Much Ado About Kate at 17 (Part II)

Kate handled life in stride for the most part. I owned a theatre company when she was about four so she was raised around my actors. That taught her a great sense of absurd humor and she was always saying things that amazed me.

Once, during her fifth Christmas, she made a card all by herself on the computer. The front of the card had a picture of Santa Claus and it said, “Peace on earth and good will toward men.” Oh, how sweet, I thought. On the inside it said, “It’s always about men, isn’t it?” Where did that come from? My little girl, already a man-bashing harridan. How adorable. How quaint. How like mommy.

Right around that time I was taking some oral medication that tasted like furniture polish. It was some homeopathic remedy that was supposed to help me ovulate. Kate caught me in mid-gulp one morning and asked what I was doing. “This is to help mommy get pregnant.” Without missing a beat, Kate said, “Oh, are you drinking sperm?” Now, if I’d been a goooood mommy I would have tripped over myself with giggles and squealed, “Aw, isn’t that cuuuuute?” But no, I was a baaaaad mommy. I said, “Only when mommy wants a new car, honey.”

We played games together, like Monopoly. She liked to read the cards. Once she said, “Look! I won a YACHET! . . . What’s a yachet?” She meant to say “yacht.” And she loved learning. Once she came home from school and read what she wrote about whales. She said, “Did you know some of them weigh about 4,000 loobs? She meant to say “pounds (lbs)” but “lbs” looked like “loobs” to her.

Kate wasn’t raised on cute little Bible songs and Girl Scout melodies. We sang Bette Midler tunes. Divine Miss M. We sang Broadway musicals. We sang songs from Jon Waters’ movies. We watched South Park and Disney films.

But Kate surprised me a lot too. She was in love with Jesus from the time she was about four years old. I can’t imagine where she picked that up because I was Muslim at the time. There may have been a Bible or two somewhere on the bookshelves, but they were never cracked open. Kate had a collection of little Bibles that she kept in her room. She had a collection of Jesus figurines and she cherished them. They were on her lowest bookshelves so she could easily see them.