I knew I shouldn’t have read the email. This is what I get, I thought, for being so addicted to my phone. Would it have killed me to let it sit and just read it later, after work?
Madison was peacefully firing away at her tiny phone game and I envied her numbness. Better to be addicted to a phone game than addicted to checking your email.
I had been forgetting to breathe and now my eyes were wet. Tears were coming fast and I realized I needed an escape plan. A how-to-not-cry-at-work plan.
I had cried at work before, finding a bathroom and breathing hard and coming out with my eyes red-splotched and salty, fooling no one. But this was worse, because we were on the crowded 86th street crosstown bus. I was bringing Madison home from school and it was my job to do that, certainly, without crying. My job as the babysitter was a simple one. Be an adult for a few hours. And not even an adult really, just adult enough to keep a child safe from 3 to 6:30, or 7pm, depending how the train was running that would bring her mom home.
Tears were coming fast now, other passengers could see it. I could not stop and it was only a matter of moments before Madison would sense my uneven breathing, which was getting harder to disguise and….
“Are you crying?” the eight year old asked me, her phone now limp in her hand, the game paused; a Tetris block hovering mid-screen.
“Um… I’m… (gasp) I’m okay,” said the 29 year old sitting next to her. Me. A beet-red-faced spectacle on a long, snaking crosstown bus headed west through Central Park.
“Why are you crying?” she asked, her voice now changed, uncharacteristically compassionate, as if in a spot-on impression of her mother in this exact scenario. It hurt my heart to hear her use a grownup’s voice and I wished I could be a child again, not on this bus, mind you, but in some soft place, atop my old bunk bed maybe, before email was invented.
“Did something bad happen?”
I was torn because I didn’t want to burden her and knew that I was wildly out of line to be telling her my problems, but then again, I was having a massive and obvious emotion and it hardly seemed like there was anywhere to go but with the truth.
I bit my lip and steadied my breath, trying to think how I could translate this mean email I’d received to a child.
“Um, well, I wrote a … a play (I said, instead of a TV pilot, which seemed too abstract a concept). I wrote a play. I worked very hard on the script, of the play. And my friends want to help me make the play (I thusly explained the concept of producers) and so they said send it — the script of the play — to this guy and he’ll read it and — well, he didn’t like it, my play. And this email” — I looked down at my open phone, at the nasty email telling me what garbage my writing was — from a man whose opinion I’d been told was important.
I was wiping tears and snot away as gracefully and adult-fully as I knew how. To Madison I said once more, emphatically, to make up for the lack of context and her lack of life experience, “This guy really, really — just — did not like my play.”
The problem sounded so simple, maybe even meaningless, but also so very extra sad, when spoken aloud to an 8 year old.
I had said my piece, so I turned to face her straight on, to see what she’d make of it. Through my mortification, I met her gaze and found that she was looking back at me with the steadiest eyes. And with an unflinching, unshakeable surety, she said,
“I KNOW that if I read your play, I would love it.”
My sternum caught her words like a hiccup and I stifled another sob.
My response crumbled, tired and honest, into the tight space between us on the packed crosstown bus:
“You would. You really would love my play, Madison. It’s good.”
“Well, I know that!” she said, as if defending her fine taste and common sense.
Her confidence in my script, sight unseen, without a shred of empirical evidence, without having completed third grade, was contagious.
I slid my offending phone into my grimy coffee shop logo-emblazoned tote bag. Madison slumped back into her unpaused game, setting the Tetris block down and sighing softly. I looked up at my fellow passengers, doing damage control on my reputation and daring them, just daring them, to disagree with Madison, and with me, that I had written a great play.
Out of the mouths of babes
❤️