“My mommy was a mommy when she was twenty-four,” came the crackling rejoinder. (Yes, she is the type of kid who investigates these things.) The unspoken question sizzled in the air, the same one that pops into my head on my crankier days. Penina followed it up with another zinger: “When are you gonna be a mommy?”

“When Hashem wants,” I said to her, and also to myself.

“Oh. So… but first, you need a wedding,” reasoned Penina. “Right? Then you could be a mommy.”

“Right.”

“So when are you gonna get married?”

“I don’t know. When Hashem wants.” That’s right, Esther, you skeptic. What happened to all those seminary shmuessen?

“Do you need help?” offered Penina. “I’ll help you. What do you need?” Her little face split into an excited grin. “Dresses. And flowers.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “And food.”

“Hot dogs?”

“Um, maybe chicken and rice.”

“Okay,” she conceded. “And dessert. And then you’ll be married!”

“Well, I need a chassan, too,” I reminded her.

“Oh.” Brought up short, she paused to consider this brow-wrinkling technicality. “Where do you get him?”

“I don’t know.”

Penina pouted.

Same. “He’s probably in a succah somewhere.”

“Right.” Penina nodded. “Yeah, because the boys go in the succah now. But which one is he in?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted, feeling a stab of illogical shame.

Penina eyed me with the frown of a disapproving mother whose child has misplaced their homework. “I wanna go to your wedding,” she reproached me. “I wanna pretty dress an’ I wanna dance.”

Ouch. The indictment in her words was breathtaking, a brick to my chest. Until that moment, I could almost have deceived myself into believing she was concerned for me. It hurt to remember that she wasn’t, that she couldn’t be, that she was five years old and completely self-absorbed. I wanted to scold her, or maybe just run away, to tell myself that she was wrong and I wasn’t missing out on life. I wanted to punish her for reminding me that I was.

I wanted to punish her, too, because it hurt to hear these thoughts aloud — whispers from my inner self, which I’d pushed away, ashamed and afraid of my lack of faith. Now those thoughts had taken a visible and accusing form in this child, who saw a peer in me. In this child, in whom I saw the little girl I had once been — a little girl who played house with her friends and wore a white satin kallah dress on Purim. Call her naive, perhaps, but there’s no denying that that little girl knew, with a certainty I hadn’t felt in years, that she was destined for a happy ending.

How it stung for that little inner dreamer to be exposed to the harsh light of reality! How could anyone bear to destroy her castles in the air? Only someone as heartless as another child could do such a thing. And I wanted to hurt her, that child who had hurt my little girl. You don’t know anything! I wanted to say. You’re stupid! Leave me alone!

But I was the only adult in that room. I was Esther, and Esther contained every girl I had ever been. And while that included a howling five-year-old in a kallah costume who had been hit and was straining to hit back, it also included a 24-year-old young woman strong enough to restrain that child, because she had been fighting for five years to learn kindness, and not bitterness, from her pain.

The only other person in the room was Penina, who contained only five Peninas, none of whom had suffered a day in their lives, and all of whom still believed in fairy tales. One could argue that Penina should be told the truth — that Prince Charming has his own path to travel, that what should come naturally doesn’t always, that sometimes girls date and G-d laughs — but it didn’t feel like my place to share those things with her.

Besides, she had told the truth, at least as any little girl would see it: I wanna go to your wedding. I wanna pretty dress an’ I wanna dance.

There was something very beautiful about the fact that she did not know how to lie. I refused to be the one to teach her.

So I swallowed and said, “Me, too.”

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 965)