I am looking at the neurosurgeon’s business card. I’m supposed to call the number this morning to schedule Jessica’s surgery. I will talk to June, whom I have talked to before, and she will be very kind, and it will be very easy, in the sense that she will not be a pain in the ass and put me on hold fifteen times.

I know what the call will set in motion, and I am just fresh out of any capacity to deal with it. I have been looking for my anger and my bitterness, my rage at the injustice of what the universe has done to my daughter, and I can’t find it. The rage usually carries me through. But it has disappeared, and there is just a hard ache where it was, and I don’t quite know what to do next. I think maybe it means this time I am broken, and the universe has won, and yet I can’t even seem to get worked up over that. I am not even incensed over the dumbass things people have been saying to me. “They’re trying to find the right thing to say,” I think, and you know that’s just wrong. When have I ever cared what people meant instead of what they said?

Here is a thing I will never forget. Jessica, in the plastic chair next to me, listening to the neurosurgeon speak, the paleness of her face when he says what the studies have shown.

“I thought we already did surgery to make me better,” she says.

Yes, the neurosurgeon tells her. Yes, but it didn’t work, and your condition has worsened.  He takes her face in his hands. “I am so sorry, Jessie,” he says. “I am so so sorry.”

That is when the tears start. They’re not the huge wracking sobs like I will have later on, alone. Her tears are quiet. She is devastated. Worse than that.

Jessica is afraid.

She is afraid because I have always told her the truth, as if I couldn’t have just lied to her and saved us all a lot of trouble. What would have been wrong with lying? I could have started when she was young, and wanted to know about the scar on her skull, and I could have told her anything. I did not have to tell her about the disease she was born with, or the way the doctors took out half her brain and threw it away. And when she was older, diagnosed with another even scarier disease, I could have lied about that. “No worries,” is what I could have said.  “It’s not a big deal.”

It’s not like I don’t lie all the time to other people for the sake of expediency. “I do love that new haircut and no you don’t look like you’ve gained fifteen pounds.” You’d think I could lie just as well to my own daughter.

The problem is that a long time ago, I enumerated the rules that Jessica and I live our relationship by, and one of those rules is, “We will never lie to each other.” Which, now that I consider it, is a stupid rule. We have other rules, like, “We love each other no matter what,” and I don’t know why I couldn’t have just left it at that. But no, in a stroke of idiocy, which at the time I mistook for wisdom, I came up with “We will never lie to each other,” and so we never have. A long time later I realized this is because Jessica does not know how, so we didn’t really need the rule in the first place. But it was too late by then.

“Tell me what we are going to do,” she demands, grabbing my wrist as we sit at a table in the small snack shop on the second floor of the hospital. Her father is buying her a Diet Coke. She is clutching a pink stuffed dog in her other hand. “What did the doctor mean by loss of function?”

And so I tell her the truth because I always do. It is only later, too late, that I think, “What the hell would have been wrong with a lie?”

But I tell her what loss of function means, and why a skin graft is needed for this surgery and not for the last one, and where the skin will be taken from, and I even tell her what the risks of the surgery are because it is her life and her body, and she ought to know. That’s what I say to myself, what I have always said to myself: the world will try to disempower my daughter but I never will. And for some dumbass reason, I think this means I can never lie to her.

I answer every question I can. She cries a little more, but everything about her is dignified. And sometimes when it hurts too much for me to speak, her father steps in, gently explaining. He’s always been the world’s worst liar and so he doesn’t even try.

“I do not want to be in a wheelchair,” she says.

“I know, honey,” I say. “And that is why the doctor says you need this surgery.”

“The bandage will hurt coming off.”

“Probably ,” I say.

“They always do.” She looks at the pink stuffed dog. She takes a sip of Diet Coke. I hate the fucking universe.

“Should we get some lunch?” her father says.

“Lunch would be good.”

I have no appetite. I’m a stress eater, and this is the first time in my life when I can’t eat anything. There is something wrong with me, and I don’t know what.

“Will you tell Lisa tonight?” Jessica asks her father. Lisa is his partner, or at least that’s the name I give her on my blog.

“Probably.”

I am glad he has someone to talk to. We have always been able to make decisions about Jessica together, but we have never been able to help each other through.

“Ready to go?” He has Jessica today, and I won’t see her again until tomorrow. We take the elevator to the parking garage and they get off on their floor and I go down one more, alone in the elevator, thinking how many times I have been here before. You would think it would get easier, or that I would learn to expect the damned disasters, but it doesn’t and I don’t.  I am just as stunned this time as every single time before.

I should have lied to her, I think, but it’s too late now.  Or maybe someone should have lied to me. I think I would have liked that a lot.

But no one ever thinks of lying to me. I don’t know why. I’m a fairly gullible person, and I’d be happy to believe in unicorns if someone would just lie to me in a convincing way.

