Emma sent me this photo of Robin, and for a moment, I felt a twitch of envy at the freedom and happiness and beauty this image evokes. I don’t know Robin all that way, and I can’t say for sure if she is having a happy or beautiful childhood.
When I see this photo of her running with her dog Sandy under the Brooklyn Bridge, my heart lifts a bit, she seems so free.
I also feel a stab or two, such a scene as this in my childhood would have been unimaginable. I never went on a walk with my parents, I remember taking a bus to Boston when I was 10 or 11 to see movies at an art theater there.
I was mostly alone, I had no friends I can remember, and spent most of my free time with my fish, or my rebellious and stubborn basset hound Sam.
I bred Siamese Fighting fish (Betas, and sold their babies to the one-armed man in the Woolworth Fish Department in Providence.)
Robin is a smart child, and she must have some sense that something is wrong in the world. The coronavirus is taking away a good chunk of her childhood, I asked Emma the other day how much Robin was aware of. She said she knew something was wrong.
I suspect these weeks in their apartment with her parents – her school closed more than a month ago – will stand out in her mind, the time she knew something was wrong but probably couldn’t understand what.
A lot of my friends tell me their children are getting angry, they don’t understand why they can’t see their friends, and they are sick of their parents hanging around with them at home. Emma was a sensitive child, she would have sensed something being wrong., and felt our tension and anxiety.
I hope Robin’s school starts up soon, I have never heard Emma sound so tired.
As a loving mother, she seems exhausted to me. I said she might want to bring Robin up to the farm for a few weeks this summer, and she balked and said that would almost surely be impossible.
“Why?,” I asked.
“Because we might get you sick,” she said. “We’d be coming out of New York City. You and I have had our issues, but we don’t want to kill you.”
“Oh,” I said.
For some reason jon. This brings me to tears.
This really made me chuckle this morning. ‘With you’, I hope you understand. Not ‘at you’. I have my own 30-something who could have said the same thing. I take it as a sign of a well raised and loved child. Thanks!
Emma’s last statement had me cry and laugh at the same time, did not know that was possible.
Does that sum up parenthood…we’ve had our issues but I don’t want to kill you..You and Paula did a great job with Emma! She is awesome.
Yes this is hard on the little ones as well.