Audacious

When you scream, you test your volume. Higher and higher you go until someone responds. You do it on purpose. I know because once when I asked why you screamed so loudly, you said, "I want to make sure you know I'm upset."

You are all too aware of how big the world is. You've recognized its shadows and you know that things can lurk in there. But you, at 5, don't know what those things are just yet, so you hold on to things you do know about. Zombies. They loom at every turn. When you sit in your room you have to face the doorway so that the zombies can't sneak up on you. When you sleep, you wrap a blanket over your head to keep the zombie dreams out.

I can reassure you that they aren't real, but that's pointless. You know they aren't real, but the bad things still skulk -- you know they do -- and since you don't have a name for it, you use the only one you have. Zombies, zombies, zombies.

You find comfort in the familiar. You want to watch the same movies and TV shows over and over again. The idea of watching a new movie is met with flat rejection because the unknown aspect freaks you out. Except, for some reason, when we were watching the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader. You wandered in when it was high drama time. The heroes were battling a massive sea monster. You stared, wide-eyed, as I explained about suspense and its function in movies. "Movies always want you to feel suspense because it keeps you watching. And they do that so that when it all works out, you can feel a big sense of relief. The more suspense, the bigger your relief when it all works out. And everyone likes that feeling. Watch; you'll see." And this made perfect sense to you. You watched the whole thing and asked to watch it again, "but just the end part."

Reason and logic are your favorite things. If I can explain anything to you well enough, you will sit and consider it for the longest time. You are eager to soak up new information, and you remember things so easily. You are an avid reader already, and you love it like I always did and still do. Every night you ask to read in bed, and even if it's late or way past your bedtime, I can never say no. The other night you were reading "Fish Out of Water" -- a 64 page book! -- and I was surprised at how easily you took on the word "cellar." How quickly you pulled that word up when you encountered it again on the next page.

When you laugh you put your whole self into it. Your eyes crinkle at the corners and they are impossibly light then. Your cheeks crease into dimples and your body shakes. Your face is transformed into a paroxysm of joy and it's a joy that puts any other joy in the world to shame. You have the quirkiest sense of humor, venturing all the way over into inappropriate at times. When you think something is funny you expect everyone to get the joke, and if they don't, you repeat it louder. And I've never asked why, but if I did I bet you would say, "I want you to make sure you know that it's funny."

It is so easy to hurt your feelings and then sometimes you are impenetrable. Your sister is a good litmus for this. Sometimes she comes at you with every ill intention she can muster and you will dissolve and wail and screech with sorrow. Sometimes you lash out physically and grab or pinch or pull. And sometimes you retreat, blanking her out altogether. Sometimes you just wrap her in a giant hug and kiss her firmly anywhere your lips can find purchase.

You love fiercely and concentrate that love mostly on one person. You leave little room for anyone else in that love. It's easy for me to be OK with this because right now most of that love is for me. You fold yourself into my arms and wrap your own arms around me and hug back right and proper. You will throw yourself at my stomach just to plant an aggressive punch of a kiss there. You love, you love, you love. With everything you've got.

Oh, you bright light, you unfathomable child. You are a collection of galaxies, you are the entire universe. Your heart is chaos and creation. Sometimes I worry that I don't write about you enough, that I'm always focusing on your sister, but this is why. Who can begin to reason such an awesome force? Scientists could devote years to it. And me? I'm just your mother, so utterly gobsmacked by the reality of you that I'm (mostly) incapable of putting words to it.

Some lessons.

We're nature girls, my daughters say -- and they are -- but even they can't comprehend the baby copperhead snake split in half on the sidewalk. "Did an animal do that?" Madeleine wants to know, and I say, No, it was a person. "Why?!" She wants to know, outrage coloring her 6-year-old voice, still small but in the process of changing, right now and all the time, into something more world weary, something more in-the-know. Probably because they were scared, I say, hands in the air, a shrug.

This is nature, too, I want to explain. Humans will do all kinds of brutal, unnecessary things in the name of fear. Like what, they will ask, and I will say, Like killing a snake. Like hurting each other. Like all kinds of terrible things.

Madeleine is hands-on-hips furious, glaring up at me. Violet is crumpled-knees curious on the sidewalk, watching ants crawl over the snake's split carcass. "That snake wouldn't have hurt anyone," Madeleine says, gesturing down at the snake. "They should've just left it alone!"

I know, I know, I say. It's really terrible.

In my memory of this the trees are so green in the light that they glow. Cicadas buzz in the trees and mosquitoes bite and bite and bite. It must have been hot, late spring in Texas. We keep walking and Madeleine chases lizards. Violet meanders. I don't give the girls that lesson about nature, about human nature, but I believe they learned it anyway. It will come burbling to the surface one day when they are older, unbidden. And when it does I hope they'll remember: Probably because they were scared, and it will be that little bit of empathy they'll need to remember how to be good people in the world.

That big snow cone truck in the sky.

Somehow it never seems completely dark in Madeleine's room. Part of that is the nightlight shaped like a snail that sits at the corner of her bed and casts warm light in a halo around her pillow. But there is more to light than its very existence. There is also the intangible brightness that comes from the life in her room, the leopard gecko hunting crickets in its tank, the pet rat rustling in its bedding, the ball python exploring its confines, looking for escape. Their noise lends credence to the idea that her room is a safe place. Comfort somehow illuminated without the help of light.

