Free Sand in My Eyes by Christine Lemmon Page B

but who I didn’t want to be was the one my daughter would look at soon enough with eyes of justice, declaring mommy “mean” for making daddy sleep in his makeshift bed.
    I got up, gathered his sheets and pillow, and threw them in a bundle on the floor, questioning which things in life a mother is supposed to tell her daughter and which she is not. Sharing with Marjorie the reasons for my wrath, that daddy is no good, would only put an end to the way in whichshe giggles whenever he enters the room, and how she steps on his toes, waltzing along as he steps side to side. Dance to your daddy . It’s what I wanted for myself when I was young, and what mothers want for their daughters, to love their fathers madly. I would keep quiet about it all, but one day she would find out for herself how hard it is to be a wife, think back to those faces her mother made, and understand me better.
    “It’s okay. Little girls don’t see it. They don’t see their daddy’s flaws,” I would tell her on that day, a long, long time from now, the day she learned of his immorality and started sympathizing with me for grudging poor daddy—the man she felt sorry for all those years. “But it’s easier for a little girl to love the man who is her daddy than it is for a wife to love the flawed man who is her husband.”
    “This room is too overwhelming,” I declared as I took the orchid and stormed out, heading next into my bedroom. There, I set the flower on the bedside table and flicked on the overhead fan, recalling what my neighbor had said about orchids liking subtle breezes. But then I gave the night-stand a good shake. It was wobbly, and so was I, for there were moments in which I found it easier to stay with the father of my children, and others in which I knew leaving him would be best, and that the boys needed to know soon the sort of man their father was so they might never become like him.
    “Should I sit my boys down one day,” I asked myself, “and tell them what their father did, let them see the hurt in my eyes, so hopefully they will never do it to their own wives?” But if I were to do that, it would only raise other questions, like why I didn’t leave him, and it would interfere with what I am trying to teach them—that when they do something wrong, there are consequences. Little boys need to know this. It’s the only way they can grow into men who are accountable for their actions.
    I didn’t want to be wobbly-minded, and knew the orchid didn’t like wobbly tables. I moved its pot over to my writing desk instead. “This spot is just right,” I told the orchid, wishing my own contentment could be so simple. “Come morning, the sun pokes through this window, and you will be a happy flower.”
    But what would it take to make me the happy woman I once was? Iwalked out my front door, got into my car and drove to Captiva Island, to the cemetery that lies next to the library, beside the Chapel by the Sea. There was no better place for a woman to go when she was grieving and missing horribly the person she used to be, back when life was simpler and more carefree. As I opened the white picket gate to the cemetery and strolled in, I was overtaken by emotion, aware that I had been stumbling in circles for too long, trapped beneath a tarp of sleep deprivation, one that suffocates a mother’s spirit and smothers her ability to see both the beauty of life and her very own aliveness. And then I walked past sites belonging to babies, some with the same names as my own babies, and it was hard to see the names of my children on tombstones. Life can be short, I thought, and I wanted my children back home again, home again, jiggety jog . I reached up and pulled a white hibiscus off a low-hanging tree. Its petals were delicate as tissue and I could have used it to wipe my tears, but then I dropped the hibiscus and let myself be overtaken by emotion as I read the inscriptions for individuals living as far back as the late