The Moments in Which We Are Rich

By Elisha Pidcock

Sometimes my daughter says “I wish we were rich”. She feels the platitude of being the child of a single mom with a single-mom income at times. 

I tell her: “These are the moments in which we are rich,” as we lay on the couch, with her cheek snuggled against my chest and our two cats snuggled into crevices between blankets and limbs and soft supine bellies. I think, in her heart, she knows this. 

She is reminded of it on occasions such as when we have transformed the living room into ‘Mommy and R’s Dinner Theatre Inn’. On these nights, the coffee table is carefully spread with souvlaki skewers, tzatziki, and pitas, or tortillas and taco fillings, our amber glowing star pendant lamp the only light in the room, the floor aesthetically strewn with pillows. The couch is covered with soft blankets, a movie queued up on the tv. (We have made it through the entire Lord of the Rings Trilogy, the Star Wars ‘Skywalker Saga’, all the Studio Ghibli classics in this way.) 

Beside the entryway to the living room, we have a small cabinet behind which my daughter stands, her crayoned sign taped on the front advertising the movie. Atop the cabinet, my daughter has staged a toy cash register. I arrive with my ‘posse’ of friends, which consists of several stuffed animals who have become the favourite companions of our movie nights. I tell my daughter, who plays the role of cashier, that I would like tickets for all my stuffed friends and a ticket for my daughter who will be meeting me there in a little while. I am tendered hand-drawn tickets, then seated by the ‘theatre assistant’ who offers me a selection of drinks – LaCroix, Juicy Juice, milk, or water. I always pick LaCroix, and she knows this, but the offerings are part of the experience. 

Art by R, age 9

The stuffed animals take their seats along the back of the couch leaning against the wall. 

Then my daughter circles around the apartment to the second entryway of our living room. When she enters, as herself, we greet each other as if we were meeting after a long absence. We engage in commendations of the atmosphere of ‘Mommy and R’s Dinner Theatre Inn’: “How cute?!” We share expressions of excitement for the movie being shown, and praises for the dinner which has been served. She asks me to order her a Juicy Juice and then conveniently slips away to the “bathroom” before the movie theatre assistant reappears to take my daughter’s drink order. When she returns as my daughter, she makes a little joke about how the movie theatre assistant looks just like her: “So weird! Can you believe that? Maybe she’s my long-lost twin!”  After our dinner we settle in on the couch for snuggles and have an intermission half-way through the movie during which we make ice cream sundaes or microwave mug cakes. 

My weekends are filled with nights like this now that my daughter lives with me full time, rather than the nights of my shared custody days. I would go out for drinks while my daughter was spending her weekends with her father. I look back at my life before almost as a separate eon, alien and unfamiliar to me now. I’ve traded in the (albeit infrequent) Saturday nights of standing in a full face of make-up, a vodka cranberry in one hand and cigarette in the other, with girlfriends at the bar. I quit smoking, alcohol, and even caffeine, replaced them with LaCroix and walks down our lane breathing deeply the different smells of the seasons I would never have noticed in my previous life. 

I spend my weekends at the skating rink looping circles hand in hand with my little one or baking bread, helping my daughter bloom yeast in a tiny mixing bowl to make her own tiny bread because she is obsessed with tiny foods. I spend hot summer days riding bikes with my daughter to the local pool, where I, unabashedly, sit underneath a mushroom waterfall and play mermaids with my daughter as if I were a child myself. I banter with her about little inside jokes (we have a revolving set of ridiculous, giggle-fit-inducing ones) or sometimes about more serious thoughts like “What if none of this is real and we’re all just dreaming the same dream?” (I kid you not, my child said this). 

I can see that all these things mean so much to my daughter and through her eyes I can see that this is what truly makes life complete; simple acts and joyful memories and inside jokes I share with this child who will go out into the world and bloom because of this time we have shared. My daughter sometimes says, “I wish we were rich,” but in my heart I feel a richness that isn’t found in money; a richness which has made my daughter’s childhood full in a way I know she’ll remember as an adult. 

Because I don’t think many of us remember every toy we had as children, but I do know that we remember summers playing mermaids at the pool, the way that it felt to nestle ourselves into the soft curves of our mothers, and the taste of an ice cream sundae — these are the moments in which we are rich.