My footsteps echo in the parking garage. I get in the car. I will have to call the neurosurgery office in the morning but right now I just have to go home and do some work. I do, and I pride myself on the fact that no one would ever guess about the wrenching pain. The work has always saved me, it has always been my solace. Jessica’s father has his partner, and I have my books.

I don’t know what Jessica has. This is the first time I believe that we are not enough, her father and I, that we cannot keep the fear at bay for her any longer, that she will have to find a way to do that herself. It’s part of growing up, I suppose, though most people are never tested this way. Maybe that’s why I have always told her the truth, so that she will learn to be strong enough to face it.

I wish she didn’t have to be. I wish she had been given a life like other children have. I wish I could give her mine. I have made those wishes for nearly fifteen years, and today I have one more. Oh my beautiful girl, I think. Please make it through one more time. 

Last year, Jessica and I were talking about our wishes, because we like to wish upon stars. And every time we do, we have the same three wishes: that she will grow big and strong, that we will always have good work to do, and that we will live happily ever after.

That day, she added another wish. “I would like to be like Harry Potter.”

“Do you mean you’d like to be a wizard?” I asked. “Because there isn’t really any such thing as magic.”

“I know there is no such thing as magic,” she said. “But I would like to have a cloak, like he wears. And a magic wand. And I would pretend to be Harry Potter. It would be wonderful to be Harry Potter.”

This did not seem like a terribly extravagant wish to fulfill, so I bought her a cloak and a magic wand, and she wore the cloak and carried the wand on every errand we embarked on for the next three months, and it is a testament to how much joy Jessica took in it that everyone who saw her responded to her joy, and not to the oddness of a teenager dressing like Harry Potter on a random day in May.

“That is a very wonderful cloak,” they would say.

“I know it!” she would beam. “I am just like Harry Potter. Would you like to see my magic wand?”

“Yes, of course,” they would say, and smile.

And so one day in the early summer, she said to me, “Do you have a special wish that we should wish?”

“No, our three wishes are all I need.”

“A wish is not about a thing you need,” she said. How did I get to be a grown up and not know these things? “It is about a thing you want. What is a thing you have always wanted?”

The things I have wished for are too painful to talk about. I tried to come up with something that she would understand, and that I could stand having conversations about for the next three years.

“Well,” I said. “When I was younger, maybe about your age, I thought, ‘When I grow up, I will always have fresh flowers every week.’ I have always loved flowers. And I thought if you had enough money left over for flowers, you would be doing pretty well in life.”

“Daffodils are your favorite,” Jessica said, because she remembers things like that. “And then daisies. After that is tulips and crocuses, because they mean springtime.”

“That’s exactly right.”

“That is a very easy wish,” Jessica said. “We can make that wish come true.”

“I suppose. But we don’t need to.”

“We don’t need to?” Jessica was puzzled. “I don’t understand that. What good is a wish if you just let it sit there?”

That week, we went to the grocery store, and Jessica said, “There is one more thing before we check out.”

“What?”

“I will show you.”

She’s a smart girl. She knew if she said, “We should get flowers,” it would be too easy for me to say no. I am very good at saying no to myself. But if she showed me the flowers, well, I would not be able to resist. So that was exactly what she did.

“I think the pink roses are beautiful,” she said. “They are flowers for you, but don’t you think the pink roses are beautiful?”

Because she wanted them so much, it was easier for me to say yes.

By the next week, they had faded and been thrown away, but when we were at the grocery store, Jessica said again, “There is one more thing,” and I was going to say no, but they had orange Gerbera daisies, which are the happiest flowers in the world, and so I got them.

It has gone like that, week after week, ever since I made my wish. Fresh flowers every week, just like I promised myself all those years ago. Because what good is a wish if you just let it sit there?

Jessica and I are reading the Lord of the Rings series. A couple of months ago, looking for something to do on a weekend, I asked if she would like to watch the movies.

“I do not know,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “How about we watch the first one and if you don’t like it, we stop.”

“That is good. I will try to like it.”

So we watched The Fellowship of the Ring, and she loved it and we had to watch the other two and then we had to order the books, including The Hobbit. There is no movie of The Hobbit yet, and so she had a little bit of trouble following along with all of the action and asked exhaustive questions. (“Reading  is like a movie, only better, because we can talk as much as we want!” she said.)  I tried to say, “I don’t know” a time or two, but it quickly became clear that this was an unacceptable answer, and we would have to look it up on the computer anyway, so as you can imagine by the time we got through with that book, knowing we had about 1200 more pages to go in the series, I was sort of wondering why I thought introducing her to Tolkien was such a good idea.

We brought Tolkien with us on our trip to D.C., and read him every night, Jessica riveted on every word and discussing everyone’s motivations and actions and words. “What does alas mean?” and “Why did his eyes fall on the floor? I do not understand how they got out of his head.”

