How We Met

There’s a mermaid tattooed on my husband’s arm.

And years ago, he told the boys it was because he caught me in the ocean and decided to marry me.

Which, according to him, is how you get a wife.

My middle believes this with the kind of wholehearted conviction only little kids and conspiracy theorists are capable of. He wants details every time. What kind of bait did he use? Was I dangerous? Did I live near sharks? Could I still breathe underwater if I tried hard enough?

And my husband, naturally, answers every question with increasing confidence and absolutely no concern for continuity.

My first, meanwhile, is horrified by all of it.

He’s honest to a fault. The kind of kid who wants the truth cleanly labeled. No tricks. No wool over the eyes. No being made the butt of the joke. Even as a little kid, he’s had the soul of a very tired accountant.

So naturally, we make it worse.

Not cruelly.

Just enough to needle him.

We’ll nod seriously and add even taller tales.

That I used to collect forks off the ocean floor.

That sailors occasionally spotted me near Catalina.

That I lost my tail once I came onto land, but could regain it if I ever went back into the ocean again.

Which is why, obviously, I never do.

And they’re constantly trying to catch us in the details.

Holding up old childhood photos like evidence.

Questioning timelines.

Asking my sister if she used to be a mermaid too.

And without missing a beat, she’ll immediately answer in complete seriousness, slipping into whatever strange mermaid lore we’ve apparently all agreed upon.

At this point, the story has become bigger than any of us.

My first will stare at us like he somehow ended up raising us.

Which, honestly, might be fair.

But I think part of parenting is trying to leave a small doorway open between reality and imagination for as long as possible. Not because they’re gullible. Not because we want them confused.

Just because adulthood comes for them eventually.

And my first, especially, already seems halfway there sometimes.

So we keep winking at him from the other side of the story.

Trying to convince him that a little nonsense might not be the worst thing in the world.

Small Fictions

A little mischief in life, just to keep things interesting.

There are things I tell my kids that aren’t entirely true.

Not big things.

Not the kind that matter later.

Just small ones.

Like how I can always tell when they’re lying — because their eyes change color when they do.

They still pause when I say it.

You can see it — the split second where they consider whether it might be real.

A quick blink.

A glance away.

A hand that moves just slightly closer to their face, like they might cover it if they could.

And sometimes, that’s enough.

The truth comes out before it has time to settle into something else.

I know what I’m doing.

I know the irony of it — telling a lie to catch one.

It’s not lost on me.

But there are moments in parenting where the clean, honest explanation just… doesn’t work.

Where “because it’s the right thing to do” feels thin against whatever impulse they’re trying to outrun.

And in those moments, something a little more immediate, a little more convincing, tends to win.

Parenting, at times, feels less like instruction and more like theater.

A little stagecraft in the service of raising decent humans.

We do this more than we admit.

We say carrots help you see in the dark.

We warn that the ice cream truck only plays music when it’s out of ice cream.

We create a world that bends just slightly, enough to guide them where they’re not yet able to guide themselves.

Not forever.

Just for now.

Children already live in a kind of half-magic.

Tooth Fairies.

Santa.

The quiet belief that the world is paying attention to them in ways it probably isn’t.

We don’t create that entirely.

But we do… manage it.

Shape it.

Nudge it in directions that make our jobs a little easier, and their choices a little better.

It would be nice if everything about parenting was clean.

If every lesson could be taught honestly, directly, without any need for embellishment.

But it isn’t.

Some things are learned through experience.

Some through repetition.

And some, at least in the beginning, through a well-placed fiction.

One day, they’ll figure it out.

They’ll realize their eyes never changed color.

That I couldn’t actually tell, at least not in the way I said I could.

And maybe they’ll see the trick in it.

But by then, hopefully, they won’t need it anymore.