Hope and Heartache

My middle daughter is an amazing little soul. I’d like to tell you about her.

To protect her privacy, I’ll call her Lilly. I call Lilly my “angel with skin” because she is so altruistic and loving. When she got old enough to walk and talk (around age 2), her older sister got jealous and didn’t want Lilly around to share attention, toys, etc. So her older sister was often mean to her. When Lilly would get a toy to play with, her sister would promptly grab it and take it away from her. Most kids would cry and get angry, but not Lilly. Lilly would just look at her sister, walk away, then go find something else to play with. Again, her sister would come over and take her toy away, and again, Lilly would just walk away and find something else to do. Of course, I stepped in when I saw her sister being mean to her, but this scenario could repeat itself many times on occasion. Lilly never got mad or upset. She just moved on to find something else.

She soon learned that she’d rather find a remote place where she wouldn’t be seen to play, I’m assuming so that she could avoid having her things taken away by her sister. She would crawl into the back of my closet upstairs and play by herself for hours, happily amusing herself. I’d always have to go looking for Lilly, since she was always hiding somwhere, playing alone. I’d open up cupboards and closets, only to find her huge brown eyes look up at me and say, “Hi Mama! Wanna play with me?”

Lilly could never understand how people could be mean to other people. I share her views, so this is one trait that we intimately share. Her sister was constantly mean to her, but instead of crying and getting angry or fighting back, Lilly would always walk away. She often came to me and asked, “Mama, why does Amy hate me? I love her so much, and I never did anything to her. Why does she hate me? How can I make her like me?” I really didn’t have an answer to give her. I told her that her sister didn’t hate her. I explained that her sister was an only child for two years, and during that time, she got all the attention and all the toys, etc. Now that she had to share, she was having a hard time with it. “It isn’t about you, Lilly”, I’d tell her. “She just preferred being an only child”. Now it’s 8 years later, and Amy still proclaims that she doesn’t like Lilly, and she still isn’t very nice to her most of the time. I figure that, eventually, as she matures and grows up, someday they will become close, as Lilly so desperately wants them to be. At least, I hope so.

Lilly is the most altruistic child I have ever met. One year, when Lilly was 4, we were able to celebrate Christmas because her father was in jail (he wouldn’t alow any mention or celebration of Christmas, since he was Muslim). That year, money was very, very tight, but I wanted the kids to have a nice Christmas, so they wrote a list of gifts that they wanted, and I worked really hard to be able to get them at least some of what was on their lists. Christmas came, and on Christmas morning, they opened all of their gifts. Lilly was ecstatic. She got a life-size doll, a Video Now video player with discs, and some other toys that she had been wanting for a long time.

The next morning, I was in the kitchen cooking breakfast when Lilly came marching down the stairs dragging a heavy bag. She went and got her coat and was about to go out the front door. I said, “Woah, little one. Where are you going, and what do you have there?” I looked in her bag, and she had all of her precious Christmas gifts re-wrapped in newspaper. She looked at me with those huge eyes, and said, “It’s my gifts! I was so happy when I got them yesterday, and I want Haley and Emmy to be happy like that, too, so I wrapped them up to give them to Haley and Emmy (her neighborhood friends)”. I said,
Sweetie, that’s so nice of you, but they got presents for Christmas, and I’m sure their gifts made them happy. These gifts are specifically for you. These gifts are to make you happy, so you need to keep these for yourself. Why don’t you ask them to come over later, then you can all play with them together?” She thought for a minute and agreed to keep them. What an amazing little girl I have!

Another amazing characteristic Lilly embodies is unparalleled optimism. I learn from her, and the whole world should learn from her. Regardless of how mean people are to her, regardless of what bad things happen to her, Lilly always lets things roll off her back, and she has always kept a smile on her face. When the worst happens, she still finds a way to be happy. If people are mean to her or pick on her, she walks away and finds a place where she can play by herself. She never lets anything make her sad for any length of time. She has an optimistic response to everything that happens in her life. She truly, truly amazes me. I hope she never, ever loses this wonderful characteristic of hers.

Lilly loves to create new things. I often call her my “little chemist” because her favorite thing to do is to mix things and see what she gets. Thousands of times, I’d find her in the kitchen with bowls full of mixtures. She’d go through the cabinets and refigerator, find things to mix, then she’d mix them and see what she got. One time, I walked into the living room to find her hovering over a bowl of one of her mixtures only to find a hazy smoke rising from the bowl and filling the room. I quickly whisked her and her siblings out of the house and got rid of her concoction. I explained to her that she could only mix things when I was watching, because not everything is meant to go together, and that some things can be harmful when mixed. But, her eagerness made her forget to always come get me when she wanted to experiment. Once, I came downstairs after waking up to find the walls of my kitchen covered with a white pasty mix. Most of it had already dried, so I set about to remove it and get it cleaned up. I don’t know what she mixed (she said she didn’t remember), but whatever it was, it was stronger than concrete! Nothing would get it off the walls. I eventually got a hammer and starting chipping it off the walls, but the drywall and plaster came off with it. The walls had these steel posts in them, and when I got her mixture off the walls, the steel posts were the only thing left where the walls had been. So after that, I had to replace the drywall in places and re-paint the entire kitchen. I was VERY careful to always watch her very closely after that. If she was quiet for more than 10 minutes, I learned to go looking for her and see what she was up to. To this day, she loves making chemical concoctions. I know her father doesn’t watch them much and doesn’t spend time with them, so I pray she has learned enough that she doesn’t create something that harms her or her siblings.

Lilly is a bright spark of love sent from God, and I’m so thankful that she’s my daughter. She has taught me much more than I have ever taught her. I love her so very, very much - love that emanates from the deepest depths of my soul.