Her Golden Time
by Monica Crumback
There are few sights so beautiful, I think, as my daughter in her golden dress. Golden is her word, and one well-chosen. She marches up the aisle long before the raised crucifix and is seated next to the rest of her kindergarten class. They are preparing to sing a hymn.
I sit with her father, several rows back. I can still see the back of her head, her ponytail tied in black satin. But in this same moment, even as I marvel at the perfection of her graceful shoulders, I realize that she and I are miles apart in belief.
I am not golden now, nor can I easily recall ever having been. In fact, for this special evening, I have chosen a coral sweater as a non-committal cousin to bright Christmas red. I am well-meaning, I think it says, but unsure. I hope that it implies that where I cannot be faithful, I still strive to be sincere. I shift a little, though, wondering if anyone is noticing my oddball color as I sit in this sea of evergreens and berries.
I sit still when my girl starts to sing. I don’t know if she does this well, as hers is just one voice in what is meant to be the kindergarten choir. It comes out as more of a cacophony, of course, but is lovely for all of their pink-cheeked effort. They sing three songs, always quiet through the verses and louder come the chorus. Bells are then rung to within an inch of their lives, Jesus is wished a happy birthday, and then 38 feet march back down the aisle.
What a gift she is, I think. But from where or whom she came I cannot say — although I note her father’s eyes and my own pink, full mouth. She is sitting on her grandmother’s lap just behind me. I keep getting tapped on the shoulder as she senses an ever increasing urgency for Santa to know what she wants this year. Shush, I tell her, pointing to the man at the front of the church who is reading from one of the gospels. He is the father of one of her classmates, the uncle to another. The reading is in Spanish. I take advantage of my ignorance of the language to enjoy the pleasant sounds the words make. It seems almost musical this way. And I wonder what I worry over, coming here.
Prayers are said in English, and I say them. Hymns are sung in Spanish, so I hum. It is getting late, and my girl is growing restless. Her taffeta skirt rustles with her mounting impatience. She whispers and giggles with a classmate, springing the girl’s ringlets with her fingers. I, too, am getting anxious. Over an hour in the cathedral, and I again start to feel like the only kid in class who doesn’t know the answer. Faces glow with secret knowledge all around me, as voices are raised in a classic carol. Something is happening. Christ is leaving us, I realize, carried high above the bowed head of a teenage boy. People cross themselves, my girl included. I stare at the ceiling, which is painted with golden stars.
Slowly, the lights come all the way up, the stars recede, and we are asked to the basement for fellowship. The invitation starts a controlled stampede of sorts, with parents pulling hard and back while their children surge forward, all at once, for the stairs. This is poorly planned I think, and suppress a scowl. I smile instead at my girl, whose face shimmers like her skirt. “Cocoa,” she says, “and cookies!” She spreads her smile wide. Such a happy creature to have come from me I know, so warm and open to belonging and belief. Such dichotomy between mother and daughter might itself be proof of something.
Downstairs, after the grandeur of the sanctuary, we all seem in danger of being crushed. No one seems to notice though, least of all the kids. The girls, more than 10 of them, are taking their first opportunity all night to spin their skirts. Crowd be damned I guess, as they bounce off of us, the tables and chairs. You’d have to call it delight, this numbness to surroundings. I wait unhappily – far too warmly – in line for a cookie I don’t want and cocoa that is rumored to be scorching. I suck it up though, because there’s my girl. She’s halfway across the room, her grin taking up her face. Glee, I think, honest-to-God glee. She’s my girl in the golden dress.
Eventually, we head up the steps and exit through the side door, bypassing the sanctuary for the parking lot and start the cold ride home. We tell her she was wonderful and she readily agrees. We listen to awful pop versions of Christmas songs all the way home at her request. No, we say, Santa won’t be coming tonight — six more days to wait. She starts to suck her thumb, a little one late for bed. We’ll pray tonight, at her request, the three of us crammed together on the edge of her single bed.
“Dear God,” she says, after crossing herself, “I hope You get a good night’s sleep. Amen.”
“Me, too,” I say, smiling at her father. “He probably needs His rest.”
She never thinks to ask us why we never prayed with her before we sent her to the best school around — which also happens to be both inner-city and Catholic. She has asked us about sex, babies, war, and death, but never about prayer. Our policy has been to give her a basic framework for various religions, from books and art, without encouraging any particular faith or method of worship. So I get the feeling that now that she is in this school, she believes that we are all learning these things together for the very first time: to pray, to sing, to kneel. She brings each new piece of the Christian mosaic home to us as gleaming revelation. She talks about Mary with a reverence that I would not have thought a 5-year-old capable of, and shows Christ an affection that I can only describe as maternal. She once exclaimed over how tired He must be, for always being “born, dead, and rose again.”
Her sweetness is of the pricking kind: Who am I not to take into account the exhaustion of the Father and the Son? But, then, who am I, a liberal feminist, to give them any thought at all? Most often, I find that I’m thinking of Eve, suffering in childbirth for simply wanting to know. I think of Hagar, having to weep for the life of her child in the desert. And with the most consternation, I think of the nameless concubine offered to a mob to be raped to death and then cut into twelve pieces to be sent among the tribes of Israel. When I wanted to know the reason behind such events, no one could offer a sufficient answer. So, things began to turn grey between God and me about the time that I grew up and into a woman.
But my baby is just 5 years old, and she shone tonight in His honor. Seeing her standing in front of the altar, almost too small beneath the soaring arches, I nearly convinced myself that it is right to allow her this golden time with all that she believes. I don’t know, really, if I will ever feel certain of this. What I do know is that, should she ever ask me why I sat in a cranberry crowd looking like an orange, I will tell her that there are too many things that I find irreconcilable. Even though I really wish that I could be simple in my heart, as she is now. I owe her my honesty and I give to her all of my hope. Here is her chance to have true faith, and I know all too deeply that it may never come again.
Monica Crumback lives in Michigan with her husband and daughter. Her essays have appeared in Brain, Child and on hipmama.com and mothersmovement.org.
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