Wants vs. Needs

A few nights ago, after her bath, I was sitting at the computer with Shay looking at potential summer hairstyles she might like.  Earlier, while Shay was in the bath, I had done the same with Mo.  All I had done was search for “African American hairstyles” on the web, and a whole slew of celebrity pictures popped up.  What I had been trying to do was look for Macy Gray, because Mo’s hair does the spiky thing naturally without, in Mo’s intractable words, “turning into a weirdo ‘fro.”  We realized this when Mo had been playing and running in the sprinklers all day.  She came in all out of breath, trying to relay some direly important piece of kid-world information, and all I could do was stare at her hair.

It looked AMAZING.  Or at least, might with the slightest bit of work.  I was just happy that we had seemed to find a hairstyle that her hair naturally wants to do anyway, and maybe it just needed a little help to make it look like it had been professionally done.

Well, when I showed her a picture of Macy Gray (who is beautiful, by the way), Mo’s face twisted all around in disgust.  “I’m NOT going to have that kind of hair!” she nearly spat.  “I want that lady’s hair!”

She pointed to a picture of Oprah. 

Oprah.

Not that there’s anything wrong with Oprah, or her hair, but just…I mean…if my parents one day pulled out a picture of Johnny Rotten and told me I’d look good with that haircut, I sure as shit wouldn’t have decided to instead go with Johnny Carson.

Anyway, once Mo had decided to get the hair of a 60 year old media icon billionaire, Shay came in and started looking over the pictures.

“Which one do you like, babe?” I asked.

She ran her little finger along the computer screen, occasionally stopping over a picture, then moving on.  Finally she just sighed and put her head on my shoulder.

“What’s the matter?  Can’t find one you like?”

“I don’t know I guess.  It doesn’t matter that much to me.”

“Well, you need a good hairdo for the summer don’t you?”

That’s when she looked me dead in the eye and said with the earnestness of a Buddhist monk:

“Dad, I don’t need a hair do, because all I need is food, and shelter, and love.  I want a summer hairdo, but I don’t need it.  Do you understand?”  Then she cupped my face with her little soft hands and turned my head to meet her gaze.  “Do you understand the difference between wants and needs?”

And her wide brown eyes darted across mine, searching to see if I understood her in this little childhood moment of clarity. 

I didn’t know whether to laugh or start crying at this.  I started to do both.  I cleared my throat and said, “Yes, honey, I understand the difference.  I think we have your needs covered then.  So…what do you want for a summer haircut?” 

She smiled, then pointed at a random picture of a girl with flat-ironed hair and said, “That one is fine.”

Later, after the girls were in bed, I told Amy about our little encounter.  She said, “Awww,” then, “they probably went over wants and needs in school today.”

“Yeah, probably.  Funny though.”

I think we all know the school-book answer of wants and needs.  We remind kids of the difference all the time, whenever they say that they “have” to have something, and we wearily tell them that no, they won’t die without that pair of jeans or whatever.  That’s a pretty standard encounter.  But I started to really ponder the difference.  Do we, as adults, actually understand it?

I remember talking to a friend of mine at the Air Force Academy.  We were talking, for some reason, about the worst thing we had ever said to our parents.

I told the story about how my mom, as was her custom, one day called me a “little sonofabitch.”  Well, on that day I had taken my crazy pills.  So I looked her dead in the eye and said,

“You’re right.”

Got a whuppin for that one.

My friend, despite my expectation of laughter, just kind of grunted and looked at the wall. 

This friend of mine was the product of his father and his father’s second wife.  His first wife had died in a car crash when the two were very young, before they had any children.  He then re-married and went on to have a couple of other kids.  But my friend told me that his father had never spoken much about his first wife or the accident that killed her.  Anyway, around the time my friend was ten, he had been pondering the way life works out.  He had had a very innocent concept of how the world worked, and that most things, when good comes of them, are happy things for which to be thankful. 

So one day he says to his dad, “Dad, I’m glad your first wife died in that car crash.”

His father just stopped whatever he was doing and slowly turned to his son, who stood there confident and somewhat proud of his deductive reasoning.

“What?  What did you just say to me?”

My friend saw the look in his father’s eyes, a look of utter shock and unfathomable pain, as if he had taken a bat and hit him over the head with it.  My friend’s confidence faltered.  “I…well, I just meant…that if that hadn’t happened, then…”

“I know what you meant.  And I love you.  But don’t ever say that to me again.”  His father then walked out of the room, and my friend thought he heard his dad suck in a few sobs as he closed the bedroom door behind him.

This was the story he relayed to us, and I still remember the look on my friend’s face as he told it.  That was his moment, that moment we all have, that pops into our memory out of nowhere to remind us of how cold and thoughtless we can be.  And even though we hate the memory and our guts tie in knots and our skin grows clammy as we recollect it, we hold it close so we will never, ever do something like that again.

