Age: 5 or 15?

I am always amazed at the things that Grace internalizes.

The girls were fighting over a toy of Grace's tonight, so I put the toy in time out and had them work out their issues. I was about to give the toy back to Grace when she walked in and told me that she had to tell me something. I braced myself for a "Mommy you hurt my feelings when you took away my toy." I was already coming up with responses in my head. Then she lays this one on me:

"Mommy, I don't have a place where I belong."

I was floored. My mind backed up 10 feet and then scrambled to find a response. I ended up probing for more information. I asked her why she felt that way, and she said that she didn't like our new house, and that she needed to move to Arizona to be with her Grandma. I guess I didn't realize how out of place she feels- not much different from me. I assured her that she belonged with her mommy and daddy and that we loved her and wanted her. I'm not sure if I convinced her, but she did run off and play.

The second shock of the night is when she came into the kitchen crying (again, I braced myself for some petty disagreement) and out came this:

"Mommy, I'm sad because I really want to marry daddy."

Now here's some back story before I continue. Grace has recently started to recognize romantic love and expressed that she wanted to marry daddy. She constantly tries to kiss people on the lips- even coming up with ways of tricking people into it. It's all normal and cute (to a point- repeated attempts to kiss us with the same trick gets old). We did have to tell her, though, that daddy is already married to mommy and so she should try to find someone else to marry. We thought that she had accepted this, since this past week she had told us that she couldn't marry daddy because he was already married, so she was going to marry Max. We took that as progress, but love cannot be quenched so easily. Ok, back to wanting to marry daddy...

So, I took her in my arms as she cried, "I really, really want to marry daddy, but he already got married to you when I was a baby." (Well, you actually weren't born yet, honey.)

I told her how I understood why she loved daddy. He is handsome, and funny, and nice. She agreed through her sobs. "Yeah, daddy is so handsome... I just want to marry him."

Trying to hide the smile that was bursting behind my lips, I promised her that if she still wanted to marry daddy when she turned 18 (the age, i explained, when one is allowed to get married) then she should come to me and we would talk about it. After a few repetitions of the promise she seemed to be mollified, and she allowed me to return to cooking.

My mind flashes back now to a time when I was probably not much older than Grace, and totally attached to my mother, and I asked her if I could live with her after I got married. My mother assured me that I could. Of course she knew that I would want my own place when I got married, just as I knew today that at 18, the last thing that Grace will want is to marry her father (and if she still does, that talk I promised will be very weird). But in that moment, with the limited maturity that we own, we cannot imagine our desires changing. It's interesting to be on the other side of that coin- to know her future self better than she does.

On a side note, Grace related the whole story to Kaylon at dinner, which caused him to exclaim how much he loves being the dad of girls (can we say ego boost?). Course, I don't know if he'll get the same treatment from Liliana... she was trying to put him in jail and kill him tonight, as she threw her head back and let out her evil laugh. "Ha ha ha... he he he!"