atomic mama

I’ve taken some time off from writing, as well as working, worrying, and wallowing. The past month has been the month to sidestep the letter ‘W’, I suppose. And it’s been very, very good. Lots of time with my amazing kid, time with my usually-very-busy husband, time for yoga. Now I’m ready for action. Bring on the programming assignments, the exams, the debugging. And bring on the month of February, wherein I’m going to Mexico on vacation. (I will brag about this a lot because taking a vacation in February is not something that teachers get to do unless they’re on sabbatical or something.) I’m totally ready for 2008.

However, I wasn’t ready for what happened at the dinner table last night, and I hope it’s not a sign of things to come.

Shane, Lina and I were having dinner together. Chatting away, having a lovely time. And then, in an extremely casual manner, Lina dropped a bomb: “My get married.”

Shane and I stopped chewing and looked at one another in total surprise. We knew that she’d just been moved up to the next class at school, but nothing in the curriculum description led us to believe our daughter could come home engaged. Nothing. My first question was, of course, “to whom?” As it happened, she’d just stuck a big piece of bread into her mouth, and as it also happened, I had lectured her not five minutes earlier about talking with her mouth full. So we all sat there, in suspense, as she chewed, swallowed, and then proceeded to take an unnecessarily huge drink of water from her sippy cup.

Then she slammed her cup down and looked at us as if she’d just had the best idea in the world. And she said, “You get married!!”

We looked down guiltily, feeling like now we were the ones keeping secrets. We’d never actually told her.

“Actually,” Shane started in, “we are married.”

Upon hearing this news, her expression was one of great happiness and satisfaction. Yet another thing we’d all have in common! Marriage! She climbed down from her chair at once, grabbed Shane’s hands, and started dancing wildly. “Get married! Get married!” And then the unexpected, “Get married again!”

I joined in the frolicking a little bit, looking on the bright side and thinking that maybe she’d get it all out of her system now. Sure, when you’re two years old marriage seems like one big party. But maybe in a few years (perhaps when she’s five or six) she’ll see that it’s about commitment and compassion. At that rate, she should be about ready for the real thing when she’s thirty.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 4th, 2008 at 12:39 and is filed under stephanie. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.