By Liz Petrone
Many years ago an old boyfriend asked me to tell him what my wildest fantasy was. I looked at him. “You really want to know?”
He nodded, eager.
So I leaned in close, lowered my voice, and told him how I wanted—more than anything—for someone to tell me that everything was going to be okay convincingly enough that I believed it.
I knew from the way his face fell that he was disappointed with my answer, but there was nothing else to say. It was the truth.
Everything is going to be okay. It’s such a magical phrase, one of my favorites still. I’ve said it countless times to everyone I love, and once I had kids I found myself saying it to them constantly: everythingisokayitsokayitsokay all strung together to soothe them when they were sad or hurt or scared or over-tired or mad because they couldn’t wear dirty underwear as a hat to school. I even say it in my sleep when they whimper next to me, just a reflex that pops out of my still-unconscious mouth, as instinctively a part of my parenting now as checking the toilet seat before I sit down or whipping my arm out across the passenger seat when I brake too fast.
I’ve said it to myself even more, probably a million times over the years, using it as a mantra to get through awkward phases and job losses and bad breakups and bad hair days. But when my mom died, it didn’t work. It just wasn’t true and I knew it.
Still, I tried:
“Everything is going to be okay,” I would say to myself while laying on the bathroom floor, the only place in my house with a door that locked so I could cry without scaring the kids.
“Everything is going to be okay,” I whispered to my littlest when he was born and it hit me in a wave of terrible realization that he would never meet his grandmother, not once.
