By Lia Aprile
@liaaprile

My four-year-old doesn’t like me.

How do I know? He tells me. A lot. Often it is comparative. He runs through the five members of our family, listing them from who he likes most to least, and I am always last. “I love Roma the most,” he’ll say (that’s his big sister), “then Daddy. Then Maximo (the baby), and then you. You’re at the bottom,” he tells me. Once he inserted cashews into the list, so his ranking went: Roma, Daddy, Maximo, cashews, Mommy.

“Cashews are really good,” I said.

***

He was in my arms, I was holding him like I used to when he was two, like I do with his little brother now, his weight resting on my hip. He had his arms around me, and his head snuggled into the space of my neck. “I love you so much,” he said, and I breathed him in, pulling him a little closer. “But…” and his voice got very soft and tender, “I love Daddy more.”

While drawing pictures with his big sister he began to practice writing. He’s been learning to read and he’s itchy to write his words. He asks for spelling, but sometimes he just grinds it out, putting together sounds he knows. He gets pretty close most of the time. After his drawings of bears and cars he began: I love Roma, he wrote on a piece of orange construction paper. I love Daddy. And then, proudly, he held up his final caption: “I hte Mommy.” Then he read it aloud, in case I didn’t get it.

“I don’t like you,” he said, while I kissed and hugged him before bed. “I want to hit you.” And then he raised his little hand and hit me (lightly) on the face. I took his arm.

“I can’t let you hit me,” I said. “That doesn’t feel good to my body.”

He dropped his hand. “I wish you would go to Australia,” he said. (We had just watched a YouTube video about Australia.)

“I would miss you,” I said.

“I hope you get bitten by a scorpion.” He said, “I want you to go away.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll write to you from Australia.”

His older sister stood by, uncertain. “What did he say?” She kept asking. “Did he say he wants you to get bitten by a scorpion?” She looked worried. I couldn’t tell if her concern was because what he was saying was such an anathema to her—she showers me with love, at every opportunity, asserting my place front and center in her heart—or if it was something else … a lightbulb maybe. We can say that? I looked at her plainly.

“Yes, he would like me to go to Australia,” I repeated. “Far away.”

She giggled and then the two of them hustled themselves off to bed.

***

I realized today that the baby is now the exact age my son (the one who doesn’t like me) was when his little brother was born. Two and four months old. I have pictures from the week before the birth. We still lived in LA then, in an apartment with bad air conditioning and no yard. We used to sit on our balcony, which no matter how often we cleaned it would turn our feet black from the drifting soot of the I-5.

We would sit in wooden deck chairs and watch the cars go by on our street, beneath us. We had a game; we would choose a direction and we would get one point for each car that came from that direction. Two points if the car had a bumper sticker. In one of the photographs, my son is sitting on one of the big wooden chairs, his feet don’t even quite reach the edge. It’s raining, lightly, so he’s wearing his green rainboots with the frog faces on them, and a striped zip-up sweatshirt. He has a bowl of Pirate Booty in his lap and he’s laughing. His white-blonde curls standing straight up from his face, his eyes with the dark lashes that go for miles. You can see one of my fat knees in the foreground. I am rotund with child; I can tell just from my knee.

I don’t remember if we were playing the car game. I remember what the air felt like though. And I remember that it was just him and me. I remember because I was aware, having been through this change before, that soon it would no longer be just us. In those last weeks, while his big sister was at school and his dad was at work, I tried to take him to all the places and do all the things. We went to the zoo, where I waddled next to him and gaped at the monkeys. We went to every favorite playground. I contrived dozens of daily ways to get him snuggled in a chair next to me: books, photos, iphone videos. I drank him in. And I remember the day I took the picture I was longing for the present moment, as if it had already become the past.  

When we found out we were pregnant with number three, it was my husband’s biggest fear: is our son cut out to be a middle child? Would he get lost? He, already at not-yet-two, had made it clear he was sensitive, not just to his own feelings but to the feelings of everyone around him. He noticed. He was the only toddler I had ever met who would respond to a question, with another question. “Do you like cars?” A grown-up might ask. “Yes,” he would say, “Do you like cars?” It stopped people in their tracks. Would a kid with a heart the size of a city thrive in the middle? The middle. So known, so quoted, so warned against.

