FAITH IN THE FORCE OR SAY A PRAYER TO SAINT ANTHONY?
Stevie Trujillo grapples with truth, lies, and a four-year-old’s existential crisis
“I can’t find my toothbrush!” my four-year-old daughter hollers downstairs.
“Use mine,” I offer. We’re sharing a suitcase while visiting my mother-in-law. I’m guessing her toothbrush is lost in that quagmire.
“I need my toothbrush,” she screeches, clearly overtired. This isn’t going to end well if I don’t find that toothbrush. I head upstairs.
Her toothbrush has LED lights in the stem and a suction cup at the bottom so, while standing, it looks like a robot — C3PO, to be precise. Of course she loves it, but my daughter has never seen Star Wars, so she can’t really love her toothbrush. Her affection is impersonal — the toothbrush is just another cool thing that lights up — whereas mine roots back to a California six-plex theatre, where I first watched the epic of a lonely orphan who discovers his tribe and the ways of the Force.
I check the drawers. I move into my room and pick through tangled piles of clothing. I search the office where she’s to sleep on the futon, peeking between each book on the shelf. I can’t find it.
“But I can’t go to bed without brushing,” she says. “How will we read a story? How will we snug like a bug in the rug? How will I wake up?” I realize my daughter is teetering between kooky and existential crisis, and I have but a few moments to restore order to the Universe.
Do I tell the truth? Life’s a continuum of loss, kid. Time, money, memories, youth, dogs, keys, people — some of these things return, or you find them stuffed between the couch cushions, but mostly they’re gone forever.
Or, do I lie and give my daughter a belief to buoy her reality when she feels overwhelmed?
“You know what we should do? Pray to St. Anthony,” I blurt out. Wait, what? Aside from my liberal use of profanity, my daughter’s never heard me speak of God, let alone a saint.
“Who’s St. Anthony?” she asks, willing to suspend disbelief if I get this right.
“He’s like a fairy who helps us find things.”
She chews this information, slowly, but not without interest. “What’s praying?” “Praying is how people talk to saints. Ready? OK, spin in circles. Second, say, oh blessed St. Anthony, our patron saint of lost and stolen things, pretty please with whipped cream and a cherry on top, return my light-up toothbrush. Good. Now faster!” She gets dizzy, giggles and falls. “Quick, say Amen!” “Amen!!!”
“You did it! Your prayer was heard.”
She accepts this outcome and agrees to put on pyjamas and borrow my toothbrush for tonight. Even so, I worry I’ve made things worse.
My default-parenting rubric is to do the opposite of what my parents did: Don’t hit, yell or emotionally terrorize child. While that’s a great starting point, some things don’t fit nicely in the equation. Like faith. I don’t remember when my mother taught me to pray to St. Anthony, but I do know when I stopped believing in everything.
My childhood was imbued with a magic born of loss. My father died while my mother was pregnant with me so, to cope or to keep a part of him alive, we talked to him as if he were a living spirit in our home. Since my stepfather moved in with us when I was four, however, we referred to my dead dad as Daddy Stephen, as to not confuse the two.
“Daddy Stephen,” I’d say, “Should I hang this picture on the facing wall or by the door?”
Then my framed third-grade class photo would guide my hands like the planchette of a Ouija board, first left, then right. Yes, by the door, he says.
I loved Daddy Stephen. He was like my very own Obi-Wan, a dead father figure who could use the Force to help me from the other side. But by the time I took my first college philosophy class at 17, I’d lost my faith in the Force, Daddy Stephen, and all the saints. It seemed none of them could protect me from the violence in my home or return the innocence stolen by those who should’ve loved me most. So on my 18th birthday, I moved out of my parents’ house with two black eyes and little else. I was now an adult and an agnostic, untethered from family and faith.
So how will I sustain this belief for my daughter? Can St. Anthony return lost faith to non-believers? I could buy the same toothbrush tomorrow and plant it in the house where she’s likely to find it, but what happens when she loses something I can’t replace, like Kiki, our dog who died two years ago, whom she still includes in her drawings even though she’s too young to have retained a real memory of Kiki alive? Rather, it’s Kiki’s absence she recalls with a precocious anxiety.
“How old was Kiki when she died?” she asked.
“14.”
“Is that old?”
“It is for a dog. That’s like 100 in people years.”
“How old are you?”
“41.”
“Is that almost 100?”
“No, I have 59 more years before I turn 100. Don’t worry.” I counted from 41 to 100, slowly, to illustrate the great length between death and me. But she does worry. Once a week she asks if I’m turning a 100 any time soon.
I don’t have the heart to tell her there is no safe number; death can come at any time.
We read a story in bed. All is right in the world, tonight, even though I know tomorrow I won’t be able to further spin this yarn of prayer into a faith.
I reach to turn out the light when my hand, as if willed by another force, moves to the bedside drawer and opens it. There he is: C3PO, waiting for a touch of faith to light him up.