No Coffee, Just Love

3 Years:
"Mama, are you tired?""Yeah. I think I need coffee. Are you tired?"
"Yeah. But I don't need coffee. I just need love."

When I was a kid, I had noticed that there were some things that parents were especially fond of saying. In particular, they liked saying that their backs ached, that children were on their "last nerve," and that they needed coffee. Always, always, they needed coffee. And they said it in a way that always had some kind of passing subtext, or some sort of secret code they shared with other adults. From the tone they used, I half-believed that "my back hurts" and "I need coffee" actually meant something else altogether, because it seemed strange that adults all shared the same physical and mental needs at the same time, in a way that kids just couldn't get.

It wasn't until I was an adult myself that these things started to make sense. Somehow, between the day we leave high school and the day our kids start talking, all of us seem to develop a constant back ache, a cruel addiction to coffee, and a relentless feeling that the jabbering kids around us were on our last nerves. I don't know how it happened, but it happened to me despite my best efforts to forge some new path into parenthood that didn't involve coffee or back aches.

My daughter said she didn't need coffee, just love. I wish we could all go back to the time when a hug and a kiss were a solution to absolutely every problem in the world.