This story is about a lemon. A store-bought, medium-sized lemon. A lemon that somehow, became Stella’s first iteration of an imaginary friend. And this lemon’s name: Lyma.

This past week Stella began her first official round of swim lessons. Although she has shown that when it comes to horsing around in the pool she has the ability to be fairly adventurous, she has also set some very clear boundaries: no face in the water, no activities that might force her to inadvertently put her face in the water. Simple as that. Enter, swim lessons.

As it turns out, the lessons have been insanely successful. And, in no small part because of her new bath-time swim buddy, Lyma. The best I can tell, she happened by the fruit bowl one night and decided she wanted to take a lemon in the bathtub with her to help her practice her new swim moves. So here I am, sitting at the dining room table balancing the checkbook, and I hear her in the bathtub, talking to Lyma as though she were a living, breathing human:

“Okay Lyma, now you go under. Then I’ll take another turn.”
“Oh Lyma, I love you.”
“Hey Daddy, look at how good Lyma is at swimming.”
“Now it’s Lyma’s turn to have her hair washed.”
“Mommy, can Lyma sleep with me tonight?”

A lemon. My child formed an emotional attachment to a lemon.

This went on for three days. We negotiated the sleeping arrangements such that Lyma slept in a clear acrylic cup on the nightstand next to her bed. You can imagine that after rigorous manhandling in hot soapy bathwater, along with daily tag-alongs at playtime, Lyma’s structural integrity began to erode at an increasingly rapid pace. She became softer and softer, and I was beginning to dread the inevitability that Lyma was going to explode and – to Stella’s horror – ooze her lemony innards all over the floor. This was a close friend, after all. Practically a member of the family.

This is where an odd situation became horribly difficult. It became one of those parenting crossroads that I was completely ill-equipped to handle. Death. Dying. The loss of a loved one. We had to break the news that Lyma, our daughter’s new pet lemon, had to go to that great compost bin in the sky.

I slipped it into conversation one night at dinner after I casually gave Lyma a physical and realized that I had never witnessed a piece of citrus that squishy soft without also being covered with a healthy coat of mold. We needed to get this show on the road – and there was no telling how it was going to play out.

As it turned out it was difficult, but Stella handled it with an amazing amount of grace. I gave her the option of putting Lyma in the compost bin herself, or offering one of us to do it for her. With a gentleness and sorrow that I rarely ever see in her, she said that no, she wanted to do it herself after dinner. She then proceeded to say some reassuring words to Lyma, leaving both Steve and I dumbfounded at how things had gone this far.

More and more lately, I have noticed that when Stella is sad – really, truly, honestly sad – she shows it by trying to control it – eventually succumbing to a quiet sob. It is when she is melting down or screaming hysterically that it is clear to me that she is frustrated and angry, but not really sad. So you can imagine her stoicism as we quietly finished our dinner that night. Once we were finished, she somberly marched out to the compost bin by herself and stood there talking reassuringly to Lyma as she laid her gingerly on a pile of grass clippings. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore and I walked over to her and put my arms around her crouching shoulders as she stood there quietly crying, saying only, “Mommy, I miss Lyma.”

We stood there, hugging for a good couple of minutes while Stella cried into my shoulder. I was torn by the oddness of the situation. On one hand I was consoling my daughter about the loss of her friend. On the other hand, it was a lemon she had befriended three days earlier.

We haven’t talked about Lyma much since that fateful evening. I promptly went out and bought her a special mermaid doll to take in the bath with her – hoping it would smooth the transition a bit. And, I am secretly thankful that the recent pace of our lives, combined with the somewhat limited attention span of a 3 year old has meant that this chapter – the one lovingly titled Lyma the Lemon – may have come to a close. But not, I have realized, without a lesson or two.