Love conquers all

“Tell me a story Daddy, pllllease. A good one. Not one of your normal ones. A special story.”

“OK Brianna”, said Dad with a dull look in his eyes. Oh no I thought, here we go again.

“Once upon a land in a far away place, there was a little girl who…”

“DADDY, STOP!”, I shouted in his ear. It took that kind of shouting to get his full attention these days you see. I wasn’t normally a shouty kind of kid. After all, 4 year old little girls aren’t supposed to shout, are they?

“No Daddy, you’re doing it again. Your voice is all dull and your story is the same one you always tell me. This time we’re going to do it my way.”

He smiled a dull smile, shuffled with his hands a bit and said “OK Brianna, whatever you’d like.” He had no idea you see of what was to come. He was still filled with sadness at losing my Mom. But I wasn’t sad because she came to visit me every night in my rainbow world and there we cavorted in dreamlands too wonderful to find the right words for with my limited, 4 year old word bank.

I leapt onto him, hugging him tight to me you see, heart to heart, arms locked around his neck. He wasn’t going to wriggle out of it this time. A big smile ran through me as I heard my Mom laugh. A huge wave of excitement bubbled up in me and spilled out from my heart to Dad’s. His eyes opened wide with disbelief at a feeling he had long forgotten.

“Come” I whispered in his ear, “into the lands of the rainbow worlds where Mom waits to sing us her song. You know Dad, THAT song.”

A tear glistened in one of his eyes. Funny adults, they think they’ve got to hold back emotion from a kid like me. But they don’t. I love emotion. I love it when my Daddy cries and tells me how he really feels. It’s so much better than him pretending to smile when his whole body is screaming out sadness and pain.

“Here comes Mom on a turquoise green dragon, swooping over the rainbow mountains. Her laughter echoes across the valley and up the mountain side. Can you see her Dad? Can you hear her laughing?” I think he can, but he refuses to say, as yet another tear dripped from that glistening eye. I think he’s trying to keep what adults call ‘a stiff upper lip”, whatever the heck that means. But oh no, I am not having any of that this time around. So I tightened my arm lock and let my heart burst so much love into him that I truly don’t know how he can keep resisting me.

So I started to laugh, just like Mom, our song of joy and happiness filling the rainbow world with sparkling birds that whooshed alongside the dragon and the unicorn I was riding. I know that Dad can’t resist our laughter and I know that he can hear us both because now both eyes are popping wide open with disbelief and the watershed of tears has begun, thank goodness.

“You see Dad, Mom’s not gone. She’s right here with us always. Whenever I want her I smile, laugh, sing a bright song and poof there she is soaring with me and my unicorn in my rainbow world. And don’t you dare try to tell me different Dad. Coz you see you adults got it all wrong. You believe weird stuff. You’ve lost your ability to see the magic worlds, to touch the invisible potential that’s sitting right there in front of you. You get lost in the sadness and despair and forget that you are breathing, you are alive, you are a miracle of creation and life is waiting for you to live Dad. LIVE DAD! Like really really live Dad. You and I we have adventures to have. We have stories to tell and songs to sing. We have love to experience and people to meet. Unicorns to ride and dragons to tame.”

Dad is really sobbing now, heaving me up and down with his sobs. But I didn’t let go, no sirree. I clung on even tighter to keep him from running away again. Mom leapt off her dragon and came to hug him from the back. His quick intake of breath told me he felt her too. She and I began to sing, our voices melding into one glorious, joyful song. A crescendo of all that love and life is meant to be. You see, there’s no sadness in Mom. She’s happy and her only thing is that Dad refuses to see and talk to her. But I’m dealing with that, count on it.

I watched our song flow deep into Dad’s heart which I still held tightly to my own. It washed him clean of sadness and heartache, opening him up again to love and be loved, especially by me. Coz I am a great love master you know. And love can conquer all. My unicorn told me so.

Dad’s sobbing started to calm a bit even though the tears still flowed. They were making my teddy bear next to us on the bed all wet. But that’s ok because Teddy was part of my plan and he was transforming those tear drops into sparkling joy and pouring it back through me into Dad.

“Yippeee”, I shouted loudly as I burst backwards to plop onto the pillows. “Daddy, you saw her. You heard her. You’re going to be all right now aren’t you?”

Daddy smiled, a great big rainbow kind of smile that told me that everything was going to be ok now. “Thanks Mom.”, I shouted as her sparkly dragon flew around the rainbow mountain and disappeared from view.