magic

Frances: Mama, will you just tell me? Is Santa Claus real? Is it just you and Papa who put presents in the stockings?

Me, caught off guard, looking up from the winter squash I have been hacking away at: Well...what do you think?

Frances: Mama. You always say that. Just answer, yes or no.

I look at her. I have no idea what to say.

Frances: I hate lying and secrets, Mama.

Me: Me too.

Frances: So please just tell me.

So I did. I told her that Santa Claus is just a story. She got me with that bit about lying and secrets, which is why for the first years of parenthood I felt squeamish perpetuating the Santa Claus myth, unable to meet my eager toddler's eyes when the subject of elves came up. Over the years though, her delight trumped my qualms about lying. When she was about 18 months old, Frances discovered the Santa Tube, which is her direct line to the North Pole. Mike had casually picked an empty cardboard tube that had recently held gift wrap up off the floor shortly before Christmas. Gently placing one end on Frances's ear, he had whispered through the tube: Frances. Hello, Frances.

Eyes wide, her face registered a shock of immediate recognition. Santa??


After a few beats, during which Mike and I looked at each other over her wee head with raised eyebrows, he whispered Yes. What else could he say?

She asked him all kinds of improbable things, and he answered kindly. Then it was time to hang up, and the tube became a piece of cardboard again. Every year since, there has been at least one Santa Tube incident. Frances sits there, sometimes watching Mike speak into his end of the tube, and though at age five at least some part of her growing rational mind realized that the voice she heard was most likely her Papa's, a louder, imaginative and exuberant part of her knew it was Santa. 

Last year she also wondered often about whether or not Santa was real. But we never went all the way there; she didn't really want to know. But after she lost a tooth a few weeks ago she asked me point blank if I was the tooth fairy. I told her the truth. I should have known what she'd ask me about next.

After I told her this afternoon, she turned back to her book and I turned back to my squash. A few minutes later she looked up and plaintively asked, Really Mama? Really?

I nodded. I couldn't turn back now. Her lower lip began to tremble. Then the words tumbled out: Mama, now I can't believe any magic is real! You shouldn't have told me; now for the rest of my life there won't be any magic!

All I could do was sit down next to her and pull her into my lap. She clung to me and said that now that there was no tooth fairy and no Santa, how could any other magic things be real? Her days of believing in magic had come to a sudden, tragic end.

I heard myself say all kinds of awful things about how miraculous nature is and how magical Christmas morning with my family is for me. Terrible, thick-headed, adult sorts of things, and Frances finally stopped me, explaining that that stuff is not the kind of magic she was talking about. Fairies, elves, wizardry, trolls, centaurs, magic potions, gnomes, Narnia, Hogwarts, all of it! It is a beautiful way of looking at the world, colored by the expectation of real magical mythical stuff that very well may be lurking behind any old tree in the backyard.

Well. I think we resuscitated that mode of anticipating magic, one that I was very attached to myself as a child and never quite let go of. When I told her that I thought magic is hidden, and that we adults are probably too busy, too loud, and too mired in multi-tasking to notice it (which might explain why I haven't encountered any fairies lately), I wasn't lying. I told her that children, who can be quiet, observant and dreamy all at the same time, are the people most likely to encounter magic. It was easy to meet her gaze. So she accepted that, and a few minutes later jumped off my lap to develop some new yoga asanas with Gabriel in the living room. (The sort that involve leaping off the couch.)

Then later when my sweet girl was getting tearful at bedtime, exhausted yet unwilling to go to sleep, my eyes caught this little notebook on her desk. If you can't make it out, it reads:

Meagan
67 inches tall
very sick and maniac
clean nose
slow heart beat

I started laughing. I remembered that I had agreed to be the patient for her and Gabriel a couple of days ago, and without my realizing it, like a good and thorough doctor, Frances had taken notes. I yelped like a wild dog when I received my fake flu shot; apparently that's what my 'maniac' diagnosis was based on.

I know it's not the same as meeting a Fairy Queen, but there was something about reading that medical note that was no less incredible. I now know better than to make such a claim with a six year old, but I can share this with you.
It is magic that my daughter wasn't before, and now she is. I lived twenty-eight years without her and then all at once she arrived, an alien, endlessly fascinating being. Frances came from us, but she is not us. She is utterly, completely herself. How irrational, unexpected, beautiful, and strange. How very, very magical.