She said it so easily…so quickly and without a second thought for how it might land. It felt like something she had been holding in her mouth for years and just decided, on an ordinary day after school, to finally…so casually…let it out.
“Well I don’t really trust you...because you lie…like all the time.”
She literally just turned 11 a couple of weeks ago, and she’s growing like a weed…physically, emotionally….mentally, hormonally. Just one inch shy of five feet, has a little boyfriend already, and a pre-teen angst that totally crept in, unannounced and uninvited. And she said this to me the way 11-year-olds say hard things...without armor, without cruelty, without any idea of it’s impact or how it would just hang there…heavy…in the room between us.
My first instinct was to defend myself. To list every sacrifice, every flight booked, every trip taken, every birthday made enormous...Paris…London…Disney World. Every night I stayed up late rocking her to sleep or in the early morning hours when it was just her and me while her dad went to work. Every version of myself I burned down and rebuilt, trying to be the best version of myself and her mother that I could be. I wanted to open my mouth and let all of that spill out and ask her to look at it, really look at it, and reconsider.
But I stopped myself, I didn’t do it. I just gave Yas a little eye roll that said can you believe this? And he looked back at me with wide eyes and a smirk that said actually...she might have a point.
Yas, my sweet neurodivergent partner…my person. The man who can look me dead in my face and tell me I’m wrong…and we are working on those truths being delivered with the right amount of love and tenderness required to make me not throw something. In this instance, he didn’t say a word…he didn’t have to.
So I sat with it, I let it pierce my insides, and considered all that started to ooze out. And ooze out it did.
When did I lie to her?
At first, my mind blanked…and then, all at once, it came rushing to me. Maybe it was when Millie was three, and she asked if she came from my belly. I told her the truth, but just enough for a 3 yr. old to handle, I told her no, that another woman “had” her for us, but that I was her mommy from day one. She rolled with it the way toddlers do...nodded, moved on, went back to her snacks. But I’ve always wondered what happened in the quiet after. Whether something small and certain got rearranged inside her…maybe it was the first time she understood that the reality she was certain of could be different from what she thought it was. Three is young enough to absorb a thing like that without language for it, and old enough for it to settle somewhere in uncertainty…in the body where language doesn’t reach.
Or maybe it was every time I said just one more email and then an hour disappeared, and the light outside changed, and it was just too late to go to the playground or play that game I’d promised to play. Or the times I convinced her a new school would be amazing and that she’d make so many friends...because what else do you say when your kid is looking at you with those wide, trusting eyes and when you need her to believe the world is going to be kind to her even though you have absolutely no evidence of that? And then she didn’t have that experience…not at first, and not very easily…even though I said she would.
Don’t even get me started on Santa Claus…or the Easter Bunny…or the Tooth Fairy and the wildly inconsistent exchange rates. The years I spent building up those mythologies for her...leaving cookie crumbs and boot prints and writing tiny notes in handwriting that looked nothing like mine...and then having her come to find out it all wasn’t true…and it wasn’t me that gave her that truth, I was the one engineering the lie. It’s a particular kind of betrayal that we all subscribe to and agree somewhere along the way that it’s the way it is. It’s what you do…and honestly, I’m still not sure who it all benefits, but here we are.
And then…there were the bigger ones…the ones that required their own conversations, their own careful conversations and omissions, their own deep breaths before I opened my mouth.
We’re moving to New York. It’s going to be an adventure.
Your dad and I are getting a divorce. But I’ll be right here. Nothing will change for you.
I have to work at the restaurant tonight, but I’ll be home in time to tuck you in.
Ugh…that last one. How many times did I say that and then not make it home in time? How many times did the restaurant pull me under...the tickets pouring in way past a “closing time” that doesn’t exist, someone calling out, a table of ten walking in twenty minutes before said close with an energy that says we are going to be here for a while...and I would surface somewhere on the other side of bedtime, still smelling like onions and fryer oil, checking my phone on the walk home and telling myself she was asleep anyway, she didn’t know, it was fine.
But she knew…she always knew…she remembers.
When she was nine years old, she was learning how to triangulate two stories from two parents who weren’t speaking much, and she figured out which version of reality she wanted to believe. That’s a lot of mental and emotional back-and-forth for someone so small…for a little girl whose biggest concern should’ve been whether her best friend was going to save her a seat at lunch.
And then, within that next year, everything shifted again. Her dad got married and moved across the river to Jersey. I moved in with Yas, and then six months later, Yas and I got married. Three massive tectonic life events stacked on top of each other so fast that I don’t think any of us fully processed one before the next one arrived. Honestly, I think Millie stopped expecting solid ground and started bracing herself for the next shift instead. She learned to keep her knees soft, she learned to stop asking, is this it? because the answer kept being no, not quite.
