My son likes to play Car Accident. I'm not a fan.
How do I tell him that's the reason he'll never know his grandfather?
My three-year-old son Leo loves cars. Has to have them. Has to be near them.
Last year, when we went to the Azores for our annual summer trip, I stuffed about a dozen of his matchbox cars into a Ziplock. By the end of the trip, the Ziplock neither zipped nor locked after being dragged around the islands for a few weeks. My aunt gave Leo a fabric drawstring bag that was sturdier, which he then took everywhere.
“MAMA, DO YOU HAVE MY SACO?” he’d yell before we’d leave the house.
“Yes, Mama has your bag,” I’d say.
Even after we came home to Boston, we’d have to lug the bag everywhere. And of course, with doting family and friends all around, cars would be added to the stockpile. At one point, I counted 74 cars.
Leo asks me to open the saco—he still has a hard time understanding the function of the drawstring—at least once a day. In the past he’d play Traffic, lining each of the matchbox cars bumper to bumper. It was a great game for him and a great twenty minutes of silence for me.
But with every birthday and holiday, Leo’s collection has grown—much to my dismay. (Don’t get me started on my Less-is-more Toy Soapbox.) With monster trucks and excavators and tractors and firetrucks—his collection has gotten bigger, not just in numbers, but in size, too. So while I can’t control people’s spending habits, I thought I could at least control my son’s play.
Wrong.
Leo’s new favorite game is Car Accident. Instead of slowly placing one car in front of another for a well-mannered game of Traffic, Leo now takes a semi-truck and slams it into a car.
“Boom!” he shouts. He flips the car over for dramatic effect.
I can see he’s proud of his imagined scene, because he recreates it again and again. But I’m less than enthused.
“Don’t you want to play Traffic?” I ask.
“No,” he says, and goes back to smashing.
I don’t know how to tell him that Car Accident is too real a game for me. Every time he blasts cars against each other, I don’t just tell him to quiet down for the sensory overload, but because too quickly, I’m transported back to a beach in Faial, Azores when I was 18-years-old.
It was 2007, and I was two weeks away from starting my first year of college. I was nervous, but so ready to live on my own and do all the things college girls do—stay up late, party, have lots of sex. I was a pseudo Rory-Gilmore-Do-Gooder, and now that I’d be away from the watchful eyes of my parents, I wanted to live. Really live.
But then there was a phone call that shattered all those hopes and dreams long before I even got to really develop them.
My dad and uncle had been in a car accident. My uncle survived. My dad did not.
This year will mark the 18th anniversary of my dad’s death. It’s a big one, because once August 12th ends and August 13th begins, I will have lived longer on this Earth without my dad than with. And that’s hard to wrap my head around. Hard to understand how I’ve made it this far, especially now when I’m a mother and have two young boys who would have loved my dad. Loved him beyond words.
But my boys—three and one—are too young to hear about what happened to their grandfather, their vavô. For now, I’ll have to watch Leo play Car Accident and swallow the sadness.
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