My daughter was 9 when her dad, David, died by suicide. I worried endlessly about the impact of the trauma and whether it might alter her ability to love so deeply ever again. Her dad, David, spent a month in a Portland psychiatric hospital that had no windows and no color. The nurses worked behind bulletproof glass. The patients were given crayons as a diversion to their racing and maddening thoughts. Most of the people there had suffered grave losses. David's roommate awoke three weeks prior to find his partner dead in his bed. Others had been traumatized by childhood sexual and physical abuse or abandonment. The lack of hope hung as heavy as the smell of the mealtime Brussels sprouts. The plastic utensils, replacements for sharp knives and forks, reminded me of how volatile our lives had become.
I visited David as often as I was allowed. "Sophie needs you," I pleaded. "She asks to see you every day."
"I can't imagine living life under a bridge," he told me one day, his eyes flat from sedation, and his speech thick and cotton-mouthed. "I ruined my business. I ruined us."
Twenty-four hours after his release from the hospital, David drove to a protected wilderness area in Oregon and ended his pain.
Even though I told myself that the last thing I needed was to be in a relationship, the truth was, I was desperate for intimacy. And yet, it felt like a terrible time to fall in love. It was even more awful to be faced with the grim and gray aftermath of suicide. Colin already had two small girls who desperately needed their daddy's attention. He'd been divorced five years, long enough to be comfortable watching his kids come and go -- tiny humans weighed down with the giant, heavy backpacks carried by dual household children. I was desperate for intimacy, but only with someone who understood loss and who relished my role as a mother. Colin and I found one another at the worst and best possible time.
Sophie didn't want another man in her life. She told me so one night as we cuddled before sleep, the twinkly sticky stars on her bedroom ceiling casting just enough light to reveal tears squeezing from the corners of her eyes.
"I can't remember Daddy," she said. "And I don't ever want Colin to replace him." Sophie's grief came like waves. One day she'd be up and scrubbed clean for school, the next day she would wail for hours, her heart breaking again and again.
I held her. Again and again.
Still, Sophie brightened when we saw Colin and his girls. We spent time together at the local athletic club because swimming was one of the things everyone liked to do. Colin's girls, ages 8 and 5, looked like little colts with legs too long and wild, thick auburn curly hair. At age 9, long-legged and athletic, Sophie easily passed as the blonde older sister.
After several months, jealousies and insecurities began to bubble and Colin devised a timekeeping method so the girls wouldn't fight over him. He allotted five minutes of individual time per girl, to be towed on a plastic mattress, piggybacked around the pool, or lifted into the air and thrown into the water. He called it The Watch.
One day, when it was Sophie's turn, she whispered something in Colin's ear.
He nodded, and then he moved his hands underneath her as she lay looking up at the pool ceiling, barely moving.
I knew exactly what she was doing. It was just like that time in Costa Rica when David had taken her into a cave with what looked like a million stars on the ceiling. He'd floated her on her back so that she could pretend she was watching the night sky.
I married Colin, believing as I still do, that he is fair, compassionate, and that he would offer the same kindness to my daughter that he showed his two children.
Sophie and I were still recovering from trauma. But Colin's concerns were of the everyday kind.
"It is the hardest thing I've ever done," Colin told me one night when we were clearing the dinner table.
Sophie's dirty dishes in the sink frustrated him. His penchant for order frustrated me. In a household as emotionally complicated as ours, it seemed ridiculous to spend time making our house look like a hotel. Colin tacked lists of things he thought were necessary all over the house:
Return items you borrow,
pick up your clothing,
close drawers and cupboards, clean out your tub, etc., etc.
clean out your tub, etc., etc.
I made a list in response and tacked it in the family room.
Be kind,
laugh a lot,
try your best, and look for love.
Colin chuckled when he walked by my sign carrying a load of freshly laundered towels. "It's so much easier to love when the dishes are clean." he said. I knew what he meant. In a year of upheaval, order eased Colin's worry about his new role as a father to three.
Of course there were days he became overwhelmed. Every father is, especially with blended families, everyone seemingly vying for your attention and time. He asked a wise counselor of his, "How do you love equally when you have a stepchild and biological children?"
