SO I told her that all the pennies we've not saved won't be enough to get a loan to cover the $26,000 a year deficit. (The school quite happily encouraged a parental loan that neither father nor I can secure.) She rarely cries in front of me. I wish that I felt ok about using unlawful methods to get whatever she wants because if anyone should have whatever she wants, it's her. But that whole Weeds thing and/or transporting illegal aliens across frozen tundra just isn't something I can make myself do, so maybe I wouldn't really do anything for her. But this isn't about me. I've got a girl to grow up better than my mother grew me, so I'll be practical in my suggestions, logical in my reasoning, emotionally available for her disappointment, but I can see she just wants to say "Fuck it all." I would. I do say that and then I drink a glass of wine, take a bath, sleep and in the morning get up and find myself not fucking it all or maybe I am fucking it all by not caving into myself. She can't drink--well, not in front of me she doesn't--but she does go soak herself in fresh water from the tap (unusual for a lion but not for a fish, of which she is both under the sun and the moon), falls asleep--first on the couch and then somewhere in the pause of the soundtrack repeating on the menu, she finds her way upstairs and into the womb she can return to, my bed. She gets up reluctantly, remembering her dream school has snubbed her like the girls and guys in the hallways who can't deny you're there, they just really can't see you unless you show them the money.
Later, she gets her sketch book, a package of stickers and arranges them on the page. The summer she was one, and we thought we were more poor than we were, and the Missouri humidity fettered our bodies in sweat, I would load her into the car, run the AC on high and stroll her around the mall, wishing for things that didn't matter and never would. To occupy her tiny hands and encourage small motor skills, I provided a tiny notepad and stickers. She would with prescient perspective peel and place the stickers carefully on the page. Since I can't fix this by lies or truth, I sat next to her on the old couch downstairs as she returned to something that was creative, that felt ordered and controlled. I stayed there until she fell asleep, looking no different at 17 with her eyes closed than she did at 2.
