This is maybe the best way to tell you who this kid is: big fun, big personality, big ideas, big faith, big big big giant heart. Her dad’s kid for sure and her own person for sure. This is a kid who wants to hang around with the wife. Not all the time, just sometimes. Oftentimes. This is a kid who is only a couple years older than a kid the wife might have had with her husband, if that took, if that had not been permanently shelved. Maybe see also here: I don’t think you’d be a good mother, maybe. Something about this kid is filling a hole she didn’t know was empty, except it’s not a random kid hole, it’s a this-kid hole. This is a kid who calls the wife when she’s sad and asks her to come over and she goes over. This is a kid who can cry on her shoulder and who can cause her to bust into giggles like she’s not the age she is. This is a kid who knows she’s still growing up, and the wife gets to bear witness to her growing up, beautifully and awkwardly and with the grace of willingness to show up and hang in and do the work through the very worst of it, and seeing this kid actively participating in becoming herself feels like witnessing a miracle. At the kid’s age the wife was still actively participating in ruining her life. Now she’s the age of using phrases like at her age, but it seems she’s still becoming herself too, which is honestly annoying as fuck. She had been so sure she was herself before her husband left.
This is a kid who sleeps in the fluffy giant-ass king-size bed with the wife when she comes over but somehow winds up not just on the wife’s side but actually on the wife, legs and arms on the wife like she’s just a lumpy part of the bed. This is a kid with such an epic story that she once shared it with a roomful of people and held that room like it was hers. The wife sat in the front row laughing and crying, and when we say crying we mean something above and beyond misty tears of appreciation, we mean she broke down, and when we say broke down, we don’t mean for a minute, we mean repeatedly, we mean gasping for air sobbing, for the duration of the kid’s talk. Maybe that’s something some shrink would be able to effectively unpack, maybe it’s obvious to you hearing about it, maybe it’s about the wife wishing she had a kid, maybe it’s about her connecting with the kid’s experiences, maybe it’s because the kid is so clearly sprung from a person she adores, maybe the wife is still fucking grieving the end of her marriage, maybe it’s all these sixteen things or none of these sixteen things maybe in the end it’s just big love and that’s all anyone needs to know about it.