-image via Google
The colourless glass shattered onto the dark wooden floor, vomiting flecks of glitter that resembled snow, and the liquid that made the snow move spill out everywhere; a reindeer, red-nosed, with a red and white striped shawl tucked around its neck, and those big antlers that resemble veins, sliding in the liquid that only made the snow move, did not stop spinning.
My daughter, although it has been said so many times that she is so grown up, is 9-years old. I often forget that she is smart, so smart in fact that she has allowed herself this little bit of luxury, continuing to believe in folklores and myths and magical creatures, clinging to this ideation of wonderment, in order to protect herself from the world’s damages.
I thought it was time. I was wrong.
I sat her down last year, in late November, the rain drumming on the rooftops I thought would drown my words, but it didn’t and they didn’t, and I suffocated nonetheless, choking in between sobs of remorse and tears of regret.
You lied.
Two words that pierced my heart and continues to echo in my ears every time she looks at me with those big big eyes.
When she was 7, her uncle had bought her the complete set of Harry Potter books for her birthday. We held a competition to see who could read them the fastest. At nights, when we couldn’t have the lights on to read, we would laugh about Moody and Luna and wondered together how it would have been like for Harry if Sirius hadn’t died. We made up our own characters, a farmer and his wife who lived in the Wizarding World, and that story has evolved ever since into a ridiculously long and ridiculously absurd drama that only we would enjoy.
She had started reading when she was 5. I bought her Peter and Janes and Enid Blytons so I could relieve my own childhood through her, but what I remember most about them and what she remembers about them are different.
She learnt about Christmas, the edited narrative version, through these and other books she could lay her hands on.
We were at a shopping mall once and they had a Santa Claus distributing little packets of green, red and gold wrapping paper of what we would later find contained chocolates. Santa Claus had had a faulty beard that would peel off every time he bent down to talk to the children. When he asked them what they are wishing for for Christmas, he had a Chinese accent, because, well, he was Chinese. When it came to her turn, my daughter just stared at him, the words she had practiced over and over just a few minutes ago (I want a Monopoly set, I want a Monopoly set, I want a Monopoly set) in anticipation of his question, seemed to have evaporated from her now gaping mouth.
I quickly grabbed her hand and we walked home. I could see her bubbles of thoughts emerging, inflating, burst, then reemerging, inflate and burst over and over. The whole time we were walking she was silent, but her facial expressions were deafening.
That night, I braced myself for a long talk.
“Why was Santa all wrong, Mama?”
“Why do you think he’s all wrong?” I said, calmly, because I knew asking her a question in return always worked.
“Santa’s supposed to be white, because he lives in all snow, and he’s supposed to be old, not unreal beard for young people like that man at the mall. I don’t know who he is, but he is definitely not Santa Claus” she said, with so much conviction only a 5 year old could muster when they’re terribly sure of themselves.
“You’re right. That wasn’t Santa. Santa lives in the North Pole, and it’s Christmas time, so he’s busy. All over the world, he has helpers that would help him get all the information down ready for him to prepare all the toys back at the North Pole. That man you saw earlier is one of them. His job is to jot down what all the children in this area wants for Christmas and send the message back to Santa.”
“Then why did he have to pretend he was Santa?”
“He was dressed up like Santa because that red suit is a uniform for all the helpers of Christmas. Santa doesn’t just wear that red suit, you know. He has other outfits too.”
I thought of telling her the truth right there and then, but she seemed satisfied with my answers. Inside, I was jumping and throwing my fist in the air; I had outsmarted my 5-year-old. The chocolate she had received from fake Santa was on the nightstand and she would forget about it the next day, leaving it to melt and change shapes throughout the week before we finally threw it away in the bin.
You lied.
When she started school, in the middle of the academic year, at 8, she would come home crying because she was often bullied. We sat down and wrote spells together, spells that would make her stronger, make her braver, make her be seen by those who were kind and would want her to be friends with them. I told her spells are just like prayers, you had to really believe in them, and make the wish, recite the words three times or seven times or however many times we thought would be appropriate, for them to come true. And even when they didn’t, she would come home and say “we didn’t do it right”, believing that the magic was already there, that it was still there, that it only needed the people, the wizards, the witches, to see it in order for it to work.
The bullying soon dissipated a little, and I could see how socially mature she was getting to be.
I thought it was time.
See, we are Muslims, living in a Muslim country, so I expected my personal belief in raising my children to respect and understand and learn from other religions to not be well accepted. At home, I tell her about Jesus, and quote the Bible, I tell her about Moses and David, and Brahma and Shiva when we pass by a temple, and Buddhism and paganism and atheism. You know, basic stuff you would tell a 9-year-old. At school, being a Muslim, she cannot question or show interest in anything other than Allah and Muhammad.
I was afraid for her. I was afraid she would ask a question and get bullied, laughed at. I was afraid she would ask a question and get me convicted for violation of religion, my religion, the one religion I have, since I was young, understood better because of the other religions I learnt from (on my own).
So on that late November morning last year, I told her about Santa.
That invisible snow globe she had been holding on to, the one that for her, symbolised magic, and hope, the one she would metaphorically shake to let the snow fall over Rudolph, and watch for hours as they settle, how they calm her when life wrenched away her childhood, when circumstances took away her innocence and joy, fell and shattered to the ground.
“You lied,” she said, through gritted teeth, and uncontrollable sobs.
“Why would you lie to me, Mama?”
My heart broke. I had destroyed my 9-year-old and I didn’t know what to say other than a repeat of I’m sorrys over and over like a broken record playing a song you were already so tired of hearing.
“You’re wrong,” she went on, allowing me to disrupt her monologue with my robotic apologies every now and then, "Santa exists because magic exists, everywhere. Just because his story was based on a saint, that saint existed, and his idea existed and what he did was magic, so why won’t you just let me pretend to believe in Santa so I can be happy?
Tell me you lied, Mama. You lied.”
She wouldn’t speak to me that whole day. That night, she gave me a tight hug and told me she loved me.
We have since picked up the fragments of the glass, the reindeer in his candy-cane scarf, and returned him to his little ceramic land. We glued everything back together, and Kintsugi-ed the cracks with our own gold paint.
I know it will never look like the original ever again, but I am learning from my daughter to choose to continue to see the magic just for a little while longer.
This year, for Christmas, there shall be glitter and snow.
How hard these decisions we make are to bare... not only for our little ones but perhaps even more to us. 💔
You wrote that so beautifully Lisha, every line and word a memory of my own. X