After I hopped down the stairs from the bathroom and changed into my pajamas, I jumped onto the couch where my mum waited for me. She was in her white polyester robe and her face looked tired, but she still looked pretty to me. I crawled towards her end of the couch, where she scooped me into the curve of her body.
“Did you brush your teeth?” she asked me, raising a dark eyebrow.
“Yep.” I smiled.
“Did you floss?”
I smiled even bigger, “YEP.”
“Okay.”
I nestled in tighter to my mum’s side while she read the title aloud to me.
“The Kissing Hand.”
An orange heat spread through my little chest and my wide brown eyes peered down at the illustrations of furry animals. Chester the raccoon didn’t want to go to school and I couldn’t understand for the life of me why. I couldn’t wait to go to school and make friends. His mother, Mrs. Raccoon, looked down at him with love in her masked black and gray face. It looked a lot like how my mum looked at me when she used to pick me up from school.
“Sometimes we have to do things we don’t want to. They seems strange and scary at first. But you’ll love school after you start,” mum read Mrs. Raccoon’s words of wisdom and I looked on at the vibrant pictures of green grass and little white flowers. Mum’s voice flowed like silk, not one stutter over a single word. Her long fingers nimbly turned to the next page. We were getting to the good part now. Mrs. Raccoon had a secret to show her frightened cub. She took his left hand and opened his fingers into a fan. Then she kissed his palm and heat spread from his hand, up his arm, and into his heart. Mrs. Raccoon’s big grey paws cupped Chester’s tiny left hand. Little pink hearts exploded from his palm. His mother’s love would go anywhere he went. Just before he left for school he gave his mother the same gift in return. I soaked in all of it. I loved this story, I loved stories before bed in general.
As my mum finished the book and folded the cover closed, she placed it on our dark wooden coffee table-the one I used to always bang my pinky toes on and still occasionally do.
Mum stood up from the couch and held out her hand. I latched onto it and softly thumped to the rug. We made our way past the couch and began our descent up the stairs to my room. The stairs were ten times harder to get up when you were an exhausted five year old. Finally we reached the top and my mum flicked on the light before she pulled back my covers for me to burrow under. After I’d situated my squirmy yet tired body, my eyelids began to droop and my body became heavy. Mum found my fleshy hand beneath my blankets and brought it up to her face.
“I love you Livvy Schmivy,” she whispered to me.
“I love you too mum,” I said without hesitation in response.
Then my mum kissed my palm, leaving a sensation of heat. She switched on my nightlight and clicked off the overhead lamp.
“Goodnight Liv, I’ll see you in the morning.” she said softly and then closed my bedroom door. I turned away from the brightness of my nightlight and held my hand close to my face. My muscles relaxed, my eyelids heavily closed, and as I slowly drifted into a world of kissing raccoons and white flowers, the love on my hand spreaded to the rest of my body.