“Don’t walk – just stay there,” I told my two-year-old as he maneuvered around the wheelbarrow in our garden. Squish! His foot came right down on a squash vine. Oh well – there’s plenty more where that came from.
Even though my kids aren’t always gentle when it comes to my plants, they bring joy to my gardening. I think it benefits them too. Besides the health benefits, there’s a bunch of valuable life lessons I hope they pick up from our adventures in growing food.
“Don’t worry, I’m being careful!” my five-year-old said as he tried to pick up a piece of broken glass off the kitchen floor with his bare hands.
Twitching a few times before getting the words out, I said, “No, stop, don’t pick it up! With some things it doesn’t matter how careful you are – they aren’t safe.”
I wouldn’t recommend anyone pick up broken glass with their bare hands. But his comment made me stop and think.
“That is a noise a guitar should never make.” I wince as my five-year-old scratches the strings of my acoustic guitar again. “Seriously, knock it off.”
He switches to strumming. The out-of-tune notes combine together in a way that’s the opposite of harmonic.
“It sounds beautiful!” he proclaims.
“Uh, it really doesn’t,” I respond. “It really needs to be tuned.”
My two-year-old squeaks, “Tune!” and grabs the knobs on the top of the guitar’s neck, turning them wildly. So much for getting it more, rather than less, in tune.
As much as this entire process pains me, I keep getting the guitar out.
I never thought I’d be so happy about having a bookshelf with actual books on it. I haven’t seen this sight for more than four years.
These books have been in hiding – shoved under my nightstand, stacked up on the bottom shelf of an end table. There’s nothing wrong with these exact books. It’s the very act of placing them on a bookshelf and trusting that they’ll stay there that’s revelatory.
While books don’t jump off shelves, they do end up on the floor when a toddler pulls them down with his sticky, wet little fingers.
I never thought the image of defeated motherhood would have two wheels. But many things surprise you as a mom.
My beloved bicycle has accompanied me over thousands of miles of riding. Currently, its back wheel is decidedly non-functional. If I pumped it up to its full pressure or God forbid, rode on it, the whole thing would burst like an overinflated balloon. Even more importantly, the bike’s chain is twisted to heck. I would crash with the first push of the pedal.
My bike isn’t normally in this state. In fact, it’s like this because of a promise I made. A few weeks ago, I promised my five-year-old that we would go for his first “big kid bike ride.” While he’s biked endless loops around the playground, this would be the first time we’d go on a multi-use trail together, both of us on our individual bikes.
But something blocked my way.
“What was your favorite thing today?” I asked my then four-year-old at bedtime. Earlier that day, we had our monthly “special afternoon” together, where we went to an indoor playspace with a giant artificial mountain and stopped at Starbucks afterwards for hot chocolate.
“Getting my journal!” he exclaimed. After hot chocolate, we had picked out a journal for him decorated with smiling sloths. Although he can’t write more than his name yet, he had been telling us stories and asking us to write them down. Instead of pieces of folded paper scattered all over the house, we thought it would be better to write them down in one place.
Hearing this answer warmed my writer’s soul to the core. It was completely unexpected and completely genuine.
My activist heart is tired. My mama heart is too.
Old-school conservatives would have called me a bleeding-heart liberal. I admit that I am – my heart certainly feels crushed and bruised these days.
Like many people in the United States now, feelings of guilt, shame and borderline despair threaten me on a semi-regular basis. I always keep going, but the awfulness tickles at the back of my mind. Those feelings came to a head most recently with the news about separating immigrant and refugee children from their parents. While I had always been able to clear my head previously, these horrors just kept on creeping back in. Even time spent with my kids reminded me of how much of a luxury that is.
Peeling the stem of a dandelion in half and rubbing it between my fingers, I say to my older son, “I used to do this when I was a little girl.” I let the stem curl up in my hand, then hand him the green spiral. “I used to pretend they were magic.”
He touches the slick interior, rolling and unrolling the piece of flower. Plucking another dandelion, he says, “It feels like Jasper, like fur.” It’s true – the dandelion fluff does feel a little like my sister-in-law’s little terrier.
As I rub another stem between my fingers, I drift back to childhood.
To me, this is America.
To me, America should be celebrating the beautiful diversity of our country. It should be celebrating that people come from different backgrounds and experiences. It should be recognizing that people look and act different from each other and being amazed at how wonderful that is.
To my beloved older son,
You turned five the other day. This happens all the time, all over the world, but this was special because you are my child.