When They Bloom Before Your Eyes
Yesterday at five, E left for class, and I rushed to make a quick dinner of chicken quesadillas so I could get L outside on this first day. You know the day I mean – it’s the one when you first feel welcomed outside by everything from the sounds of the birds to the warmth of the sun on your skin and the breeze in your hair. It’s the day Spring shows up at last, happy and singing.
My first thought was to just go for a jog (which she loves). But then I remembered – she’s nearly two. She’s far beyond the infant she was last time we set foot on the playground around the corner. She can run and climb and jump and laugh, and lately the furniture has been on the verge of becoming an indoor playground. So.
We got there and she was all excitement and eagerness to be out of the stroller. I set her free, and she immediately became timid, clung to my hand, wanted help going up the play structure steps and down the tiny blue toddler slide the first time. And then. Then it was like she took a breath and with that breath she inhaled a new kind of courage and she just went.
It was like watching the daffodils we brought home from the market a few weeks ago. They were all tightly budded until we put them in warmish water and then we just sat back and literally watched them unfold. An explosion of ruffled yellow petals. A time lapse video in real time.
That was her last night. A daffodil blooming, unfolding. Months of physical development restrained by the winter cold that trapped her in our little apartment just burst through all at once. I barely recognized her.
For an hour, she ran and jumped and slid and went higher. All the way up to the top of the big curly slide, she flew down laughing wild and jumped off at the end like it was nothing.
She was all kinds of brave.
Fun! Mama, this is fun! she called to me, her face all pink-cheeked and windblown and smiles.
I confess at first I hovered, worried for her safety as she fearlessly figured out how to walk up steps without going to her knees, jumped off the ends of slides to land like a cat on the ground, figured out the ladder to the biggest slide. But then I inwardly threw up my hands and let go. Sat back and watched her bloom, amazed.
When the learning is visible, it amazes.
And when she ran and tripped and fell, I picked her up, set her on her feet, pulled up a pant leg to see the scrape on her knee.
Owwweee, she wailed. Just once. And then she pushed my gentle hand away, tugged her pant leg down, and ran back to the slide, the swings, crying More! What cared she for a knee scrape when there was fun to be had?
The sun was going down, the cool of twilight setting in when I at last convinced her away with an ice cream promise. She’d earned it, even if she didn’t understand why.
Yes. I ignored the fact that it should have been pajama time and we ran for our lives to Chick fil-A and ice cream, squeezing every last moment, every last smile, out of the day.
And after I’d ordered her mini sundae, she eschewed a high chair and insisted she could sit in the booth. I hadn’t realized she was big enough to reach the table but there across from me was my new big girl. The one I didn’t quite realize I had, living proof that she’d snuck in another inch or two on us while we weren’t looking. She ate her sundae like a pro without spilling and even saved the cherry for the end like a grownup was inside her head whispering, Save the best for last.
In spite of yawns that threatened, she wasn’t done with her revelry, oh no. She fearlessly climbed up into the play structure, insisting More slide! Something else she’d formerly been too timid to do.
All kinds of brave, people. All kinds of brave.
She even refused to come down, that big girl. Just peered down at me through a window. Just as I was starting to break a sweat at her long refusal, some bigger girls volunteered to lead her out.
I took her home and wrestled her into pajamas and through teeth brushing and she couldn’t even keep her eyes open through a whole story so I tumbled her into bed whispering we’d finish reading it tomorrow.
As I closed the door on her already sleeping self, I thought, These moments are like seeing little moments in the Creation process. And we get to. As parents, we get to.
