Now I See You

by Nicole C. Kear

  “Lorenzo,” I called, walking fast over to the slide. “Your sister. Where’s your sister?”

  He shrugged before hurtling himself down the slide, bellowing his head off as he simulated being burned alive by hot magma. He was not, after all, his sister’s keeper.

  This is exactly why I need to tell people about my eyesight, I thought, so I don’t rely on a four-year-old to help me parent.

  Now I was running, darting around monkey bars, peering up the spiral slide. My fist was squeezed tight around Bobby’s soft hand, her body jerking this way and that as I rushed one way, then changed directions, second-guessing myself.

  Come on, honey, I thought. Come find Mommy.

  I tried to strategize but my brain had stopped working, filled instead with two words screaming in repetition: my baby my baby my baby.

  I needed to assess if it was time to get help—another mom, the police, someone who would do what I couldn’t and find my daughter—but I couldn’t assess anything because my brain had short circuited. I couldn’t even judge how long it’d been that I’d been looking: one minute? five? ten? What was she wearing? I didn’t remember. Where had I seen her last? I’d already forgotten. Did I have a recent picture?

  No, damnit, no, went the wail inside my head, this cannot be happening.

  I reached the playground gate, which was ajar, and then there was nowhere else to go. I was sweating. Panting. Dizzy.

  I closed my eyes.

  Please, I prayed, please, just let me find her and I will never let this happen again.

  I called her name, questioningly at first, and again, in a higher pitch. I called it three, four times, sending my voice out like a fishing line to catch her.

  please please please

  “Mommy!”

  I swiveled to the sound. There she was, sitting on the same bench where I had been sitting a few minutes before, swinging her tiny feet, clad in pink Stride Rites, and holding a snack bag of Goldfish. Her eyes, electric blue like the center of a flame, were smiling at me and she waved one chubby, crummy hand energetically in my direction.

  The sudden relief upset my equilibrium so much I thought for a second I was going to hurl.

  But instead, I walked over slowly, sat down beside her, and pulled her onto my lap. Maybe the weight of her against my chest would stop me from having a full-on heart attack.

  I wanted to give her a stern talking-to about running away but I couldn’t because chances were, she’d been sitting there the whole time.

  I wanted to say something—I’m sorry. I’m trying my best. I’ll do better.—but it would be insane to think I could explain my predicament to a two-year-old. I couldn’t explain my predicament to grown-ups. That is, I wouldn’t. What I did instead was scramble to keep a secret that kept getting harder and harder to hide. I protected the secret when I should be protecting my children.

  I stroked Rosa’s hair, for my benefit more than hers. Rosa’s hair was golden, just like a fairytale character. Except that it wasn’t just one color. There was the pale sun-bleached chunks on top but peeking out in between were darker, tawny bits, more the shade of a lion’s fur. In the back it was darker still, burnt, like the crust of crème brûlée.

  “Bobby was looking for you,” I told her, offering her the babydoll. She grabbed Bobby out of my still-shaking hand and smashed a handful of Goldfish against its fabric mouth. Then she smashed another handful into my mouth.

  “Good mommy!” she squealed.

  No, I’m not, I thought, chewing the grubby Goldfish, I’m not a good mommy at all.

  When Rosa took her first steps, my instinct was to push her back down. I didn’t do it of course. Still, the fear that filled me was powerful and persuasive.

  “You are screwed!” Fear cackled. “Good luck with that.”

  Immediately, Guilt popped up, sounding eerily like my mother.

  “What kind of a mother lets Fear in, at a moment like this?” she chastised, clucking her teeth. “Some people should never have kids.”

  Then, just in the nick of time, Joy rushed in, doing back handsprings and waving her pom poms madly, and soon I was shrieking and applauding, oohing and ahhing, and repeating incessantly “What a BIG GIRL!” which is precisely the protocol detailed in the Milestones section of the Mother of the Year Handbook.

  This will be fine, I thought to myself. I can handle this.

  I was, of course, dead wrong. I couldn’t even begin to handle it.

  In learning to walk, Rosa was coming into her own, blossoming into the girl she was destined to be.

  That girl wasn’t mellow, not even moderately.