I knew and felt it, most acutely when I moved out of our first apartment when her dad and I first separated. That was the first real physical severance...it wasn’t just the divorce in theory, it was my actual body leaving the apartment she knew as home. The apartment where her room, her foundation, was, where the sounds were familiar, where I could be found if she cried out in the middle of the night. I left that, and in her mind, I left her.
And then, my job as Head Chef of the restaurant. The 80-hour weeks…the chef life I had chosen…the one I needed…the one where I found my true self…and it was also the one that was also eating us both alive. I was juggling SO much at that time, but I did the best with what I had. I tried to love her out loud every chance I got. The entire time I was away from her, she was my reason, my why. But the brutal reality was that at the time, I was only seeing her two days a week. And on those two days, I tried to lean into the quality, not quantity, of it all, but I was often so tired that the version of me she got wasn’t the best one. I was treading water and getting beaten up from all sides of life. I didn’t put on my proverbial life jacket before trying to take care of hers.
You can love someone with everything you have and still be the reason their world got harder. You can still be the reason why they have trust issues, why they’ve pulled inward and struggle to make progress in the outside world. All those things can be true at once.
There’s a realization that bubbles to the surface in parenthood…the reality that no matter how hard we try to do all the right things, say all the right things, provide all the right things, and have all the best intentions for our kids…we are still going to manage to fuck it up. No matter what, we will most likely be the source and subject of their future therapy sessions. I don’t think there’s a parent alive who hasn’t lived inside that reality, but even knowing other people carry it too doesn’t make it any lighter to hold.
Millie’s not wrong… I did lie to her…I have lied to her…I still lie to her. I lie to her the way parents lie...sometimes to protect her, sometimes to protect myself, sometimes because I genuinely don’t know what else to say, sometimes because I believe the thing when I say it, and then life just goes somewhere else entirely. None of it was ever malicious…but all of it still counts.
Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer mixed with powdered gold. The practice is thought to have started in the fifteenth century…legend traces it to the shogun Ashikaga Yoshimasa, who cracked a favorite tea bowl and sent it back to China for repair. It came back held together with ugly metal staples...functional but brutal, like someone had stitched a wound without caring about the scar. Japanese craftsmen looked at it and decided they could do better. They could make the repair more beautiful than the original.
The process isn’t fast…you truly can’t rush it. The lacquer, called urushi, is applied in thin layers, and each one has to cure and harden before the next goes on. Weeks of patient, deliberate work just to fill a single crack…and then the gold...its purpose not to cover the crack, not to disguise it…but to trace it…to illuminate the fault line and make it the most celebrated part of the whole piece.
The philosophy underneath connects to wabi-sabi...the Japanese understanding that impermanence and imperfection aren’t flaws to fix but truths to hold. The crack is actually part of the history…you don’t hide it…you don’t pretend it was never there…you fill it with something precious so that what was broken becomes the most visible, most illuminated, most honest part of the whole piece.
This concept of Kintsugi is a beautiful one I’ve always resonated with on a personal level, but I didn’t quite realize I’d be applying it to my relationship with Millie. Especially when my little girl looked me in the face and told me she doesn’t trust me.
Millie’s 11 now. I know, there’s so much more she can hold, so much more she can understand, so much more truth that she actually deserves to have access to. Truth given in the right doses, in the right moments, and from me...her person, her mother, her original safe place, even when I was also the one who made it feel less safe than I ever wanted to.
The hardest pill for me to swallow is that I know I can’t go back and un-say the things that planted doubt in Millie’s mind. I can’t give her back the years I was spread so thin, or un-move from Charlotte, or un-divorce her dad. Nor would I ever want to. The cracks are there; they meant something then, and they mean something now. They will always be there; they’re part of her story and mine. And even though I don’t regret the decisions I made, I am plagued by the negative impact they all had on her.
And yet, I know now that I can start filling in those cracks with gold.
I don’t know exactly what that looks like quite yet, because I don’t. I’m guessing some will be little shifts with big impact…the slowing down, telling the truth even when it’s awkward, the saying I don’t know instead of manufacturing certainty to comfort her. Some will be the boring, unglamorous work of being consistently present...not in some grand gesture way, not in a Paris-trip-can-fix way, but in the Tuesday afternoon way. The I said I’d be here and I’m actually here kind of way. And I think the hardest way is by letting her be angry and feel hurt by the cracks without rushing to explain them away. There’s beauty in letting her hold them up to the light on her own timeline, and not when I tell her to.
The urushi takes weeks to cure…you really can’t speed it up. You keep applying thin layer after thin layer and trusting the process even when it feels like nothing is setting.
She said it so casually. I don’t trust you because you lie.
I think she said it because somewhere she still believes I’m worth saying it to. That somewhere underneath the doubt and the too-many-moves and the nights I didn’t make it home...she still thinks I’m the person who deserved to hear it. Maybe she knows that I hear her…that I won’t stop until I make it right.
Maybe she trusts that I’m going to be worth it. Because she is, too.
