Goodbye Balloonie

The Gaffer experienced her first sense of loss this week and although it was a relatively insignificant event in the grand scheme of loss, her disappointment has echoed over several days, which has of course worn dearly on my heart strings.

Last Saturday we went to Best Buy to get Daddy’s Father’s Day gift and the kind gentleman at the door gave her a yellow helium balloon on the way out. Can you already see where this is going? We tied it around her wrist so that it wouldn’t float away and carried it out to the car. By the time we got home, "Little Baby Balloonie" had been fed, had a snack, had a nap and floated through most of the sections of the van. She insisted on carrying it to the front door and did not want to tie it back on her wrist. I’m sure there’s enough foreshadowing here for everyone to know what happened next. Yellow ballooner floated up to the sky, got trapped momentarily on a tree branch way above Mama’s head and set off for a land thousands of miles away while little baby Gaffer cried and wailed on the street below.

The first part that wrenched my heart was her expectation that it would come back.  The second was her absolute confidence that I would find it and make it better. We know Mommies can fix anything. Except when they can’t. And that hurts more than get dumped at your graduation formal or finding out in Grade 5 that your best friend was saying mean things about you behind your back.

"Baby ballooner" was a preoccupation for the rest of the day. The tears would ebb and flow between Treehouse, painting on our new garage sale easel and playing laundry. Laundry is a game where every sock comes out of the drawer, becomes unpaired, is laid out like a memory-concentration board, is folded with a different partner and then put away in various nooks and crannies around the house. An extensive game of laundry also includes the folding, re-folding and putting away of the kitchen tea towels. These have been known to resurface under couch cushions and in living room cupboards, but rarely back in the kitchen itself.

Just when I thought that socks and paint and Toopy and Binoo had begun to outshine the dark shadow of the lost balloon, Daddy came home and the pain and suffering began anew. There were tears at dinner and tears in bed. Short of driving back to Best Buy and getting another Balloonie, there was not much I could do but divert and redirect. Finally, a day swamped with emotion gave way to sleep and Momma had a chance to grieve that the Gaffer’s fantasy life of a toddler had just experienced its first wallop of reality. I am happy to go months without having to do it again.

Father’s Day morning greeted us at 6:50am with wails about Balloonie, poor little Balloonie and not much regard for Daddy’s special day.

The Gaffer is charmed that at 3 years old, the loss of a yellow Best Buy balloon is all the tragedy that she knows, but I am saddened that she has had to experience this aspect of the world at all and humbled that there is little I can do to shield her from learning this truth.  I can only hope that it will be many more Father’s Days before she has another lesson in misfortune.