  That girl was a balls-to-the-wall, thrill-seeking, high-flying speed demon.

  That girl was a firecracker with a mischievous sense of humor. And I now see that her first great prank was leading us to believe, for the better part of a year, that she was our easy child.

  People have different names for the category of child my daughter fit into as a toddler. Laissez-faire folks called her “a free spirit,” the practical-minded thought she was “high-maintenance,” and old-school disciplinarians deemed her a “hellion.” But the phrase just about everyone agreed on is “a handful.” When Rosa was between the ages of one and three, you could count on someone observing, “Wow, that one is really a handful, huh?” every single time we stepped outside.

  I was spared having to think of a reply because I’d be too busy grabbing her by her collar before she stepped into oncoming traffic, or yanking her back from petting a dead rat, or knocking a shard of glass out of her hand before she swallowed it.

  Don’t get me wrong. From the start, I loved my daughter’s exuberance. I was awestruck and inspired by her spirit. Which is why it was really too bad that I had to spend every waking second trying to crush it.

  What else could I do? I wanted to keep the kid around, after all. Shielding that whirling dervish from harm would’ve been an uphill battle for a normal parent, much less one who was already half blind and had another young child to care for.

  As soon as she walked, she ran, and as soon as she ran, I knew I had a problem. A big, fucking problem.

  It’s not a problem unique to visually impaired people. In fact, everyone that has more than one child but still only one set of eyes encounters the same challenge. Every parent has, at one point or another, lost track of their child in some crowded public space, whether it’s a playground or a zoo or a supermarket—not in a serious way, not long enough to call the authorities or anything, but long enough to make you scared, sick-to-your-stomach, bargaining-with-God scared. It happens to everyone. It’s just that it happened to me on a regular basis.

  When it was Lorenzo I was looking for, it was almost always a false alarm. Whether it was the fact that he was my firstborn, or just his naturally cautious outlook, he was never far. When David cut the cord on his birth day, he left the million little invisible rubber bands that kept Lorenzo always bouncing back to me.

  Rosa, though, just never had that back-to-Mommy boomerang. Before she could walk, she cleaved to me, but only because I was her ride. Once she got mobile, she was off like a bottle rocket, and I swear I could hear her hissing “See you suckas!” as she whizzed past, shimmering golden hair flowing behind her like melted metal.

  Rosa would run and not come back. Sometimes, if David was with me, we’d let her go, just as an experiment. I’d watch her recede farther and farther, willing her to stop, even to pause and look back. But I always lost the game of chicken, screaming, “STOP!” and then, “David! Get her! HURRY!”

  So if Rosa vanished from my field of vision it was reasonable to assume that she was making tracks for the playground gate, and after that, who knew where?

  Sometimes though, like the day I scoured the playground with Bobby in tow, Rosa vanished from my field of vision by just sitting down or taking a few steps away from me. Then she’d fall into one of my blind spots, which kept growing larger and less manageable like a run in a stocking. She’d be gone, ev
en though she was just an arm’s length away. The only way to prevent this from happening was to never, ever take my eyes off her, not even to look at my watch, not even to retrieve a dropped sippy cup.

  Unfortunately, this made me what I’d learned from my local parenting listserv was called a “helicopter parent.” A helicopter mom is one who hovers, like a helicopter, over her child, providing constant supervision and surveillance. The opposite is a “free-range mom,” who gives her children the freedom to explore, manage themselves, and make mistakes.

  My mother has a different word for the latter, describing them as “morons who should never have gone off birth control.” According to my mother, you don’t just hand over freedom to kids; you keep a viselike grip on their freedom until they wrest it from your cold, dead hands. And even then, you haunt them until their dying day, hovering over them from the afterlife.

  When I hear fellow parents hearken back to the good old days when they were kids, how things were different then and they could walk to school alone, could play stickball in the street, could run to the corner for mom’s cigarettes, I am dumbfounded. I didn’t even get to take candy from strangers on Halloween. My mother not only chaperoned our trick-or-treating, she chauffeured us to it, driving us from one family friend’s house to the next. And even then, she checked our candy before we ate it, because while one could be fairly certain Nonny’s eighty-seven-year-old neighbor didn’t put razor blades in the Twix, one could never be positive.

