Tuesday, October 28, 2008

a whimper in the dark

My little girl took a glow stick to bed, tonight. It's not the first time -- she thinks they're just the most fun thing in the world, sometimes, and she's recently discovered Star Wars, and can't get enough of telling me how they look like light sabers. However, it will be the last time for at least a year or so. She got a little bit overzealous with the twisting and cracking to evenly free the catalyst from its little rigid compartments, and cracked the tube. I woke to a confused sort of whimpering (my wife being doped-up on codeine cough syrup and solidly out for the night) (okay, let's face it, I'd be the one doing the wake-up-and-check-on-the-kids routine even were she sober and awake, that's just who we are).

It was an interesting sight -- thank goodness it had been a green stick; had it been blue I'd probably have been distracted by weird memories of American Zombie (great film, except I can't even handle horror spoofs) and much too creeped-out to empathize. The poor dear had managed to spatter her blanket and bedsheets and pajamas with luminescent fluid, and had (in the dark, probably on the verge of falling asleep) rubbed her left eye, causing sudden, lasting stinging and burning. O Pathos! Sleepy, hurty, whimpery 3-year-old!

One exciting, howling- and struggling-filled trip to the bathtub (what, you don't want your painful head held upside-down beneath a faucet running full blast? really?) later, I was helping her out of her [faintly glowing] jammies and talking about how scary it must have been to suddenly start hurting and not know why. She was even extra-brave for me and blinked her eye open numerous times as I flushed it more gently from a cup. It's funny, the odd situations where we find these moments of sympathy, of connection and understanding. I was so proud of her: I knew just how upset she was to be pouring more things into her eye, and I knew she trusted me if I said it was necessary and that it would help her feel better.

Since this is, nominally, a "trans blog", there's an odd sense of incompleteness if I don't tie my convoluted sense of gender identity into this, draw some tangent of meaning, but I can't. There's nothing "T" about this. It's a facet of my life that I want to tie to the person I'm slowly describing, here, but only in that it's part of the foundational self from which that person springs.

Love is always hard to describe, isn't it?

No comments: