Kidfessions

Yesterday evening, while watching cartoons and eating pasta, Baby Girl said to me, tending to a fire in the fireplace, "I want to give my life to Jesus. So when I turn seven, I want to get bath-tized." She had been hinting at this for a couple of weeks now. The thinking about the bath-tism.

I felt a mix of humbled, ecstatic and slightly apprehensive. I had always thought that when one of my children decided to get baptized, it would be somewhat prompted. That we'd have a conversation about it and maybe start studying the Bible together and talk about what this starting a new life in God meant. This is where I was humbled by my five year-old, doing exactly what I had hoped she would do, just totally out of order. Sigh to the Firstborns.

And of course then there is that whole other wavelength of anxiety that I try not to ride because what if this is not for real. What if she is just a bandwagonner. Or what if this is totally sincere but this is the last time she says this? What if tomorrow she decides to join the Hare Krishnas or swim to Cuba or buy into a ponzi scheme WHAT THEN!?!

But I know those fears are not from Above. I know God rewards a consistent fidelity. I am so happy, so happy for our girl. May her desire to know the Lord grow deep and wide.

After Baby Girl went to bed and Little Man, who has been sick, got up from his fever dream, he was mock-playing with a My Little Pony and he said, "I'm interested in girl things."

So yesterday was just a big day for speaking the truths on our heart, no words were minced, nothing withheld.

Significant fingerprints

The hand towel pinched and rubberbanded as a cape. The bookshelf, a multi-level garage for Matchbox cars. Your bank card lost and discovered inconveniently days later in a shoebox filled with paperclips and the accoutrements of "playing grownups" The scribbles in notebooks, each a treasure map with clues leading to information that is only significant to you. When I used to babysit, I spent hours, long days, long nights with children who were the same age as my children are now. Sometimes I loved the mess of children. I understood none of it. I just saw all these little marks of kids scattered about the house. Sock puppets and Legos littered under couches. They were just the evidence that children lived here.

Now my home is full of those marks, those talismans of the critters who mess up my perfectly made bed; they are the smallest things that hold the greatest significance. They are the souvenirs of precious time that can never be repeated in the same form, with the same spontaneity. Like today when Little Man took ushered me into his room and showed me how he had moved the train track, and, like a mini-Bob Barker talking up a showcase, gestured with arms spread wide, "See, Mama? Things are always changing in here." How does a train track moved from one part of a bedroom to the other bear so much gravity? Because my boy moved it. And a month ago, he didn't pull stunts like that. He would get mental. And now he does it with ease and willingness.

And Baby Girl, who, just this afternoon, felt defeated after her first soccer game where it turns out people will push you out the way. Girlfriend came home and chased after a lizard in the house and caught it and built it a habitat. Fair princess. Wildlife enthusiast.

This is what they mean, this is what it's all about when they say parenting is a privilege. Because mostly, 95% of the time, it feels anything but privileged. Dumping the contents of a training potty to the big potty, heaven forbid it spills, five times a day. Negotiating vegetables over Nutter Butters. Never getting to just have quiet time for an idle thought, not for one minute, while driving the car.

It is not privilege, this majority of parenting. It is servitude.

But the other 5% of sweetness. Oh, the extra hugs and baby toes. The unbridled glee just because OH MY GOODNESS, YOU'RE HOME!!! from the grocery store. The newness of everything, the small miracle of discovering that sunshine refracting through cut glass casts rainbows on the floor. It is enough to have to stuff your heart back down your throat.

These significant marks of my children are sure things. From where I sit, the sure things are few--always have been for this natural skeptic. I assign meanings to many notions, I absorb messages that I think are conveyed that are probably unintended. I thought that letter he sent me meant something. I thought I heard my name being called. Red Rover Red Rover. Nope? Don't come over after all?

I know for certain that the medicine bottles Baby Girl used to stack for seeming hours when she was 2, when she gave me a respite from tending to her while I fed a newborn Little Man--I know those are no longer medicine bottles. I know they are symbols of a short reprieve, a gift vouchsafed from above when I needed it most.

She will not remember our green Honda or our own private tailgate parties in the parking lot of the grocery store, eating snacks and finding fun in the hatchback of our car. He will not remember the spot in the playground where he decided to walk, but I will. I will and I will not be ashamed that these marks and moments have made my life purpose-filled, valuable. They will not know the person that I used to be, calling my mom sobbing from college when the loneliness was crashing at high tide up against my solitary dock. They will not know the person, so ravaged by disordered eating at age 16, who was told she could lose the ability to ever have children. But I will.

Their fingerprints all over my mirrors and doors are all over my heart, my life. These are the things of which I am sure. They have meaning, they tell stories, and it is my privilege to be so stinking in love with them that sometimes it doesn't even hurt when I step on a Lego barefooted.

That is a lie.

It hurts like the dickens every time.

What my children taught me about play

One of the four billion things I didn't know before I became a parent and which I needed my children to teach me is that they actually tell me who they are through their play. Loverpants has always said that children's first language is play. So I knew that, intellectually. But seeing how my children school me in the characters that they are forming and the needs that they are expressing is just...profoundly humbling. I hear my daughter talking in a nurturing voice to her brother and I hear the echoes of how I strive to talk to her. On my best days, I try to use that voice. And she tells me through her play that she has absorbed those moments and I give thanks. Then I hear my little man falling to pieces because he cannot find Buzz Lightyear and doesn't want to settle for Luella the American Girl doll. I know that he has seen me simmering (usually over nothing) and then suddenly bubbling over my pot in similarly graceless fashion.

I am also suddenly smacked by memories of my own girlhood and how hard it was for me to play as a child. At least not in the traditional sense, which, now I realize was my language of being a stressy kid. I had no time for frivolity. I would organize my room and all the drawers of my bureaus for hours. I loved playing school, but only if I could teach and lend order to my "classroom." Going over to the house of some girls whose mother was a single parent was totally stressful for me. Their mother babysat children by day and their house was unfathomably messy. I would fantasize about cleaning their house, wall to wall, scrubbing floors and clearing the Easy Cheese off the countertops of their kitchen. "So. What do you wanna do?" the girls would ask, and, I would always say, "Heyy, let's clean!" like it was the most normal activity. Like it was second only to styling Barbie dolls or riding bikes.

I see my daughter's little nooks and nests of activity, each sacred in its purpose, "This is my library, Mama. And why did you throw away that magazine?! That was for the waiting area to my beauty parlor." Even though the floor of her bedroom is a minefield of dolls and books and Legos (murder weapons to bare feet), I am glad to behold the mess because it means she feels free to play. She is not so anal-retentive about her space that she does not enjoy it. It is not work for her, right now, and that is what she is telling me through the Chernobyl of toy store aftermath on the carpet. At least, that is what I tell myself.

***

Went to an Enchanted Maze the other day. Or, as Little Man said, "The Chanting Maze." There were no monks chanting, though that would have been equally awesome and contemplative. Just a lot of pumpkins and tractors and haybales. Our time there was pitch perfect.