Emily's bedtime ritual consists of me lying in the dark with her while she tosses and turns for 30-60 minutes.  It's hard not to feel like it's a waste of time for me, since she doesn't really need me for anything.  So two days ago, I just wished her a "Good night" and left her to go to sleep on her own.  Thirty minutes later, I peeked in and she was snoring away.  Yesterday went smoothly as well.

Today was different.  I gave her a kiss good night and left, and she came out 10 minutes later, bleary-eyed.  I picked her up and put her back in the bed, thinking that was that.  A couple minutes later, I thought heard her say something.  I ran back to the room, and I found her on her feet, her face buried into the side of the mattress, crying her eyes out.  I recognized that cry immediately: it was the cry of "I can be big, I need to be big, but right now I feel so small." 

So I scooped her up and snuggled with her on the bed like old times.  It took a little while for her breathing to slow back down and for her to succumb to sleep, but I stayed with her, my heart in pieces.  I thought about how many times I cried like that, and how I still cry like that, and how incredibly lonely and hopeless it feels to have a huge task suddenly foisted on inexperienced shoulders. 

Every time it happens to me, I look around for someone to share the load, and usually I'm out of luck.  In this day and age, by the time you're despairing, people want nothing to do with you.  They want a wink and a smile, Mae West and Jackie Kennedy, effortless perfection.  They have too much of their own problems to wrestle with to worry about someone else's.  Or maybe they don't really but they claim they do so they don't have to help you pick up the mess.

Well, fuck that shit; for as long as Emily wants me, I'll be there to help her when she feels small.  Even if my very presence causes her extreme grief and embarrassment and she seeks comfort elsewhere, I'll be warming the bench on the sidelines.  Because one day, that feeling will sit like a lion on her chest, and it will take all her strength just to gulp for air.  Maybe it will be school pressure, a broken relationship, or the weight of her own ambition, but she will look around for an ally, and all she'll find are more lions.   I hope she'll call me then, or at least the morning after.  I'll wait with her for the lions to get bored and leave.