I'm just gonna have to shrug some things off...

"Morran the dog wearing a rosary and being scaled by Michaelangelo the NInja Turtle"- art installation by Jude Matheny

...Like the drum kit in the middle of my living room that I am guessing will stay for at least a week and maybe the whole summer. And the handprints (and other unmentionable grime-smears) on the walls and doorways. Or the mini-kitchen with all of it's playfood and utensils now smack in the center of my own kitchen. And the fact that they won't freaking stop jumping on my Grandmother's antique camel back couch no matter how much I squeel, thunder,or turn blue and blubber.

    I've decided (maybe as fresh as this morning) that I am just going to have to shrug these details off. At least for right now, when I have three little boys that every day threaten the cusp of "grown-hood" and yet are still...just..teetering..in the land of little:

one boy dressed as a spy at 7.5, darting from room to room, and talking to himself in spy-code and then spending hours creating a ski lift and a coffee house for his Lego men,

one boy absolutely thrilled to sing and clean the play kitchen up "for his little brother" and then, without realizing that his little brother is still napping, happily launches into constructing a "most delicious and interesting sandwich" all while wearing an oven mitt, singing to himself, and clanging about like Julia Child herself,

and a third little boy that basically tries to do whatever he can to be the 16 month old version of that kid who just "blows junk up" and "lights stuff on fire".

Whether it be scaling bunkbeds, skimming contertop edges for stray knives, or leaving a welt that could rival a brown recluse bite on his older brother's arm as a response to being asked kindly to spit out a Lego, that kid is determined to "make a noise."

Yes. I'm just gonna have to shrug a lot of things off. Is this the secret to parenting? or one of them? I don't know but I am calling it like I see it: a survival tactic. Or the path to inner peace. Or both.

 

Like water off a duck's back right? swoooosh. Even if sometimes it actually feels a little bit more like sandpaper on a sunburn. But whatevs. I'm an imaginative girl. I can swing this thing right? Noooo problem.

"The Northern Lights were seen in the Deep South."

-"Findings", Harper's Magazine, January 2012

The Lucky Kiwi

I can not grow a single thing.

I come from a long line of Aunts, The Greens-
so fitting because they could take a forsaken rosebush
covered in gasoline, shake it off, wash it up, stick it in the mud,
and make it bloom like a float at the Portland Parade.

And look here,...a kiwi.
Bright and green and snaking up my house in Middle Tennessee.
A place I came to four years ago and cried in the Inglewood Supermarket
wondering where all of the vegetables had gone.

"What will we eat?! How will we feed them?!"
I sobbed over the phone to my husband,
lamenting the nutrition of our children.
I missed the beauty of a farmer's market stocked produce section .
I missed a lot of things.

And yet here, in the middle of my back stoop,
crawling upwards against the odds and natural expectations,
it blooms into an exotic fruit.
Viridescent, full grown, hairy.

It is like God sent it down just to prove He could do it;
to prove He knew this place better than I did.
Like a message. Like a love note.
Like living proof of something else.