And there is also the intangible brightness that comes from my daughter, nestled into my shoulder and burrowed under the covers. She picks nighttime to talk about the Big Things, and tonight's topic is one of the Super Big Things. "Mom," she begins, kicking her feet a little as she arranges the covers just so. "Logan at school said he believes in God. And I told him there isn't a God, and he said, 'You don't believe in God?' And some other people said I was wrong. And they said there is a God! But I'm not wrong, right?"

"Well," I hedge, considering my response. Not for the first time I wish I had something solid to tell her, something steady and sure she can hold on to. "I don't really know if you're wrong or right," I finally tell her, cursing my own lack of a clear belief system. "I have no idea if there is a God or not."

"But you don't believe in God, right?" She is drawing this from a talk we had ages ago, where I thought I had been careful to say whether I did or didn't believe. And No, I don't, is the thought that burbles up now in my mind just as it did then, unbidden, and just as quickly my mind sends it back down. This feels like a deeply treasonous thing to think, much less to say. Almost immediately I am thinking of my mother, who sent my sister and I to church sporadically when we were younger. I am thinking of the Bible camp she sent me to when I was younger. I am thinking of my mom on the phone earlier in the week, imploring me to take my girls to church on Easter, to teach them the real meaning of the holiday. To say I don't believe in God is to reject something intrinsic to how I define my mother. It is to let her down immeasurably.

Before I can answer, Madeleine is speaking again. "What?" She scoffs. "Do I think there is some big man up in the sky who will take me up to the clouds with his big old hand and take me to the snow cone truck up there?"

"Snow cone truck?" I ask, and Madeleine giggles. "Yeah! What? Am I going to eat clouds? I don't believe in that. I don't believe there is a big castle up in the clouds." She is impassioned, gesturing with her hands now. "I don't believe it because I can't see it," she says. "It doesn't make sense to me because you can't even see that!"

"You believe in fairies and you've never seen one," I point out. "What about the tooth fairy?"

"Yeah, but I've seen the stuff that the tooth fairy leaves me," she says. "It's hard to explain, because I haven't seen a fairy, but I know they're there because you see their stuff sometimes. Like the glitter in the backyard and the fairy steps and the money under my pillow and stuff."

I suppress a wince, because these things -- these things are things I have fostered. Sprinkling glitter in the backyard because I know when the girls find it they will be delighted that magic was left there. Calling the fungus jutting out like steps from the trunk of a tree "fairy steps." Writing tiny notes from the tooth fairy thanking the girls for taking such good care of their teeth. I have fostered in them a belief in magic but not a belief in anything spiritual.

"That makes sense," I say carefully. "But some people say that life itself is proof enough of God. Someone could look at a snake winding through the grass and say, 'Look at that amazing creature! Only an amazing God could create something like that.' Or they might look at a beautiful sunset and just feel really glad that there is a God who would make something so lovely."

Mad considers this. "No," she finally says. "That stuff is just nature."

I don't argue this point because I mostly agree with her. And all the while my mind has been grappling for the proper way to frame all this for her. I've got mostly nothing. Except this: "I think the thing about God is that it doesn't really matter," I say. "All that really matters is that you're a good person in the world. So at the end of everything, when you're very, very old and it's time for you to die, you can die knowing that you were good for the world. That you always tried to do good things. And if there is a God, great. He'll be very happy. And if there isn't, then awesome. Because you and the people in your life will be happy -- because you were good to the people you loved."

"Yeah," Mad says immediately, as though this is something she's thought of before."But why do people even believe in God? It doesn't even make sense!"

And now I am thinking of Bible camp again, how I was inexplicably moved to tears at the evening service on the last day, when all the kids joined hands and sang in unison, "Jesus, lamb of God, worthy is thy name." I am thinking of the things people say and do to each other in the name of God. I am thinking of my cousins, devout Christians, who do their own thing and radiate goodness. How great it is for them to have that foundation. I am thinking of my own husband, who says he believes in God. "Mad, your dad believes in God," I tell her. "It makes sense to him."

"But not to us, right?" She says. "We don't believe in God. Maybe if we see him, then we can believe in him."

So now we're talking about faith. And we're talking about nature and we're talking about beliefs and values and it is 9 p.m. and she should be asleep already. And besides. Besides. I don't know the answers. Until I have something real, something concrete to give her -- straight from my heart, something I believe with all of my entire soul -- then I will at least have something she can hold on to. Until then, I have nothing but uncertainty to offer.

I believe in you, I think before I tell her we'll have to talk more about this later. I believe in this -- as I give her a hug goodnight. I believe that this life is pretty awesome -- as she snuggles closer and shuts her eyes. We are ensconced in the glow of her nightlight. And in the other light, too -- the way the sounds of her pets warm up the darkness and turn it into something safer, somehow. This isn't too far from the nature of faith, I realize. Recognizing the light of life in the darkness. Resting in a moment. Asking questions, filled with love. Maybe here and now is our greater power. I want to tell her this in a way she'll understand, but the best I can do is kiss her forehead and tell her I love her.