“We can listen to music or I can yell at you to stop. Which would you rather?” I said to my kids, exasperated. They were making a shit-ton of noise and I felt like my head was going to explode. Everything was just so damn loud. The music went on – we settled on Rusted Root – and everything settled down. Or at least settled down as much as my incredibly high-energy children will let it.
But this incident was a culmination of a lot of self-exploration.
“Why do they say that Africa is the most wild? Antarctica is the most wild!” my older son proclaimed as we listened to the narration of yet another Disney Nature documentary.
“But how does the story end?” my older son asked.
We had just finished reading We Are Water Protectors, a powerful picture book written from the perspective of an Anishinaabe girl. She talks about how her people regard water as life and how a “big black snake” threatens the water and therefore them. While the book never names what the “snake” is, the pictures clue the reader in – it’s an oil pipeline. Like many real-life young people like Autumn Peltier, the narrator is an Indigenous water protector committed to halting water from becoming polluted with death instead of life.
“Hold it! Hold it!” my prenatal yoga teacher encouraged the class as we all struggled to keep our backs to the wall and our knees bent. Those three minute wall sits felt like an hour. But they weren’t meant to be easy. They were meant to teach us how to okay with being uncomfortable.
“Huh, I would have thought there would be fewer shadows this time of day,” I thought to myself as I ran through our neighborhood. I was running at noon, comparing it to when I often run at 2 or 3 PM. I dodged the hot sun by ducking under a tree overhanging the sidewalk.
I’ve been running this same route almost every other day since COVID-19 started. Before that, I’d been running it on Sunday afternoons, but never so often and not at different times of the day. Having it as my only chance to venture off of our property for a solid three months attuned me to the tiny changes from day to day.
I’m not usually this way. I crave novelty. I do different things every weekend, hardly ever read the same book twice, and am constantly on the move. Being stuck in the house all day feels more like a cage than coziness. The line in Hamilton about never being satisfied struck me like truth with a capital T. So at first, COVID shutting everything down was terrifying.
But I found sanity by finding novelty within small changes. The shifting of the shadows on my run, the growth of dandelions in the yard, the movement of the clouds in the sky before a storm. Each a slight shift was a new variation on a theme, beautiful in their own way.
And of course, I witnessed the small changes in my children. My older son’s penchant for coming up with his own original jokes that are getting gradually funnier and funnier. My younger son’s shift from pretending to be various baby animals to various Dungeons and Dragons monsters. (You’ve never heard of a baby Death Knight? Shame.) Both of their vocabularies getting bigger and more complex. Both of them being more able to resolve arguments with words – and when they don’t, my younger son at least being bigger and less likely to get hurt. As stressful as working from home is (and we are exceptionally lucky in that my husband is a full-time stay-at-home dad), it’s been amazing to have all of this time with them. No longer is my weekday free time with them squished into 45 minutes at best. It’s allowed me to take in these little spots of growth that build up so much over time.
I hope when all of this is over, I can maintain this newfound satisfaction. This ability to not just slow down, but embrace the new pace. To find fulfillment in the shifting of shadows and the small pleasures with my children. While I had some appreciation for those things before, the fact that it’s all we have now have given them a new weight. One I hope to find comfortable on my shoulders now and in the future.
13
“I saved your life! I should be able to choose for just one day,” my seven year old declared.
He had a point.
“Just let me take care of you!” I yelled at my four year old as I chased him around our beanbag chairs. I was trying to get him to let me put a cold-pack on his forehead, which was rapidly developing quite the goose egg.
“Do you have any recommendations on how to make being in nature more sciency?” a friend texted me.
