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I live for my daughters

On Easter Sunday I watched that new Casey Anthony three part special on Investigation Discovery.

I tend to like old lady television because I may be 33 physically but cognitively I’m approximately 72. Every memory of my maternal grandmother I have involves either David Attenborough or the spine-chilling sound of Robert Stack telling me about unsolved mysteries.

My paternal grandparents are associated with weeknights that got progressively weirder, starting off with Mr. Ed before moving on to The Musters, then The Addams Family, Alfred Hitchcock and finally The Twilight Zone. I’m convinced that my paternal grandparents’ television habits are responsible for my personality. But it’s the documentary and true crime grandparents who turned me into an Investigation Discovery freak.

But I digress.

After I put my kids to bed, I settled myself snug into my own bed and pushed play on my Tivo. I know the basics of the case, but the trial went down the summer I got married, graduated from my undergraduate program and started my masters residency. I was aware of it, but tangentially at best. It was something I’d heard about but nothing I’d invested actual attention in.

Now it’s 2017 and I’m a magnificent loser who goes to bed before Jeopardy ends.

It’s a great time to catch up.

I was ten minutes into the first episode when I realized that, just prior to starting the show, I’d argued with one of my four-year-olds at great length about why she couldn’t sleep in my bed with me.

She and her sister had insisted on a show before bedtime. Being allowed to watch a show in my bed is one of the top prizes for behavior in our house. It’s a coveted part of our nightly routine, rarely withheld except in the case of egregiously bad behavior in the hours leading up to it. But sleeping in my bed through the night is something I’ve never allowed. It’s not that I enjoy being mean. It’s just that I need some personal time. I just need it. I spend all day working or, if I’m with them, answering philosophical questions and letting them touch my face.

I need time at night to repair my bubble.

I’m not sorry.

Stop side-eyeing me, alright? Just back off.

I gave the girls their bedtime dose of My Little Pony and even indulged their curiosity about lighting by allowing them to stay up forty-seven minutes and twenty-three seconds late to watch a National Geographic documentary on the subject.

Because nerdhood begets nerdhood. Represent.

But I’d been gently stone cold as I tucked my protesting spawn into their own, separate beds and assured them that there was no reason to be afraid of lightning because, as we’d just clearly seen, it has no emotional investment in hitting people but rather just happens to do it, when a certain random set of conditions present themselves at a particular time, around 240,000 times a year.

“Lightning strikes aren’t premeditated,” I assured them as I left their rooms.

After ten minutes of the Casey Anthony story I was struggling to remember why I didn’t want them in my bed. The descriptions of Caylee Anthony, the pictures of her living and the accounts of how she may have died got under my skin with alarming efficiency. By fifteen minutes in I was taking the opportunity during commercial breaks to stand in the girls’ bedroom doorways, drinking in the sight of my perfectly unconscious children draped like dead weight over their beds.

By the beginning of the second episode I couldn’t take it anymore.

I can’t know Casey Anthony’s mind. I can’t know how Caylee Anthony died or who caused it to happen or why. I can speculate all I want, and believe you me I have an opinion, but I can’t say that what I believe happened is what happened.

What I can say is that before I was halfway through the second episode I’d gone into my daughter’s room – the daughter who’d been especially vocal about why I ought to let her sleep with me – and I’d slipped both arms under her limp, warm body and carried her, splayed across my grasp, into my own bed and laid down beside her.

She never woke up.

I finished all three episodes of the special that night, but my hand never left my daughter’s body. I fell asleep holding her in the same crushing grip with which she clutches her stuffed bear every night until morning.

I can’t know why Caylee Anthony died. I can’t allow myself to think about it or I start to get morose and angry. But I do know, with perfect certainty, that I couldn’t survive without my daughters.

Even when they won’t stop touching my face. Even when they drive me positively bat crap crazy.

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