In the picture he is laughing. It is just him and me. He has everything and I am desperate to record it, because it’s only raining lightly now, but I know the storm is coming.

 ***

I talk to my husband about how much our son says he does not like me. I recount to him in what ways and how I was told that day that he is the loved parent, and I am the dregs. My husband laughs. Touched, I know, by the affection sent his way but confident my place in our son’s heart is in no jeopardy. Most of the time I feel that way, too. Most of the time, I take it as a good sign. I would have been terrified to say those things to my own mother, so I consider it a small triumph that my kids do not fear me. Clearly. But there are days when it gets to me. 

Maybe he really actually doesn’t like me. Maybe I’m just, you know, not his kind of person. Maybe his daddy is kinder than I am, deep down, where only our son can see, and this is the bellwether. Maybe I gripe too much or have a frustrated look on my face too often. Maybe I’m not giving him enough. Maybe no matter how hard I try I will never be able to give him enough and for the rest of our lives I will be tolerated, but never really loved. And that thought is the one that breaks me, because I love him so much that every morning I feel like I’ve won a prize, when I see his sleepy face. And it would be hard to love always and only from a distance. 

“No, it’s the opposite,” my husband says. “He says those things to you because you are the ground. You are the baseline. Who else would he say it to?”

But I wonder aloud if there are big dark feelings there, ones that he needs to get out. Feelings about me. About the betrayal I committed, bringing another child into our house, when he was satisfied there, in the most royal position in the family: the baby. And this year of quarantine, without preschool, without friends, in a new city—maybe for him it’s all just an extension of the loss. Is there a way, something we can do to help him express what he needs to express? Maybe the feelings are dripping out, but they need a faucet, in order for him to release them. So that he can love me again.

“But that’s what he’s doing,” my husband responds, brow furrowed against my density, “that’s exactly what he’s doing.”

***

A friend of mine sends me an Instagram video from an early childhood expert. The title is “When You’re Not the Preferred Parent.” The video is shot selfie-style and it takes me a few minutes to adjust to the “up your nose” enthusiasm of the expert. But what she is describing resonates. Your child takes every opportunity to tell you that you are not as loved as the other. Your child tells you he hates you; he wants you to go away. Your child wishes you would get bit by a scorpion.

She reassures us, “I know it’s hard,” she says, her free hand gesticulating, “it hurts.”

Yes, I think, it does.

“But you can’t react with hurt feelings. You can’t get upset. You can’t tell them what they are saying is wrong. That will not make them feel safe,” she says, “and that is what they need: to feel safe.”

She tells us they are expressing a feeling, one that might feel too big and too scary for them to keep to themselves, and it’s your job to hold it. To make space for it. “Be light with them,” she says.

For the next few days, I practice. I try not to be wry or offended when he tells me that I am a Bad Mommy. I don’t laugh it off or remain silent when he says he loves Daddy the most, that Daddy is his favorite. I try not to change on the outside, or on the inside, when he lobs insults at me, wishes that I would disappear. I hold him with my gaze. Okay, I say. That’s okay. I tell him how much I love him, and that I hear his feelings. And I mean it. I pretend that he is telling me a secret, confiding in me his deepest and truest. And that I must prove myself a worthy confidant. We move through the day more softly. He looks me right in the eye when he tells me all the things he doesn’t love about me. And I look back.

A few mornings later, we find ourselves alone at the breakfast table. He has dawdled. I am nursing my tea. His sister and Daddy are downstairs in their respective offices. The baby is playing Legos in the other room. He glances up from his cereal. “I love you,” he says. Then he looks back down. I wait for what is going to come next. The addendum. The equivocation. But none comes.

“I love you too,” I tell him. And we finish our breakfasts in silence.

Guest essay written by Lia Aprile. Lia is a writer/producer who writes scripts, stories and marketing materials for companies big and small. She recently relocated from Los Angeles to the Pacific Northwest where she lives with her sweet husband and three kids in a home where there is never not a dishwasher to unload. Lia has always had a love for the personal essay and is honored to get to share one here. If you want to see more of her writing, and her growing repertoire of baked goods, you can visit her here.

Photo by Alicia Mayorca.