Tickling

Something I have always promised myself that I will deliver to The Boy and Lid is complete honesty.  At time, this has been challenging.  There have been what we will write off as fibs, where fingers are crossed behind the back ("Of course Bob eats carrots"), a subject avoided to avoid disappointment to the questioner, an adult "has gone on holiday" indefinitely when they inevitably let them down.

This was going well, until the subject of death encroached.  This appeared with Remembrance Sunday, where the school clumsily fed him references to "the fallen" and "baddies dying". To his mind, this meant people died when they fell over, leading him to panic every time I fall over, which is with increasing regularity as the moronic ME progresses.  He screams in panic, cries heavily, urging me to jump up whilst shouing at me that I have not died and need to get up.

We started to find ways to quell it; elongated games of "Twister" where we collapse in heaps, countless renditions of "Ring a ring a roses"; trampoline games where we fell and he could see that we were ok.

The falling equalling death disappated in his mind.  The subject, I thought, was closed. 

I had been writing a post on here about Ella, my eldest child, who died.  The Boy read it over my shoulder, and asked me who Ella was.  I explained.  He read further, and his eyes widened.  He looked frightened.  Then he asked me the question that no one else ever had, because nobody else talks to me about it.  I've either cut out the people who knew me then, or I disappeared so they wouldn't know.  "Why did she die?"

Something caught in my throat, something got in my eyes. For the briefest of times, I was silent. 

"Because, sometimes, people just die.  They get old, or they get sick, or they just can't keep living.  Something happens, and they can't run around and play with us anymore, but they're always here.  So long as we remember them, so long as we carry them inside us and speak about them, they haven't really gone.  And Ella, well, Ella just died."

The Boy is not pleased with this answer, and is clearly thinking very hard.  "So, will you die?" he asks.  This is too awful for words, so I tell him the truth, as much as I can.  I say yes, I will die, but it won't be until he is very old, when he is a grown up boy, when he won't need me anymore.  He is filled with panic, and cries that I am not to die, that I am not to go, that he won't get older than 5, that he won't grow up, and that he will always need me, that the time will never come when he doesn't need me.  I tell him that I will be very old, that he will be very old, that he will be 200 when I die.  He tells me that this is not old enough.  He will always need me.  He tells me he isn't going to die, neither is Lily, so I will have to not die to look after them.

To be honest, it's not going well.

He fixes me with the hard stare that he has learnt from too many Paddington books.  He looks me in the eye.  He holds my hand.  He tells me that I am not to die.  He asks me to promise that I will not to die. 

When I look at him, it is not just him I see.  It is my own fears.  That of leaving the kids alone.  It is the all consuming fear that they will die before me.  The fear that sneaks up and pokes me in the head on days when the depression is bad, the ME is being an utter shit and the autism at its worst.  It is my chance to not pass a fear on.  I lie.

"'Course I won't, mate.  Who'd tickle you if I died?"

He is happy.  We have a tickle fight.  I wish that this were the end of it, both the subject matter and the lying.  It won't be.