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For the past two years, I’ve kept a pile of candy by my front door. Halloween, Christmas, and Easter come knocking every year, but I don’t give it away. This candy remains by the door like the Queen’s Guard.
It’s been exactly 2 years since I put it there. I was dating a woman at the time, but the candy wasn’t for her. It was for her child, a little 7-year-old girl whom I had fallen in love with. Every time I pass my front door I think of her and taste the sweetness of that little girl’s giggles. I barely even notice the candy anymore, kind of like I barely notice the sun but if the sun went out, you know, insert favorite cliché’. Those candies are sunbeams lighting a dark corner in my dreams. If I ever got rid of them, I’d have to admit I might never see her again. So the candy stays.
Let’s call her Nae Nae because it was the summer of “Watch me whip, watch me Nae Nae!” I had that song memorized because she ran around singing it all summer long. It became my new mantra. “Watch me, watch me!” was that summer’s anthem, and when she sang it, this arid earth sprang to life. And watch her, I did. All the time. True story: I had the dance down pretty good too since she insisted on teaching me. I was her audience and my job was to cheer for her while she performed. I mastered the standing ovation.
Best. Job. Ever.
Oh, how I miss that. A lifetime of striving for applause shrinks in the shadow of that experience. To be a great audience for a child brimming with life is the royal vocation. There’s no greater joy than to be a sunbeam smiling upon the tender skin of a sapling. Once you get a taste of that, everything else dims in contrast. If you ever let it go, a famine sweeps across your face. That’ll make you think twice about leaving. You’ll write sappy articles about it for years. But, I digress.
I couldn’t help sneaking candies to Nae Nae when her mother wasn’t looking. I know I wasn’t supposed to do that. Her teeth were all jacked up, and she was already going 160 MPH all the time. Her mother was doing a spectacular job regulating what she ate. Somehow supervising her while she brushed her teeth fell on me. Perfect karma, I suppose. It was an epic task that took about 30 minutes, and I lived for it. I taught her to hum the ABC’s while brushing to make sure she brushed thoroughly, but that turned it into an MTV Live! performance. She didn’t hum. She sang. She danced. She made me laugh. It was the Golden Half-Hour: the best 30 minutes of my life.
But even that paled in comparison to the joy that came next: putting her on my shoulders and chugging around the house like a choo-choo train while she kissed everybody a good night. There was this little bedtime routine we had which involved pretending to dive bomb into the bed, burying her alive under the blankets, and singing lullabies to her. I made up silly lyrics to “Row, row, row your boat” just to hear that giggle. Nothing I ever did will measure up to that. With Nae Nae, I won the Nobel Prize for Joy.
So I started stockpiling candy for her. There wasn’t enough candy in the world to equal the sugar churning in my coffers for Nae Nae. All we had to do was lock eyes and the drumbeat would start. Her father-hunger filled my belly. Maybe it was the first time I ever felt full. When I met her she was a 7-year-old little dynamo that weaseled her way out of my dreams and into my arms. During my meditations, I’d sit and feel her bee-hive of giggles in my chest, and sink into that.
So yeah, every time I passed candy, I was grabbing some of that, yo. I’m guilty. I kept a stockade of sweets in my sock drawer which I’d bring out whenever she did something worth praising. I’m sure this made me a bad father-figure.
Maybe giving her candy wasn’t the problem. In the classic “The Drama of the Gifted Child”, Alice Miller details the error of using children to feed our own hunger. The sin of many parents, I suppose. I wasn’t supposed to do that, but I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with a little kid, either. I was supposed to be falling in love with the mother. But that wasn’t happening. The relationship between the adults went in one direction, and between me and the child in another. I found myself running over to her house every day because I wanted to see the little girl. I wanted to stand in her light the way I wanted to raise my chin and let the sun kiss my face in June. When the relationship ended, I wasn’t done giving Nae Nae candy. So I left them in that spot by my door.
Maybe I should have tried harder with the mother.
Strike maybe from the record.
Maybe I shouldn’t have been thinking of myself so much.
Strike me, myself & I from the record.
A year went by, then two. Everything in my life changed except for the candy. They’re still in the same spot. And there’s still that soft, warm hum buzzing in my chest whenever I think of Nae Nae. Or whenever I hear that song.
Sometimes I wonder if she can feel me missing her. I was hoping I’d run into her again someday so I can give her the candies. One day, while jogging around the lake, I saw her. She and her mother rode right past me on a bicycle. We were going in opposite directions. I stopped and watched what-could-have-been race past me. Caution: too much running can lead to standing still. Sliding doors always lead to wondering: what if?
In August 2015 I wrote a tear-jerker love letter to Nae Nae. I sent it to Wilhelm Cortez for publication in The Good Men Project. “I lost a daughter”, I told him. “Here’s an article about my broken heart”. Wilhelm happens to be one of those editors who always gets the sap out of the tree. He suggested the story was really about the consequence men experience when they fail to make a commitment. When a man fails to make a commitment to a woman with children, he fails the world. The hidden rot rises to the surface, no matter how much candy you’re saving up. From the “me, myself & I” angle, it’s a broken heart. From the “you” angle, it’s a broken promise. Broken promises create broken children. “Write about that”, Wilhelm said.
I wasn’t ready for that, so I buried my grief in a folder labeled “Missed Opportunities”. It’s a big folder.
Sometimes you have to lose something to realize what precious really is. When a child is in the picture, there is an unparalleled treasure in that rainbow, but the stakes are exponentially greater. If you can’t go the distance, its better you don’t start. The wake of that loss is called a tsunami. Losing a woman in that situation is the least of what a man loses. When I walked out, I drowned in my own naivete, clinging to unrequited hope. Instead of being present for a child, I kept that candy sitting there, waiting. Denial doesn’t see the rotting. This loss opened my eyes to the seriousness of dating a woman with small children. Every step of that courtship is a walking meditation. A man has to be mindful, to step slowly with purpose and deliberation. He has to watch carefully where each step lands. He has to be purposeful about where he intends to go, and if he’s not sure, to wait until he’s clear.
In the meantime, whenever I look at that candy, I see a reminder of the sweetest thing I’ve ever known: “Watch me whip, watch me Nea Nea. Watch me, watch me!” I wish I were still watching you.
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