I was meditating this morning. Call it prayer, call it meditation, call it what you want. Sometimes you just need to dampen the noise a bit. I should say I tried to meditate this morning. My solitude was interrupted by constant intrusions of a commercial I saw the other day. PuppyMonkeyBaby. I kept having visions of this thing accompanied by the chant “PuppyMonkeyBaby” over and over. I brought myself gently back to presence in the moment. Then there it was again. The ghastly tripartite creature would not leave me alone. And it made me think about the messiness of living in the presence of kids.
Here’s a typical scenario of my glorious and unruly daughter. Last night she was running around with a shoe on one foot, a Wellington on the other, and a big stuffed-animal-like monster slipper on each hand. Within an hour she spilled two cups of water, one cup of orange juice, a plate of mac and cheese, and a bowl of cereal. I told my wife about it later in the evening and she looked at me like well maybe it was because you let her run around with slippers on her hands all day. Thing is, she didn’t have the slippers on when she trashed the kitchen on her dropping spree. In fact, the only thing she didn’t drop was a granola bar that she masterfully handled with those big old fuzzy-slippered hands. Maybe because it was stuck to the fibers. I think it’s still stuck on one of them this morning.
I had an experience before we left Raleigh that really brought home this idea to me of living with the mess. While Karla was away on a business trip, I was trying to get the kids to brush their teeth before bed. It had been a long weekend with their mama out of town and my patience was running a little thin. I asked Harlan to brush his teeth and then he started crying that he was hungry. That routine. The skip dinner and get hungry at bedtime routine. I demanded he stop complaining. When I looked at him, I noticed a little tear sitting on his left eyelid. I took a breath, asked him what he wanted. A granola bar. So I got him one and he went out on the back porch. He sat on the bench and I sat across from him. He looked up, noticing how loud the cicadas were in the tree canopy above Boylan Heights. “Wow that’s a different kind of cicada!” And he was right. A completely new sort of chirp was coming down from the canopy.
We sat and listened to all the noises up in the trees. Something switched over. We were communicating in a natural tone. He chewed his granola bar slowly. Probably to delay bedtime. But I didn’t care anymore. I only cared about the cicadas in August in North Carolina and soaking their sounds up with my Harlan. He finished up, went and brushed his teeth and he and Cerys wanted to sleep in the same bed. (You might wonder what Cerys was doing this whole time — naturally, she was eating toothpaste in the bathroom.) I tucked them in, hugged them, and kissed them goodnight. The smile on his face struck me.
I am learning the language of parenthood. The little glimpses I get feel like the surface of a deep pool. Gratitude is what I felt that night. True gratitude. For my kids and my wife. Sometimes it is difficult trying to corral these little rapscallions and integrate them into my own schedule. And sometimes they remind you that if you quiet all the white noise of your expectations of the way you think things should be, you can sit and listen to the cicadas. Even with the occasional intrusion of the PuppyMonkeyBaby.
jbrettdavis 