Of the moment
A story about a timely matter.
15 March 2023
Jill Kolongowski—
How to Hug a Lion
This morning in California, while my toddler daughter and I ate scrambled eggs and toast, the temperature was 37 degrees. Frost tipped the grass outside, dusted the neighbors’ roofs. It was also 37 in Kyiv, Ukraine, this morning.
This morning Russia invaded Ukraine, bombed three different cities. Already the death counts are starting to arrive. But this sounds so clinical, so passive voice. Let me try again: while we ate our eggs, while we watched a bird land on a branch outside the window, while we smiled a hundred times, Russian soldiers began to kill innocent people.
I put these two mornings together. I want to link them. Ours and theirs. I think that the temperature links them. But who cares that the morning air felt the same across the world? Nothing about them is the same, a breakfast in a sunlit kitchen, free (mostly) of the fear of war, free of the need to decide whether to take your child and go, and risk long lines and below-freezing temperatures overnight, or to stay, and wait for the shells to find you. Maybe the link is that both things are happening—the beautiful morning, and the horrific morning. It is a horror that joy is allowed to exist alongside atrocity; it is a necessity that joy exist alongside atrocity.
As I write this, I start Googling, find images of women carrying their babies onto buses, trying to escape, images of neonatal infants crammed into a windowless cinder block bunker while nurses mechanically help them breathe, images of toddlers asleep in bomb shelters, in bus stations, their little bodies unable to take it anymore.
I cannot take it anymore and so, lucky me, I close my browser. To have something to do, away from my phone, away from the computer, I put my daughter in the car and take her to the library.
My daughter’s favorite thing about the library is not the books, but their gigantic stuffed lion. She made a beeline for it the moment we got through the doors. The lion sits high on a bookshelf, so she can only touch its unmoving paw while it looks impassively down on the children’s section. So far, she does not recognize that it’s a predator. She does not yet understand its danger.
I wonder what she would do, sheltering in a subway station. I think of when we took a tractor ride in a pumpkin patch, and she clung to me, scared of the loud roar of the tractor, the unpredictable bumps of the wagon, her body wrapped tightly around mine, belly to belly. We were too far from the entrance to get off the wagon, and so all I could do was hold her and wait while the tractor roared on and on. She held me so tightly she left marks on my arms, but she never cried.
Once, my husband was hammering something in the garage, and my daughter, so sensitive to sound, looked at me with wide eyes, asking, mama? with every bang. I told her It’s okay; it’s just dada using a hammer! But to her that meant nothing and her eyes stayed big until I brought the hammer to show her. I said, See? Hammer! And we gently hammered a nonexistent nail on the floor. Hammer! she said, with triumph, triumph at how she knew what could make such a violent sound, how she wielded it herself. After a little while, the tiny bombs of the hammer did not make her flinch at all.
As we left the library, my daughter ran back toward the lion because she wanted to say goodbye. With a brittle heart, I was tempted to tell her that real lions are scary, and that she should be careful. But why bring the predator home? Why unveil to her my anxiety that already flows in her blood? Is it kinder to talk honestly about the things a hammer can do, or to say the hammer will only bolster the house, and never destroy it?
I lifted her up to the lion, and she gently touched its foot. She blew it a kiss. She held her arms up to hug it. For now, I let her. For now, I am the only one who is afraid.
*Jill Kolongowski is the author of the essay collection Life Lessons Harry Potter Taught Me (Ulysses Press, 2017). Other essays are published in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Insider, Brevity, Sweet: A Literary Confection, River Teeth, and elsewhere. Jill lives in Northern California, where she is at work on a new essay collection about anxiety, disaster, and hope, too.
photo by Jake Weary