Wonder and Presence
There’s something undefinable about the parenting life that I find is usually expressed by saying things like “it’s really hard and then they do something really cute and you’re like–awww–and then it’s all better.” I’m coming around to the reality that this place-holder for a deeper, more complicated sentiment is not a particularly satisfying argument.
I have been experiencing more presence with my kids since I got back from a solo retreat. I feel so oriented to my world right now, and desperate not to lose the peace and balance that has come with that. I have been able to really see my kids lately. To be in the moment with them. It hasn’t made things less up-and-down (emotions are all over the place with two four-year-olds and a six-year-old), but I do feel like a reinforced boat that is riding out the storms while still enjoying the sea. It’s been a mental shift that I’ve wanted to share with people, but I find it hard to articulate. It hasn’t required any particular tangible changes–more of this or less of this or a change in circumstances. It’s been a perspective movement from product to process, from striving to being. I have heard people talk about this very thing my whole life (“Be present! Live in the moment! The only time is now!”), and I have nodded along with how important and true it all is, then promptly stuck to my usual course of always looking ahead and inhabiting the rushing and worrying and struggling that comes along with that.
Children require a great deal of habitation in the now and that reality in my life has been nudging me again and again to this path of presence. In being more mentally present with my children, I have been able to catch these little moments when they do something that is so very them. So unique to their particular personhood. I have a front row seat to their journey of figuring themselves out: Stretching out in their skin and in their minds and trying new things and being exactly what and who they are in that very moment. Yesterday, they were ninjas and tigers and centipedes and inventors and they built houses to weather tornados and they sat quietly and read in front of the fire. Who knows what else went on in their minds or under their breath as they played make-believe or sat still and were transported by imagination or the feeling of the fire at their back or just all of it in succession or at once. I don’t get to see it all, but I get to see some of this wonderful chaos. And watching it that day, I had this thought: it’s the precious secret of their becoming that is the most compelling argument to live with children. Not just the funny, sweet moments, but also (some of) the wailing, snot-dripping, bloody, feverish, agonizing ones. What keeps parents enthralled through the often mire-ish slog of the work is this tumble of moment after moment of self-discovery that is wondrous–its a mirror of our own inner work, but they often do it so much better. Kids are brand new humans whose newness allows them a tantalizing fluidity for exploring all of the pieces of being that adults tend to become rigid too. We become these forms that aren’t flexible enough to get into all the positions we once could. But sometimes, observing someone else doing it brings back the muscle-memory.
It’s a secret because these things happen and then the moment is gone. You only get let into its exquisiteness if you were listening closely, and you can never quite convey it to someone else. Sometimes, I can share with my husband something the kids did or said or experienced and it somewhat translates because he also knows them close-up. But regardless of the power of art or words to express moments, the account is always second hand. The true experience is always a little bit of a secret that only you get to hold in your heart.
For what it’s worth, this is what we are all trying to share on Instagram in pictures that look to other people like identical moments in the lives of our children. What we are seeing, we aren’t really able to document, but it’s a compelling beauty that we are eagerly trying to share. You may capture an image of it, but much of the magic is gone. It was a brilliant firework but the shape of it only remains in smoke.
(Here I am, trying to express something inexpressible. But I never met a concept I wouldn’t try to flesh out with metaphor or some other collection of words, flying like arrows towards a target they never quite hit.)
There are all kinds of wonders and benefits of living alongside children, but I’m getting off-track. What I mean to say is that what makes parenting so worth it all is this secret joy of watching them be so purely themselves–uninhibited and authentic–and that it happens in real time, something adults spend an awful lot of effort trying to escape. I won’t dwell on it, but this is the place where I admit that for me, this kind of getting-off-track, future-and-achievement-focused living leads to smallness. Irritability. Worry. Despair. Limitedness. Desperation. Longing. And a break-neck speed relying on the dangerous assumption that I’m not going to trip. When I’ve been present lately–really been there in the moment–I have felt the magic of presence with such blissful intensity. It has led to rest and joy. My kids help to lead me into this place.
How beautiful their minds are–the things they think of. The vastness of them–Oh! Children are so vast. They are these galaxies of self, limited only by the annoyances of the here and now: the basic human needs that they can’t do or reach or understand on their own. I get to help them with those things so that they can get back to being boundless explorers of their time and space and self. Who wants to be confined to this world of having to brush your teeth and wipe your butt and vacuum the floor and all that? There is so much to enjoy and explore, a lot of it within. My own life can start to feel narrowed down by the space I dwell in. So, while they are teaching me the gift of the limitless being, I help them understand the beauty of boundary (this world, this time, this body) that can give shape to that wild magic. The boundless and the ordinary. They go hand in hand. We can teach each other how to keep them in balance.
We need each other’s help, but I have to say I hate it when people say “don’t wish your life away,” or “enjoy every moment because they’ll soon be gone.” These sentiments are not untrue–they are an understanding these folks reached experientially that their audience also has to reach experientially. As much as I love words, I have been experimenting lately with “show, don’t tell”--following my kids’ lead and just inhabiting my own life, parenting by exhibiting the trial and error of finding a path worth taking. I think I want my legacy to be this hand-scratched, tattered, faded, folded-a-million-times-over road map. I am coming around to the idea that my wordless walking of the path is what is going to be the most helpful thing.
In all this, I’m not saying that you have to be a parent in order to be awake to the beauty of life. For what it’s worth, I am arguing that this is a piece of the seemingly-inexplicable motivation that keeps parents doing the hard work even when it’s so very very hard. A child’s wonder of the ordinary in the groundedness of the present is a transformative gift that can drive the persistence of parenting. The good news for us all is that this child-sense exists in each of us (even though it may feel hard to access sometimes). It is our inner identity: it is the heart of joy, and it never grows old. It stays young and flexible and open even within the scaffolding of adult life. And there are many ways to return to it, to build a home there, to dwell there. My kids are one of my paths in, at present. And art is a way that I explore the landscape and keep the paths in and out well-trod and cleared of debris. But I firmly believe that for all of us, practicing presence is a universal must-have for living an expansive life. It is the effortless art of the child, and each of us houses just such a child, ready at any moment to dive into those waters with abandon.
