Two of my friends are having babies soon. So of course, I am pretending I’m not an opinionated dervish comprised almost entirely of unsolicited advice. As each of their micro-humans rapidly approaches earth-side, the volume of my fretting intensifies: what might, should, could, will I say??—even though neither needs me to say much of anything.
They are strong, loving, inventive people, so anything I try to add may be at best only a bit useful in the coming experience, and at worst an awkward edict with patronizing tannins and notes of YOU MAY NOW CLAP.
Everyone wants a piece of the expectant parent. We want to tell them what they should do, how badly they’re in for it, or how amazing it’s going to be. No one is wrong. No one is right, either: this person’s experience will be entirely their own, and PS, they’re not the people we should be running to for validation of our own entropic forays. They’re busy doing some pretty intense impossible stuff already, like wrapping their brains around the fact that a separate but derivative human will be arriving shortly by way of the prying open of their own bodies.
A teacher I had in graduate school once handed out perfectly crafted, inordinately expensive sheets of hand-made Japanese paper to each of the poets in his workshop and said, only, “these are works of art. You can write on yours, if you choose, if you believe you can improve on it, or you can keep it as a reminder of how perfect the blank page already is.”
So, with the acknowledgment that the anomalous weather system my friends are experiencing now, with its taut, quickening peace, is perfect exactly as it is, I will also toss a few things overboard to be grabbed if needed, as much in celebration as precaution.
Someone very smart said to me, “our kids raise us,” and because he’s right, that’s what I offer: a taste of some of the courses my children teach, and an estimate of my current status as learner.
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My son teaches an upper-level course with extensive laboratory hours and required use of helmets called How to Make Space & See What Grows. He is a hurricane. He escaped every single swaddle we ever imposed on him, and now he sometimes throws himself at a wall or door repeatedly, or spins until he’s too dizzy to stand and falls precariously close to some sharp edge, laughing, for no discernible reason except what seems to be a mostly productively fermenting infusion of joy, frustration, wonder, excitement, improvisation, and dearly wished-for realities. I could not have planned for nor imagined this state of affairs.
The kid is committed—to really feeling out every molecule he can encounter. As far as I can see, this isn’t a bad thing so much as a difficult one to shepherd and witness. The separation of difficult and bad has been essential.
By acknowledging what’s difficult but letting go of the reactive and desperate “bad” label, I’ve been able to fight for the space and time for him to come around to verbal expressions such as the murmured, pleading “give hug,” the sighing, quivering, “just worried,” and the ecstatic “SO GAH-SITE-ING!” (These sentiments, in their earliest forms, were just bites, kicks, smacks, and doleful banging of his head on the floor.)
When his new expressions finally hit my ears, I get to know one of my favorite people even better in what feels like a tiny burst of light and breeze, and I quickly become less likely to restrain, judge, or work to change parts of him that are still mostly under the soil, but have begun to uncoil towards the light, with astonishing complexity, speed, and dearness.
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My daughter teaches a cross-listed survey course with a huge wait-list called LISTEN!
Recently I bought a bunch of skinny little carrots that still had their tops for her: I thought she’d like them, I see upon reflection, because they still embodied how they grew in the ground (she gazes at moss, collects acorn tops, discerns between cardinal and catbird, lavender and daisy and clover, barrels down the lawn like a charioteer shouting MULLLL-BERRRRRR-YYYYY when I remind her that more mulberries may be ripe today). She did love the tiny carrots, and is just now downstairs saying with great and complex emotion to our teen neighbor, whom I have recruited for childcare so I could write this, “MY carrot.” It is an expression of new and deep appreciation as much as possession. She says it with a caress.
The layers of noticing, knowing, connecting, and valuing this child has already assembled make her almost vibrate with a quirky, endearing swagger. She is entirely her own person, driven by keen interests and tender desires. And what else should she be?
She says, “Try it! See what happens! Probably good. It has cheese,” to herself when she struggles to accept the strange, new dinner that’s been proffered.
Listen! I remind myself, the same way she does, in a stage whisper, when she hears any far-off sound, and it’s almost as if her body shimmers into being in front of me, where I had been worried about paying a bill or preventing some brotherly catastrophe—where my awareness that I am a living creature among living creatures had gone dull. She is constantly coming into being, shining and shining and shining.
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That these two humans arrived together in their need for me has required, principally, that I abandon any effort to keep myself clean and dry. I now wear sandals so minimal they verge on theoretical, and go through mud and water after them like a rogue rototiller.
I remember the exact day I looked at my cold, sodden children, knee-deep in our still half-frozen yard puddle, frothing the impossibly chilly water farther and farther up their clothing in a way that made my throat catch with dread, and suddenly thought, “Hey, wait, I am the one who’s uncomfortable. They are ecstatic.”
And so, my need to enforce and constantly rebuild the order that has historically suited me (EXHAUSTING) began to slide off me like a cloak. The cold wind at the Toddler Riviera was, truly, uncomfortable, but I suddenly had access to a freedom I may not have known for thirty years, and I kind of… haven’t looked back. Laundry is a small price to pay for freedom.
In the rapid dissipation of a rigidity I hadn’t fully known I carried, my children have become, among other things, Olympic puddlers and excellent climbers. I’m a pretty game staff member, rarely slowing or even trying to shape their approach to water or mud or gravel piles or the chaos of the world. We usually ride home stripped down, half-naked, warming.
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My son has recently taken up the word “very” as an intensifier that need not modify an adjective. For example, he says, “That’s a VERY tractor,” “That’s a VERY dump truck,” and “That’s VERY rain.” He leaves out “green” and “big” and “heavy” and goes straight to the noun, honoring it by placing the sweet pressure of his vivid, committed attentiveness on it.
Let me leave out the adjectives, none of which can do the work we wish it to anyhow. I won’t say being a parent is lovely, or terrifying, or beautiful, or impossible, or stunning, or any combination thereof, though many of these, particularly in aggregate, come close.
Let me instead honor the experience directly, as I have known it, and say just this to you:
It is a very, very life.