On our third day, we are walking on the National Mall. It had rained the night before, and on the right side of the mall there are no puddles, but on the left there are many, something to do with how the area is graded, I suppose.

“If we walk on the right side, we can avoid the puddles,” I say to her.

“No,” Jessica says positively. “No, I will show you the way through.”

She takes my hand and bends over the green, placing her steps carefully around each puddle, leading me through an unnecessarily labyrinth and suddenly I know exactly what she is doing.

“This is like Frodo,” I say. “In the marshes outside Mordor.”

She gives me her smile and picks her way across, gripping my hand in hers. She is a hobbit, bearing a terrible burden, but she will be strong enough to see it through; she is the chosen one, though she never asked to be the ring-bearer.

This, I think. This is why I read Tolkien aloud to her every night, and answer every question. This is why I read every overwrought sentence, every purple passage, every confusing battle scene, every single one of the fifteen hundred pages. This is why.

The seasonal scolds are out in full force, so no matter what you are doing or are not doing this holiday season, you are surely doing it in a regrettable fashion and you should be ashamed of yourself.  This, however, is not going to be a blog post about what you should or should not be doing, or how you should be doing it with the right amount of gratitude no matter what kind of crap this year has flung at you, or anything of the sort; carping as a social activity is something I reserve for friends. You’re welcome.

I like Christmas, and celebrate it despite being, shall we say, an unbeliever. I figure any occasion I can eat cookies and give presents is a good one. Besides, our current Christmas is just the most recent version of a celebration that goes back millennia and which has always served basically as a way to take people’s minds off how cold they are.

We have almost always put up an artificial tree, and this year the tree is pink. I spotted it at our local Borders last year after the holidays but before Borders fell entirely to pieces.

“Oh my god, I have to get this tree,” I said the moment I saw it.

Jessica was a little doubtful about the whole endeavor. “It is not green,” she said.

“It’s pink! I love this tree. I have got to have this tree. In fact, I have just enough Borders gifts cards to buy this tree.”

“But it is not green.”

“Try to be flexible, darlin’,” I said and handed over the gift cards to the kid behind the counter.

Jessica sighed. “I will try. But it is hard.”

This year when we unfold the tree, I say ecstatically, “I still love this tree!”

“It is a pink tree,” says Jessica. “And the tree skirt is blue velvet with sequins all over it. We used to have a reindeer tree skirt. And a green tree.”

“But we needed a new tree anyway. The old one was falling to pieces. And so was the tree skirt. I’d had them both for fifteen years. That’s a long time for an artificial tree.”

“But we could have gotten a green tree.”

“Green is so pedestrian! So predictable! I love this tree.”

“It is a very nice tree,” she says. “For a pink tree.”

“You remember how you made me buy that purple spider with sparkles for Halloween, even though I said ‘whoever heard of a purple spider with sparkles for Halloween?’”

“Yes.”

“This is my purple spider.”

She considers this for a while. “That is a metaphor. It is not a simile, or you would have used ‘like’ or ‘as’.”

“Yes.”

“It is a metaphor because this is not a purple spider. It is a Christmas tree.”

“Exactly.”

“And you will put presents under it.”

“Yes.”

“Then it is fine.”

I kiss the top of her head. “Thank you.”

“And now you have to put the lights on the tree.”

“Yes.”

“I will go into my bedroom until you are done.”

I do not swear as much as she thinks I do, except when I am putting lights on the tree. “Good idea,” I say.

Later, when I am done, she and I take turns picking ornaments to hang on the tree and then we hang stockings on the mantel.

“Do you think Santa will get me the present I want?”

I have tried to explain to her that Santa is not real, but she does not believe me. She treats it like religious faith, a choice a person can make. (“You do not have to believe in Santa,” she said. “Although that may be why he never leaves you anything.”) Once, when I tried to explain that I am Santa, she suggested that perhaps I was just trying to steal Santa’s thunder. At this point, I am pretty sure she has won the battle and I’m half-convinced that if I didn’t play Santa, there would still be presents from Santa under the tree.

“I am sure he will do his best,” I say.

“Because I really want that Santa Paws dog. It would be wonderful.”

“Well,” I say, “I bet he’ll do all he can to find one for you.” Which I know he will.

“Santa is very good to children.” It is the only time of the year that she will admit she is a child. The rest of the time she is not a child, she is a teenager and very nearly grown up.

“Yes.”

“He loves Christmas and wants all the children to have something to play with.”

“I would guess so.”

“And at the North Pole he and his employees work very hard. I do not believe in elves, but I think he has employees. Like Dad.”

“You’re probably right.”

“And do you think he plays Christmas music while he works?”

“Almost certainly.”

“But I bet he does not have a pink tree.”