through awful, sad, hard things. There are other parents put in the terrible position of holding the box, waiting for their kid to get old enough to slowly, slowly take out the contents.

I’m not alone in this, as lonely as it feels.