Sunday.

The little girl that follows me everywhere sometimes trails a few steps behind but is ever present- watching, observing, skittering after me in her light-up tennis shoes.

This morning she wiggled while I braided her long blonde hair (always one plait over each shoulder) as if she could already tell I aimed to put her in the back rooms of my mind today, as if she knew just how to get under my skin and make herself impossible to forget.

I play some old 70’s music, appealing to her nostalgia and distractability, but I should’ve known it would not be that easy today, of all days. Sunday.

“Aren’t we going to church?” she asks, hanging over the back of a chair while I scramble eggs in a pan.

“Not anymore.” I plate the eggs. The smell is already turning my stomach.

“But my friends are there.” The girl rests her chin on the chair, drags her little hands up the sides. She’s beginning to pout and I cannot stand when she pouts.

“Not anymore,” I repeat, and I know I’m being unkind when I turn the music up to drown out her whine but I cannot bring myself to care. I just need an hour away from her, so that I can work in peace, so that I don’t have to face all my feelings at once.

When I set my eggs on the table she huffs, crosses her arms, tilts her wobbling chin up in defiance- “I don’t want eggs. I want to go to church. When’s Mom coming back?”

I’m quickly reaching my breaking point. The music swells. I pinch between my eyes at the headache she’s forming. “We’ve talked about this so many times. Ad nauseam, babe. If you don’t want the eggs don’t eat them.”

“When’s Mom coming back?”

Instead of answering her, I snatch up the plate of eggs and move to the kitchen, because I know there is nothing worse than being 6 and being ignored, and maybe she’ll sulk off somewhere that isn’t here.

I scrape the eggs into the trash, wash the plate, slot it into the drying rack. Something thunks methodically in the other room- she’s kicking her sock feet against the wall.

“Knock it off,” I say, coming back to scold her, to make it clear that I’m not playing this game today. “Seriously. I can’t think with you doing that.”

With my own face, she glares at me, sullen, quiet, little-girl-fury, thunk thunk thunk.

“Stop it.” I cross the room, grab her arm, and give it a little shake to get my point across.

Usually, at this point, she’d give in. She’d find a book to read, she’d crawl under the purple covers of the bed I’d made for her, she’d be the first to let the fight go just like I did when I was her age. It’s in her name- peacemaker. It’s what our mother called her, what she was expected to be.

She is not giving in so easily today. When my hand closes around the gentle flesh of her upper arm, she yelps, slides from her chair and uses her weight to pull me with her until she’s on the floor and I’m forced to kneel.

“Goddammit. I straight up don’t have time for this today.” I let her arm flop next to her face pressed into the carpet. Christ. The drama of it all. Was I really this bad as a kid? “Fine, you know what? Throw a tantrum. See if I give a shit. I’m gonna go send some emails.”

I straighten up, turn on my heel to leave, and that’s when she sinks the knife in.

The little girl begins to cry.

Not a quiet, gentle cry, either, but a “Whose Kid is Making All That Racket in the Supermarket” type of cry. Complete with shoulder-shaking sobs, with pink mouth open, with fat tears and snot colliding and trailing down her cheeks.

I watch this girl- this girl who has my eyes and my humor and my beautiful brain, this girl who has fought hard to keep my happiness and creativity and silly joy intact- having a tantrum on my floor while I look on feeling completely fucking helpless.

Through her sobs, she’s saying something, but I can’t understand the garbled speech so I kneel back down beside her.

I cannot bring myself to touch her. She looks like a live wire. She looks like a mess. I have never been more afraid of someone so small in all my life.

“What do you want?” I ask her, and now I’m the one who’s pleading.

She howls. She rubs her arm where I grabbed her earlier, just below her sleeve, and I realize I’ve left a bruise just like our mother did at the supermarket when we were 5.

“I. Want. My. Mom!”

Her chest heaves through the wail. She turns her face back into the carpet.

I bring my mouth close to her ear so she’ll be sure to hear my words. I feel flushed and angry and upset and confused. I wish it wasn’t Sunday. “Mom isn’t coming back. We don’t talk to her anymore, remember? I know you don’t get it. But she was making me so unhappy-”

“I WANT MOM!”

I rock back on my heels. She is so angry, and so sad, and I am still so scared of her, of this tiny body that holds all the emotions I’m not able to.

I watch her cry, and the tears start to burn at my own eyes, and I shake my head quick to dispel them before speaking in a commanding tone. “I’m your mom now. It’s me. I have to be the mom, and I know you hate it and I know it sucks but our Mom left us. So it’s just me now.”

I know what my mother would do, in this situation. I know what she has done. She’d grip my other arm, put me in time-out, leave me to my self-reflection.

But this girl, crying on my carpet, looks as helpless as I feel. And I cannot bring myself to mark another bruise into her skin. And I am trying so hard to not turn into Mom, for this little girl who won’t understand until she’s my age.

I bend to speak into her ear again. She’s wearing the same silver studs that we got at Claire’s on our 6^th birthday.

“You wanna know a secret?”

Her crying falters, breath catching on the uptake, and I find my in.

“I miss Mom too.”

The little girl lets this sink in. She reaches a hand out to trace the pattern on my jeans. She hiccups.

“I miss her too, and I’m sorry. It isn’t fair.” I reach out my hand to stroke the crown of her head. I breathe in the strawberry shampoo of her scalp.

And though it wasn’t a true apology, I was always an easy sell on making amends, always the first to jump at an opportunity for forgiveness. Even if it wasn’t my fucking fault in the first place.

The girl climbs into my lap, and I hold her. I sway gently from side to side. I hum a song from that cartoon she loves until her tears stop coming.

She sits up and swipes at her eyes, cheeks blotchy and red. “Can we have pancakes? The animal-shape ones. Like Grandpa used to make.”

I make the little girl some pancakes, form them the best I can into her requests- a unicorn, a dinosaur, a centaur. They’re weird-looking but she doesn’t care.

I get out two plates, stack the pancakes like Grandpa used to, and have a Sunday morning breakfast with the girl I used to be.