The other morning Shay told Amy that she looked pregnant. 

Now, we’ve all been warned against saying this to a woman.  We’ve all heard the story of someone who knew someone who said this to a woman and the woman replied, “No, honey, I’m just fat.”  But for Amy, that isn’t much of a worry.  And it certainly wasn’t the reason Amy got a little upset.

“Mom, I said you look pregnant.  Are you?  Because I had a dream that you were pregnant, and…”

“Shay, quit saying that, okay?  You’re upsetting Mommy.”

Shay looked taken aback, started to sniffle, and said, “Okay.”

Later that morning, as I was driving the girls to school, I turned down the radio.  “Shay?” I asked.

“Yes?”

“Do you know why Mommy doesn’t want to hear that she looks pregnant?”
“Because she doesn’t want to look fat!” answered Mo.

“No, that’s not the reason.  Girls, you know that Mommy and I haven’t been able to have any babies, right?  And you know that we tried for a long time but couldn’t.  You remember me telling you that, right?”

“Yes,” they said in unison.

“Okay.  So when you tell Mommy she looks pregnant, she gets sad because it reminds her of that time.  So let’s not say it, okay?  You shouldn’t say it to any woman ever anyway.  You never know for sure and you might hurt their feelings.”

“Okay,” said Mo, who went back to looking at her book.

“But…” started Shay.

“What, honey?”

“But, did you want babies?”

“Yes.  We did very much.”

“But if you did have them, then…”

Silence.  At this point I knew where her little mind was taking her.  And I thought I knew what her dream the night before was really about.

“What’cha thinking, Shay?  You can say it.”

“Nothing,” she sighed.

“What was your dream about?  Did you dream that Mommy had a baby?”

“Yes.”

“And…then what?”

“Well, nothing I guess, but you guys were really happy, and then…”

“Then, what?”

“Then I woke up and I got scared.”

“Were you scared that we were going to have a baby and then not want you guys anymore?”

Silence.  Then, barely audible, “Kind of.”

I thought for a moment of what to say.  The fact is, if we would have had a baby, or two, or whatever, then no, we probably wouldn’t have become foster parents, and these girls would have been somewhere else.  But how in the hell do I convey that to a kid?  How in the hell do I tell this little girl that she wasn’t ever really in our plans?  How do I say that without sounding like we actually wanted someone else?

“Girls, I want you to listen to me very carefully.  Your mother and I love you very, very much…”

It started to sound lame.  It started to sound like lip service, and I didn’t know where I was really going to go with it.  So I changed course.

“Shay, do you remember the other day when you asked if I knew the difference between wants and needs?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.  Hmm.  Well, this is really what it means to grownups who have lived a while and have had a lot of things we loved go away, who have had a lot of things not go the way we thought they should, and have seen a lot of bad stuff happen.  When you get a little older and get more experience in life it’s just how it goes.  But we’ve also seen a lot of great things happen.  And we see how they can rise up out of the awfulness.  We see that things are beautiful in ways we never imagined, because as we get older we see new kinds of beauty that keep surprising us.  Grownups are full of wants.  All we do is want.  All the time.  But life can turn around and take those wants from you and smash them.”

I took a few breaths, trying to figure out where this was going to go.  “The trick that some grownups never learn,” I continued, “is to see the things we really need and grab them and hold them and love them.  Yes, we wanted babies.  We still do.  And it may one day happen, we don’t know.  But always remember this: we needed you.  You two are the beauty that rose up from the hurt.  And because of you, it’s brighter and more wonderful then we ever thought possible.”

I had to stop at that point, as I was choking myself up.  I thought of my friend and his story about his father, how the first wife had died, how awful that must have been, yet how from the dust of despair two children had risen and become his pride and joy.  I thought of how I had received an eye injury at the Air Force Academy as a junior and had been disqualified from pilot training, how destroyed I had been, but if that had not happened, my path would have been vastly different and I’d probably not be married to Amy.  I thought about three years ago, how terrible it had been with each new month, with each new disappointment, and the day the CPS worker had shown up with the girls, ratty and smelly and afraid, them needing us…

us needing them…

Then Mo said, “So God makes up for it?”

I snapped out of it.  “Well, that’s one way to put it.  I believe that.  But we can’t take a passive role in that giving.  Have you heard that saying, ‘when you’re in a hole and you ask God for help, he sends you a shovel?’ or something like that?”

“Noooo…”

“Well, you will.  And that’s another way of saying you have to be looking for beauty in the world where there doesn’t seem to be any.  And you have to have the strength to go for it.”

We drove in silence for a few minutes, and I almost turned the radio back up when Shay said,

“I hope maybe you guys can have what you want.  I hope you have a baby and then we can name her Juniper.”

I laughed. 

Juniper.

“Okay, Shay.  Juniper it shall be.”