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Let us suppose, as I do on the days that are sufficiently bleak to cause me to eat not only my children’s Halloween chocolate but also the off-brand gummy bears, that I am not well suited to being a parent.
After all, I need oceans of mental space, despise loud noises, am deeply disconcerted by messes, harbor the continued belief that preparedness can prevent disaster despite all evidence, want to talk about esoteric things rather than why mice have teeth over and over, enjoy focusing on one thing for hours on end, and function best on 7-9 hours of sleep.
Fine.
Let us also suppose the following, as an experiment: that because I am not well suited for something, I ought not bother trying.
OK.
In that case, as someone who hates being wet and isn’t tremendously mechanically inclined, I should not have decided, with two crying children already hauled out to the car and strapped in, the November rain falling with marked indifference, to fire up the lawnmower to jump my car’s dead battery. And that was the best thing that happened yesterday, both because it was funny and because it worked.
Also, in that case, as someone with joint and chest pain and near-constant fatigue, I should not have used a length of orchard rope stolen from one of my apple trees to drag a picnic table made of Satan’s lead across the yard by myself to put it away for the winter, rather than just waiting for my husband to be done with whatever he was doing. And that particular hair-brained move saved us some time, surprised my husband, which is hard to do, caused me no harm, was funny because ridiculous— and it worked.
Also, in that case, as a person who at age 11 struggled to finish a six-inch long teddy-bear scarf, opting to have her grandmother put a button on it so she wouldn’t have to make it long enough to tie, I should not have embarked on a lifetime of knitting projects whose stitches I believe I’ve added up to over a million in total. And almost all of these projects have brought me joy and satisfaction.
Also, in that case, as someone who feels searing, guilt- and shame- driven hatred at the thought of an unruly/hopeless garden, and despises weeding, I should not have persisted in cultivating a roughly 600 square foot garden of vegetables and flowers. And this space has been among the principal sources of beauty, joy, excitement, learning, and imagination for my children, not to mention a few salmon-pink zinnias that leave me at least temporarily without question that there is goodness—somewhere— in this universe, with that kind of beauty afoot. (Count also the tomatoes, whose audacity never fails to thrill me. Sungolds, my daughter will tell you, should you misname them.)
So.
Perhaps, and I will allow this thought only because I found the last two Twizzlers as well, we who are “least suited” stand to gain the most—from doing what comes not at all easily, and therefore demands inventiveness, growth, and possibly allows even greater delight. If Serena gets a ball over the net, no one’s impressed. If I get a ball over the net, I’ll pee my pants and have a party.
A hundred years ago, I’d be dead. Arguably, I’m not particularly well suited to life at all, with blood that clots at the sight of a black cat, joints that feel like they have knives in them because it’s a Tuesday or a full moon or I glanced at a shaft of wheat, what-have-you.
But: maybe, in working to close that gap, between my given state of affairs and an average healthy person’s, and having to do so at a crawl along what can seem an endless stretch of roughly pebbled beach— well, maybe that’s how one best learns each color and texture, all that which might otherwise have been just a given, a blur, a thing to move past quickly, because I could.
Onto the bleak strand you manage to thread these beads of laughing colors. Now that takes strength and courage. And If twizlers help? So be it!
Well I, for one reasonably well-versed in autos and engines, am gob-smacked by the audacious creativity of using lawnmower to start car! ...Brilliant! Having done it t'other way round one would think it might have occurred to me that the electrons don't care which direction they flow, as long as it's down-hill.
That picnic table IS from Satan and should have been left out as a permanent fixture for bears or feral cats or it sinks into ultimate decay and can be used as firewood.
As a beneficiary of homemade knit sweaters I give warm and hearty thanks throughout the Fall & Winter for your perseverance with knitting anything and everything plausibly useful for whatever humanoid crosses your path
...the gummies you can keep, preferably out of the yarn bin!