The jaunty intro music plays and two tiny heads whip toward the television. I settle onto the couch with my young sons and some of my stress melts away because I’ll have the next seven-ish minutes to feed myself, complete a small task, scroll, or just sit and enjoy with them. Usually, I choose to watch.
Like many adults, I’ve fallen in love with the Heeler family. My husband and I routinely lust after their house. We cry as the emotional roller coaster of parenthood is reflected back at us.
For me, the show has also been a surprisingly useful tool: Bluey and Bingo are helping me grieve. As I snuggle my boys, their small bodies constantly wiggling, their tiny hands and pudgy feet overlapping with mine, I float back to the hospital bed set up in my parents’ living room, poorly disguised with bright sheets. I held my little sister Kelsey’s hands and they were as soft as my sons’ are now.
I snuggled up with her the same way, two years ago, as we helped her die. was torturous but precious. My family had the gift of time to say goodbye.
Each day I laid with her, I knew it could be the last. She couldn’t speak, but I believe she heard me, felt me and found peace in the closeness we’d been sharing since she was born. She was 31, two years younger than me, and I begged the universe for another minute, another day, while simultaneously wanting her suffering to end.
Every time I drove away from my childhood home to return to my own child, my heart beat out of my chest and .