  “Don’t you trust me?” I’d protest, desperate to escape her force field.

  “Of course I trust you!” she’d exclaim. “It’s everyone else I don’t trust!”

  One of the biggest perks of becoming a mother is that you get to show your own mother how much better you can do the job. When I was pregnant, I thought that one of the ways I was going to do this was by affording my children the freedoms I hadn’t been given. Let them learn from their own mistakes. Give them space to grow.

  And I might have, too, if it hadn’t been for my eyes. I might have shaped up to be one cool, confident, relaxed mom, standing on the sidelines at the playground, sipping my latte while chatting about gluten-free snacks or whatever the hell Supermoms talk about, looking up every so often to locate the kids but generally doing my own thing and letting them do theirs. Sounds dreamy. I bet my hair would have been fuller and my skin clearer and my ass tighter, too.

  Instead, I ended up a greasy-haired, baggy-eyed, wilted-ass helicopter mom. Except that hovering is too gentle a word for what I did. “Pursuing” is more like it. As soon as I set those kids free, my goal was to catch them back up again, which entailed endless Keystone Cop chase scenes on the playground.

  It didn’t take much experimentation to figure out that if I even dabbled in free-range parenting, my kids would end up in the ER and I’d end up institutionalized—and that was best-case scenario. Case in point: the Harvest Festival Fiasco.

  It was early October and our go-to Park Slope playground was hosting a Harvest Festival, filled with the old-school country-fair fare we urbanites don’t get much exposure to and thus go crazy for: pony rides, a petting zoo, pumpkin painting. By the time David and I rolled in with our double stroller, containing four-year-old Lorenzo and two-year-old Rosa, the place was mobbed like a subway platform at rush hour. To make matters worse, the kids immediately headed in opposite directions.

  “Owsah,” demanded Rosa, her pink bejeweled binky lodged in her mouth. In the sunlight, her eyes were the color of a Tiffany’s box, and like the gemstones you’d find inside, they glinted, cut with sharp edges.

  “Mommy doesn’t understand when you talk with the paci in your mouth,” I explained for the five millionth time that day. Eventually we’d have to pull the plug on the paci but it was the only thing that made Rosa remotely sedate and I couldn’t face a world without it quite yet.

  Rosa pulled the paci out of her mouth and enunciated clearly, “Orsey. Orrrr-seeeey.” Then she threw in for good measure, “Neigh, neigh, neigh.” I always got the feeling with her that I was the child and she was the beleaguered adult trying to be patient with my limited abilities but finding it very difficult. Having clarified her demand, she popped the paci back in her mouth and resumed sucking.

  “No, no, no! I don’t wanna go on the horsey!” shrieked Lorenzo. “Yucky yuck yuck! I wanna make a punkin.”

  Unlike any kid I’d ever met, Lorenzo actively disliked animals; he found them loud, smelly, dull, and coarse—in all respects revolting.

  “I’ll take him to the pumpkins and you do the pony ride,” David strategized. Divide and conquer was always a good plan and I knew David had opted for the pumpkins because, like Lorenzo, he had no love lost for creatures that stomped in their own feces.

  I left the double stroller in the Stroller Parking Area and securely took my toddler by the hand.

  “We’re going to the horseys,” I explained. “But you have to hold Mommy’s hand. No running away. Got it?”

  She nodded persuasively. And she did hold my hand, the whole ten steps to the ticket table. But as soon as she realized that we would not be immediately hopping on the pony’s back and would instead have to wait on a long, serpentine line, she let go and started climbing on the wooden fence that encircled the pony corral.