His counselor answered, "You don't. You have infinite love."
When we fought, it was over the things we'd lost: Colin's sense of control and order, upset by the complications of a blended family. I'd lost a partner who would share that look parents give one another at their kids' ballet recital or baseball games. That moment of connection so profound it doesn't require a counselor's prompting.
Months after David's suicide, I was still bolting upright in the middle of the night, screaming loudly, my heart-beating so wildly I thought I was having a heart attack. Night after night, Colin drew me into him and whispered, "It's a dream, baby. It's a dream."
It wasn't a dream. It was the night terrors accumulated during months of witnessing David's descent into madness. It was my grief in the absence of the one man who loved my daughter unconditionally. And, it was my construct of how life should be shattering in the form of terrified screams. Colin held me.
Colin included Sophie in the Daddy Daughter dance, a yearly event in which all the dads at our athletic club dress up and dance the night away with their girls. The first year Sophie attended, the theme was "Bond." We rented an old white limo and bought matching black dresses for the girls. Colin was tall and slender, with salt and pepper hair and a black and white tux. We toasted with sparkling cider and they were off.
I drank too many glasses of wine waiting for them to return home, anxious to hear how such an important outing unfolded. Sophie walked through the door first, her curls limp, her face still sweaty from dancing. She was carrying the black dress shoes she'd removed after the first dance.
"It was fun," she said before I could even ask. "But I got tired of waiting for my turn to dance with Colin. I danced with my friend Helena." She collapsed in a heap on the edge of her bed.
Colin's sense of order and fairness had failed, or at least it had seemed that way to Sophie.
An avocado pit broke in my throat. Heartache and hope dissolved into huge tears, then hiccups, then full out sobs as I curled up next to her in her bed.
"Mom," Sophie admonished. "It's not THAT big of deal." She could not have understood the fierce protectiveness I'd adopted after her dad's death. No one would hurt her again. Not if I had anything to do with it.
Relationships, especially blended ones, are tricky, ever-changing and emotionally demanding. I knew the statistics by heart: Blended families have a divorce rate of 75 percent. Those are tough odds.
In Sophie's bed, I confronted myself, and the mistaken belief that my partner should be capable of navigating the toughest terrain of all: managing to be a father to two girls who didn't see him nearly enough, a step-father to a girl whose loyalty to her own dad never faltered, and a husband to a person who couldn't take another hit to the heart.
"Leave the Watch home," I said to him one rainy Portland afternoon as we packed up coats and umbrellas for an outing together. "Let's just see what happens."
Colin's body straightened and his shoulders lifted. We'd released the burden of "fairness." It had been a cheap substitute for our shared anxiety about blending a family. He smiled a haggard smile.
There wasn't a single complaint as we stomped rain puddles and walked through the Japanese gardens. Maybe it was the practice of the Watch. Maybe it was that we'd finally learned to just let it be.
Before she left for college, I climbed the stairs to the family room to find Sophie texting on the couch, her long legs in the short shorts that only teenagers can get away with, her blonde hair tangled and fanning out over a pillow. She looked up briefly from her phone and smiled, a moment of recognition, and then back to texting.
My knees buckled. She would leave soon and these common and wonderful moments would be relegated to holiday visits or Face time. She belonged to a much bigger world now, with friends and boys and decisions that weren't mine to influence. Her thumbs clicked a million miles a minute and I mouthed, "I love you." I pulled the door closed and felt my heart thump.
Later, I would see the funny videos and texts she was sending. It wasn't a boy or a girlfriend she was talking to. It was Colin, who was downstairs working in his office at the same time. They were laughing about a video of a pig licking ice cream, and a Chihuahua dancing to Mexican music. The kinds of nonsense friends send to one another when they are bored.
We're often told love is infinite, magic, or pre-ordained. But Sophie's love for Colin was built on a series of her choices and of her decisions. Sophie's love for Colin only bloomed once I got out of the way. It was never what I imagined. And yet, it endures. When I think of how Sophie builds love it is not the cartoonish image of an instant connection, an arrow to the heart. It is brick by brick, moment by moment. In her own way, and on her own time.
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If you -- or someone you know -- need help, please call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. If you are outside of the U.S., please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention for a database of international resources.