I thought this gig got easier with experience. Once again, I was wrong.

Children can be difficult. Each stage of development comes with it's own pitfalls and rewards. But somehow I got the idea that as I grew with my children, as I gathered experience points in this motherhood thing, it would get easier. Funny me. Delusional me, maybe.

Six and half years into this adventure, I'm beginning to realize that when you start with an infant, you start out easy. Address the basic things: food, clothing, shelter, love. Some babies are easier than others, I know (my first was a difficult baby). I just felt like I could work through everything, be generous and loving, and it would all work out. It gets so much more complicated from there.

As a family, we attended an open casket visitation and then funeral service this week. It was my daughter's first personal experience with this sort of ritual. We tried to prepare her for it, using a (quite serendipitous) question about a mortuary we drove by to explain things like embalming, viewing the dead, and funeral rites. Upon approaching the casket the other day, the first question was easy to handle. Then the distractions set in and it seemed like smooth sailing.

Until we hit the car. For some reason Ari thinks that the car is the perfect time for deep meaningful conversations.

I won't get into the nuts and bolts of the conversation. I will tell you that Ari was upset. Confronted with a person's mortality made her perceive a threat to those people that she loves dearly. [Grandpa's earlier attempts at being honest and well-meaning, with comments like "We all go someday. I'll die someday, too." didn't help matters.] And I desperately wanted to stop the car, pull her into my arms, and murmur platitudes assuring her that I would never leave her. That she would spend all her days sheltered in the arms of the ones she loves, never feeling the pain of loss and grief.

But I knew this would be wrong.

On one level, I couldn't bring myself to say this because, frankly, I want my children to outlive me. I want us all to have long, full, rich lives and come to a natural end. To tell my six year old that we would never leave her somehow implies to my brain that she will leave us instead. Short life isn't on my list of things I want for my kids. This is honest and raw and natural.

More than that, I couldn't offer Ari those reassurances because I know life is painful. It's hard. It's cruel sometimes. And I prefer honesty. We don't believe in Santa Clause, perfection, or that everything works out all the time. We do celebrate when things go right, when we try our best, and when the hard stuff reminds us of how good the good stuff is. If I am the one to leave my daughter, I do not want to complicate her grief with lies. I want her to know that I value her, love her, respect her.

So, as hard as it was, I didn't offer empty promises. Instead I followed her lead and did my best to help her through her fear. In the end, she seemed to feel better after deciding what memento she would keep from each of us. She asked for my jewelry box, some of her dad's shirts, her brother's keepsake box. She staked her claim on those things, in case one of us dies.

It took almost all of my energy to calmly progress in this conversation. To accept that she needed to have it. To hear her fear, to lift her up, to promise her these transient material things in case of disaster. Days later, I'm still digesting and processing, and when I can sit and think about it, I go ahead and cry.

The questions just keep getting harder.