  “Hey there!” came a voice behind me. I turned and saw Heather, the mother of a boy in Lorenzo’s preschool class. Heather had three children: one Lorenzo’s age, one Rosa’s age, and a baby she was currently carrying in an indigo sling. All three of her offspring looked like they’d been bred to appear in Gap ads, with gray-blue eyes and chestnut hair, and all three of them were quiet and agreeable. They were interested in the right things—the son was crazy for soccer and the daughter, ballet—and they could entertain themselves for the better part of an hour by flipping through picture books. I’d had Heather’s son over for a playdate one day and had been depressed for hours afterward by how competently he’d been raised. He’d asked to wash his hands upon entering the apartment, cleaned up his blocks when he was done playing, chose milk over juice, and made sure to place his cup at what he called “twelve o’clock,” directly in front of his bowlful of Goldfish. My own son had somehow spilled the lidded cup all over his front, saturating the coat of cracker crumbs that had been deposited there. When Heather, ever mindful of reciprocity, had invited us over for a playdate, she’d offered the kids kale chips and smoothies. To this day, when I see smoothies, I feel shitty and subpar.

  Heather was the superest of Supermoms, and her seemingly effortless excellence at everything made me toxic with jealousy.

  “I was waving at you for like five minutes,” Heather laughed. “Then I thought I’d just come over.”

  “Oh yeah?” I said, embarrassed. “Sorry. It’s such a madhouse here.”

  I had made it a habit of blaming crowds and glare and distraction when I didn’t see people wave at me, and this time it was almost believable.

  “I know, huh. How great is all this?” she gushed, gesturing at the cornucopia of activities.

  “Yeah, it’s amazing,” I agreed, kicking myself for having taken a negative approach and trying now to meet her positivity or, ideally, outdo it. “Especially the pony rides. Rosa loves ponies.”

  I gestured over at Rosa who had one leg over the top of the fence.

  “No no no honey, we can’t ride the horsey yet,” I explained, hoping to mask my frustration with a singsong voice.

  Rosa glared at me as I pried her freakishly strong fingers off the fence. It wasn’t just the color of Rosa’s eyes that were intense. Like hands, they gesticulated. Her lids were limber, narrowing in anger, snapping open like window shades to express surprise or fear. The rhythm of her lashes told stories—fluttering from nerves, beating out a bass to concentrate, unblinking in defiance. And her blond brows, so energetic, danced in their places like back-up singers. Her eyes were like a stage where a spectacular was always in progress. Which was captivating, to be sure, but also, exhausting.


  As soon as I put Rosa back on the ground, she started climbing up the fencepost again. I felt like Sisyphus.

  “Where’s the rest of your brood?” I asked Heather.

  “Oh they’re around here somewhere,” she replied breezily. “Dmitri’s working today so I figured we’d spend the afternoon here.”

  If their dad isn’t watching them, I thought, who the hell is? How could she be so blithe and unconcerned about their lack of supervision? And, more importantly, how uncool and uptight did I seem by comparison?

  “But I should get them soon because I have to throw a dinner party tonight for Dmitri’s family and I still need to find a few more place settings. There’s going to be twenty of us.”

  The last remark almost sounded like a complaint but just before it veered into negativity, she hastened to add: “But it’ll be great and give the kids a chance to practice their Greek.”

  She’s making a homemade meal for twenty people? I marveled. I can’t get it together enough to make a bowl of pasta for two kids. And even if I could, our table wouldn’t fit six people, not even very thin guests who are used to confined spaces.

  My silent spiral into self-loathing was interrupted by Heather adding, “But you must know how it is. Your kids speak Italian, right?”

  “Ummm, not really,” I confessed. “I tried with Lorenzo a little but my husband doesn’t speak and I’m not so fluent anymore and it just got too hard.”

  “Yeah,” she nodded sympathetically. “It is hard.”

  Not so hard she couldn’t pull it off, I thought.

  “Oh, looks like you’re moving on up,” Heather observed, gesturing at the gap in the line in front of me, which I hadn’t noticed. Like people waving to me from down the block, gaps in the line were something I almost never noticed without having them pointed out.

  “Okay Rosa, let’s go,” I called out, turning to where my daughter had been a minute ago. But when my gaze reached the fencepost, I saw Rosa was not there. I looked down the fence to the right and down the fence to the left but she wasn’t there either. I felt the sick, sinking foreboding that had become so familiar since Rosa had started walking. And at that moment, I wanted to lay hands on Heather’s unwrinkled neck and strangle her, right there in front of a hundred kids waiting for a pony ride. Because, unjustified though it might be, I blamed Heather 100% for this particular instance of losing my daughter.