guesther – parenting in progress

Posted on | August 10, 2010 | 7 Comments

today’s guest post comes from my best internet friend forever, Mae from Parenting in Progress. you all know her, and if you don’t, you’re either new here (and in that case HI!) or you just plain don’t listen to me. if all has gone well (remember i’m writing to you from the future) then i am coming home from NYC today and Mae is off on a family vacay in michigan. one of two things have happened. a) we fell even more in love after rooming together for 3 glorious days and party hopping and causing much trouble or 2) she hates the way i talk and the way i chew my food and she’s sitting lakeside right now telling her husband Topher how much she hates me and can she change her phone number so i can’t blackberry messenger her anymore?

moving on, i was so glad she picked this post for GuestHer because it’s my favorite post she has ever done. i know you’ll like it, too. if you haven’t been listening to me for the past year, her blog is here and you can follow her on twitter here. if you have been listening to me, well then you’ve already read this amazing post.

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Lately Piper’s been putting herself to sleep like a champ. We do bath, jammies and bottle and she goes into the crib to listen to her story. When the story’s over we leave and she just, hangs out.

We let her keep her Violet dog toy along with Mr Quackers, her lovie. After I leave and there’s no screaming for the 5th night in a row, I carry the monitor out to the backyard with me while I water the plants. There are no caterpillars today, but  there’s a kink in my hose someplace and while I’m tracking it down I listen to her push the buttons inside Violet’s paws and make the music start over and over and over and over. She listens to it for a little while and then pushes a different button. This time Violet asks for a hug. I wonder if Piper gives her one.

I water the broccoli and think about how awesome it is that she’s got the confidence to put herself to sleep lately, and I think about when I was a young girl waiting for my parents to leave me alone in my bed with my imagination. I always had so many things to think about before sleep. So many imaginary scenarios that I needed to play out, built like castles in the sky around something I’d read or seen or heard that day. So much for my little girl mind to get done before I could rest.

I wonder what she thinks about as she listens to the music again and again.

I water the tomatoes and think about how it is that a broccoli became a broccoli and a tomato became a tomato. What makes them different? How did the broccoli decide that its leaves needed to be so bold and serious? Is it because heads of broccoli are so very serious looking? What about the tomatoes? A sillier looking plant you will rarely see. If you consider the plant as a whole it look ridiculous, even without hundreds of caterpillar holes in the leaves. But I get it, the leaves gather the sun and the rain and funnel it all perfectly. Watering them both I watch the water pool at the bases of the plants, right where it’s needed.

But the carrot. I only have one root vegetable planted in this, my very first garden, so I admit I have no idea what I’m talking about. But carrots are just so mysterious. You can’t tell what’s down there without completely ending the party, so you need to be sure before you pull them up. And how the thing survives until someone comes along to liberate it from the dirt I have no idea. The carrot tops themselves seem to practically wilt when I water them. They just fan out and around and seemingly do a terrible job of getting the water to where the actual plant is. But then again, the root IS the whole plant, which is in the ground, all of which is now wet because of the fanning of the carrot top itself. Obviously I have a lot to learn about gardening.

I know a lot of people who say that they never truly believed in God at all until they had a child. The inability to trust faith and not require proof is pretty universal it seems. I know it’s hard for many of us, including myself. But for many children do offer proof of some kind, or at least it seems that way when they’re yours. They are so very much more than just the sum of their parts. There is so very much more happening inside that tiny mind than what was put inside of it by the genes her father and I passed on, she’s only 1 and I can see that as easily as I can see the surviving tomatoes starting to ripen. I have no idea what made them choose today to begin, but they have. Yesterday they were green green green like the grass but today a gentle orange tint is starting to push at the skin from the flesh inside. It looks like magic, just like the light in her eyes that seems to come from a rainbow. We still haven’t decided what color they are you know. Some days we say hazel, others gray or green.

How does a tomato know it’s supposed to be a tomato?  What is she thinking about after I close the door, listening to her music in her crib and putting herself to sleep like a whole person?  Who will she be someday? How will she know whether she’s supposed to be a ballerina or an engineer? A writer or an astronaut? What magic will I watch push out from the mind inside of this child, who I made with my body, turning her life beautiful colors?

I water the carrots and I think about God, and my daughter.

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