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 turned 11 this year, and she’s growing like a weed…physically, emotionally, mentally, hormonally. Just one inch shy of five feet, already had her first little boyfriend, she’s brimming with that pre-teen angst, which crept in unannounced and uninvited. And she said this to me the way children can get away with saying harsh things...without armor, without cruelty, without any idea of its 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. I wanted to point out every night I stayed up late rocking her to sleep as a baby or how every single day, it was just her and me while her dad was at work. I wanted to defend every version of myself I burned down and rebuilt, as I tried to be the best version of myself and her mother that I could be. I wanted to open my mouth and let it all spill out and ask her to look at it…really look at it…and reconsider.
But I stopped myself; I didn’t say anything. 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. (We’re still working on his delivery of those truths, making sure they have the right amount of love and tenderness needed to soften the blow and make me not want to 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.
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 something without language for it, and old enough for it to settle somewhere in uncertainty.
Or maybe it was every time I said just one more email and then an hour disappeared, and the light outside disappeared, and it was now 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? When you need her to believe the world will be kind to her even though you have absolutely no evidence of that? And then, in reality, 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 placed on the “goodness” of her. The years I spent building up those mythologies...leaving cookie crumbs 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 I wasn’t the one who broke that news; I was the one engineering the lie. It’s a strange 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 actually benefits from it, but here we are.
And then along the way came the bigger ones…the ones that required their own conversations, their own careful explanations 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 never seemed to exist, as a table of ten walked in and were sat at 10 pm with an energy that said we’re going to be here for a while. I would surface somewhere on the other side of bedtime, smelling like onions and fryer oil, check my phone on the walk home, and tell 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 learned how to triangulate two different stories from two parents who weren’t speaking much, and she would decide 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 remarried and moved across the river to Jersey. I moved in with Yas, and then six months later, we, too, got married. Three massive tectonic life events stacked on top of each other so fast that none of us were able to fully process 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 this and felt it most acutely when I moved out of our first apartment on the heels of our separation. That was the first real physical severance...it wasn’t just a theoretical divorcing, it was my actual body leaving the apartment she knew as home. The apartment where her room and her foundation were, where the sounds were familiar, where I could be found if she cried out in the middle of the night. I left that space, and in her mind, I left her.
It was also my job as Head Chef of the restaurant. The 80-hour weeks…the chef life I had chosen…the one I needed and where I found my true self. And yet, it was also the one that was eating us both alive. I juggled SO much at that time…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…at the time, I only saw 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 adhere to those basic safety instructions to 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 they have trust issues, why they pull inward and struggle to make progress in the outside world. These things can be true, and harsh, all at once.
There’s a realization that bubbles to the surface in parenthood…the reality that no matter how hard we try to do the right things, say the right things, provide the right things, and have the best intentions for our children…we’re still going to fuck it up, in some way. No matter what, we’ll 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. Sometimes to protect her, sometimes to protect myself, sometimes because I genuinely don’t know what else to say…because even I believe the thing when I say it, and then life decides otherwise. 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 started in the fifteenth century…legend traces it to an ancient shogun, 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, decided they could do better, and could make the repair more beautiful than the original.
This process isn’t fast…you truly can’t rush it. The lacquer, urushi, is applied in thin layers, and each one has to cure and harden before the next can go on. Weeks of patient, deliberate work just to fill a single crack…and then the gold...its purpose is not to cover or disguise the crack, 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.
Both of these concepts, Kintsugi and wabi-sabi, are beautiful ones I resonate with on so many levels, but I never quite realized I was doing the same with my relationship with Millie. In my own way, I’m not trying to hide the cracks or pretend they aren’t there; I’m trying to fill them, mend them.
Millie’s a full-on preteen these days. I know, there’s so much more she can hold, so much more she can understand, so much more truth she actually deserves to have access to. Truth given in the right doses, in the right moments. Truth given from me...her person, her mother, her original safe place…even when I was the one who made it feel less safe than I ever intended. Even when my little girl looks me in the face and tells me she doesn’t trust me.
The hardest pill for me to swallow is that I know I can’t go back and un-say or undo those seeds of doubt planted and sewn 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. Those cracks happened…they 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 can’t deny the negative impact they had on her.
And yet, I know I can start filling in those cracks with gold.
I don’t know exactly what that looks like quite yet, but I’m guessing it’ll be the little shifts with big impact…the slowing down, telling the truth even when it’s awkward, saying I don’t know instead of feigning certainty in the name of comfort. The gold powder will be the boring, unglamorous work of being consistently present...beyond the grand gestures, beyond the Paris-trip-can-fix kind of way, and more in the Tuesday afternoon on the couch kind of way…the I said I’d be here, and I’m actually here kind of way. Even in the hard moments when I just let her be angry, let her feel hurt by the cracks without rushing to explain them away. Just as the urushi takes weeks to cure, as layer-by-layer is thinly applied, each one setting in and stabilizing…the same beauty resides where Millie can hold these truths up to the light, curing and mending, on her own timeline.
She said it so casually…I don’t trust you because you lie.
She said it because somewhere, deep down, she still believes I’m worth saying it to. 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 deserves to hear it. Maybe she knows that I hear her, I see her pain, and I won’t stop trying to help mend it all with gold.
Maybe she trusts that I’m going to be worth it…Because she is, too.
