These were the words out of Sara's mouth last night about 7:45. She had just had her bath, her hair was still wet, and was dressed in her normal bedtime garb - one of my t-shirts.
When she said this, I thought, "Wait, this sounds like a "girl" thing, so why are you asking me?" I looked toward Susie, and she evidently knew what Sara was going to ask. I'm processing things in my head as fast as possible, because sometimes you don't really want to answer questions that your kids come up with. So she said, "Is Santa Claus real?"
Sara is 9 1/2. We've made it this far. The past two years, Susie and I have thought every Christmas that "this would be the last year" she believed in Santa. Meg was 10 when she "cracked the case", and was quite proud of herself.
So the question is out there, hanging like a dead limb on a tree that you know you're going to have to cut back. I did the normal thing and hedged, hedged like crazy. "Well, what do you think?" That's how psychiatrists respond to everything on TV and in the movies. That doesn't always go over well in real life, especially with my daughters. She shot back with "just tell me!" We tried some other lines like "how else would all these presents appear?" and "you've seen him at the mall and at other stores", things like that. We kept going round and round, with Sara refusing to give up her inquistition and Susie and I hanging onto this piece of childhood innocence. Maybe we were wrong for being so protective over this belief. Let's face it, when you use reason and logic, there's no way a fat man could break into your house and millions of other houses during a 24-hour timespan and do what he does. But maybe that's the reason - we didn't want her to use grown-up logic. We don't want to keep her from growing up, but she was the last child we'd ever have to question the idea of Santa.
By this time, Sara was getting angry. She's crying and yelling "just tell me!", and we're both looking at each other like "you tell her, I don't want to!" So I came up with the classic line "Santa is what you believe him to be in your heart", to which she responded "then he's not really real!" and started to bolt of the room crying. I held her on my lap in the recliner, just trying to calm her. After several more "just tell me!" rants, I finally let her go and she stormed upstairs. Why was this so hard to just tell her? Couldn't tell you. When she left my lap, I knew that we had turned a momentous corner in Sara's life. We decided to let her calm down a little bit before talking to her about it.
About 15 minutes later, I went upstairs to the bonus room to check my e-mail, then I went to Sara's room and knocked on the door because it was locked. "Go away, leave me alone!" came from the other side of the door. I persisted, and she finally let me in. After staying behind the door for a few seconds, she got in her bed and we talked, and it was obvious that she was more relaxed now, having processed things for a few minutes. I asked her why she was so angry, even though I already knew the answer. Was she mad at us for "lying" to her about Santa? She said that wasn't it. I asked if she was just sad that she "found out" about Santa, and she nodded. We talked a little more, and she was starting to smile. I told her that Meg was 10 when she made the same discovery, and Sara said that she was much more mature than Meg, and that's why she figured things out earlier. I asked that she promise not to tell "little kids" about Santa, especially her cousin Grace since we'll see her this weekend, and the other kids on the street. Sara then said, "What about the tooth fairy? Is that you too?" I tried to hedge again, but she was obviously on a roll. Susie came in, and we all talked some more. I told her that I found out about Santa when I was 6 because I had been snooping and found some of my Christmas presents early. Sara asked who called every Christmas Eve and pretended to be Santa. "Is it Granddaddy?" We relented and told her. I said, "And years from now, when you have your own children, I'll do that for them!" I told her goodnight, gave her a kiss and walked out of her room. She went into Meg's room to talk about her revelation, and Susie came up to me in the hallway and said, "What about the Easter bunny? Did she ask about that????" I said that she didn't, and that we'd had enough discoveries for the night, so we'd just leave that one for another time.
This Christmas will defintely be different at our house. Sure, Santa will still come, but Meg and Sara will probably both look at each other and grin when we talk about it, like it's a sister-to-sister inside joke. This is all a part of growing up, both for the girls and for Susie and me as parents. The girls both know they can ask us any question they want to ask. We may not give them the answer they want to hear, but we'll always be there with an answer. We know there will be things that we have to deal with but would rather not, just like last night. We also know that we can handle it all because we have each other - all four of us......
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