Of Fairy Staffs & Magic, in Two Parts

the burden of parenting the imagination

I don’t know how the fairy staff broke. She wouldn’t tell me, but I have my guesses.

I found her in a tear-stained ball on the side of the house, arms wrapped about her knees, knees pulled up to her chin. She was sobbing, her whole body shaking.

“What happened?” I asked. My mind went to bloodied knees and bruised elbows and pinpricks of wood embedded in fingers.

“We need glue,” she wailed. “We need to fix it.”

“We need to fix what?”

Slowly, sadly she produced the staff. It was indeed snapped in two, irreparably so.

“Glue won’t fix that,” I said. She buried her face in her hands and continued to sob.

“But the fairies gave it to us…” She trailed off.

I picked up the two pieces of wood, so carefully sanded and smoothed. My fingers were drawn to the rough, ragged break. The staff had been a gift from the fairies, cast down at our feet from high above. It was a sudden thing, a surprise. A near disaster. It narrowly missed my head during one of our walks in the woods. Consequently, we’d dubbed it a gift, rather than a curse.

Do you believe in fairies? she’d asked me that day. I’d said I had no reason not to. After all, I still had my head.

And now I held that gift in my hands once more, broken beyond any reasonable hope. Snapped. Just two sticks, really—interestingly shaped, perhaps, but nothing more.

Still, my daughter cried, some vial cocktail of guilt and shame and disappointment and sadness.

And now I had a choice to make. “I don’t think the magic goes away,” I said, slowly. “Now, you have two wands—perhaps, that’s what the fairies want. Their gift—” I paused. “Changes, I think. But you still have to care for it, right?”

I laid the two sticks down on the cement next to her. She didn’t move. I set my useless words down next to the stick, and instead gave her a hug.

Fairies or no, belief inevitably casts upon us a heavy burden.

This actually IS a sequel of sorts to an earlier story I shared a while back about my daughter and fairies and the woods. Read it here.

And another thing:

• Want to win a copy of “My Life with the Jedi: The Spirituality of Star Wars?” Of course you do! Click here to enter Loyola Press’s giveaway!

• Did you know it’s National Poetry Month? I wrote a reflection on my favorite poem by David Whyte, “Sometimes,” for IgnatianSpirituality.com. Read it!

• Are you a fan of Scrooge McDuck? You’re not alone. I wrote about old Uncle Scrooge for this week’s “Now Discern This.” Give it a read.