Cinderella

She may remember this night for the rest of her life. Maybe not. But it stands out as different from all the other nights in the seven years before it. 

Natalie is a hummingbird on speed, a hopped up rabbit, a spastic housefly. She flutters and dances and chatters non-stop, all the live-long day. She runs everywhere she goes.  You would think with the frenzied energy that drives her through fourteen waking hours, she would collapse in an exhausted little pink heap by 8:00 pm each night, but instead, though she is sent to bed by 8:30, you can hear her running about, playing and talking after 11:00 pm. She has been heard singing in her bed well past midnight (she’s like her mama; the night owl doesn’t fly far from the tree!).  No amount of scolding or timeouts on the stairs have helped.  They say that there are several things you can’t force a child to do; sleep is definitely one of them. 

And, as I’m sure you can imagine, unlike her bunny relatives, she doesn’t hop out of bed in the morning, because she is too bushed from her late night escapades.

When the big kids used to do this, I made them plop down on a hard kitchen chair in the boring ol’ entryway until they were plumb tuckered out. Recently, the big kids were laughing and joking about it. “Do you remember how Mom used to sit us on a wooden chair till we were tired when we wouldn’t go to sleep?”  They talked about all of the ways they would flip and turn in the chair to try to get comfortable. They would soon begin begging to go to bed. “No,” I would say with hesitation, as though I were considering it, “I just don’t think you’re tired enough.”  But eventually I learned that this technique wasn’t quite doing the job.  They were still goofing off after-hours. 

Then, whilst wandering the dark corridors of my diabolical child-rearing chambers, I came upon an almost fool proof method for inducing sleep without Benadryl. And it worked. 

I haven’t had to dust off this particular parenting tactic in a few years, mostly because Jonah tends to just lay the heck down and go to sleep.  But for Natalie, it was time to pull out the big guns. 

“Natalie, come down here.”

She tentatively descended the stairs, and stood on one foot hugging the door jamb.

“You have a lot of energy tonight. Let’s not waste it.  Go get a washcloth and a spray bottle.”

She looked at me suspiciously.

“Go on”, I coaxed. 

When she returned with the rag she held it out to me as though I were the one who would be using it.  I gave her the simple instruction, “Okay, go scrub the spots off the kitchen floor.”

She was shocked, but didn’t protest. How could she? What would she say? “I can’t, Mom, and I have to go to sleep.”  Her shoulders did droop a bit as she dragged her little feet back into the kitchen. 

She disappeared from sight for a while, but I could hear the spray bottle, so I knew she was working. Soon she migrated to the doorway to be sure I could see that she was crying, but she never quit working. I let her go on like that for another ten minutes, and then called her to me. 

“Do you think you’re tired enough to go to sleep now, or do you need a little more scrubbing time?”

“Noooooooooo,” she whimpered. 

“Oh, good,” I said, intentionally sounding very relieved that she chose to be done.  “I’m glad you’re tired. You should sleep really well now.”

I hugged and kissed her, and told her I loved her. The lesson is built in, after all. No need for a lecture. 

*Post scrub script: Some kids are tougher than others. Natalie has gotten the opportunity to scrub the bathroom floor this week, as well.  This time there were no tears. She hummed as she worked. I think she simply knew what to expect this time, and seemed somehow content with the situation. Maybe she was relieved to have something to do with her energy. Some children are a quandary.  

When she was done, she went straight to sleep. 

I imagine she’ll be doing the baseboards sometime later this week.  I picture her, years from now, at a family reunion, telling her older siblings how hard she had it compared to them. 

“You guys got to sit on chairs. I had to scrub the floor!”

The One

So, Adam has Covid. We chose not to tell the Littles until he started feeling better because Natalie is very nervous about it all.  Every time she prays, she asks God to protect “Adam and Ethan and the whole earth-planet-world” from covid. She’s covering all her bases.  Adam is doing much better now, so we decided to tell them, partly because it is getting challenging to talk about it in code, and partly because they might find out by accident, and we didn’t want that. 

Jonah simply said, “I thought he might have it, when you guys said he was sick.”  He’s been paying attention. He was content to know Adam was on the mend, and casually headed out of the room. 

Natalie stood still holding her little white bear and disappeared behind her blue eyes. After a few moments I asked her if she was okay with what we told her, and she said, “I’m not sure”.  She was processing the months of prayers for the world, the masks and hand sanitizer and the closed stores; the fear. And the deaths. We hadn’t been able to protect her from knowing about those. “Will he die?”

After assuring her he was almost as healthy now as she is. I tried to explain, but then I stopped and said, “wait a minute”.

I ran to the studio and grabbed all of our pencil jars, and colored pencils and began counting them out in tens. When I got to 100, Natalie said, “is that all of the people who die?” I told her to wait for a moment and counted out my second hundred. Then I stepped back.

“If each one of these pencils is like one person who got sick with Covid,” then I reached out into the pile and choose a small pencil,  “...this is how many would possibly die.” She took a minute, gave me a critique on the pencil color I had chosen, and then stepped back to let me know she understood. 

It must have been enough for her. She seemed to relax. I again assured her that Adam was doing great, and she trotted away.

I looked at the pile of pencils. It’s an easy thing to explain it to a child that way, overly simplified. No point in upsetting her the way all of the grown-ups have been. She’s going to see enough of the hardships of life soon enough.

I looked at the single pencil in my hand. That pencil represents someone.  Someone’s son or daughter, even if they died at 90.  Hundreds and thousands, hundreds of thousands... of someones.  I’m grateful today it wasn’t our someone. 

 I’m almost not worried anymore. There is still that tiny chance that I’ve heard about, the one of the young, healthy twenty-something who gets a mild case of Covid, and three weeks later dies suddenly of a stroke or heart failure. I stand with a pencil in my hand like someone drawing straws, and say another prayer for Adam. 

“...and the whole earth-planet-world.”

Road Maps from Above

I had to borrow this photo because, at the time these thoughts were coming to me, I was driving and couldn’t snap one. And of course, this happens to be a lush, green road in England, not our dry, golden landscape in Amador, but it’s not about the greenery. It’s all about the road.

As we were driving home from Sacramento today, my navigation had me take a different route than usual. Looking down at my phone, I saw a straight road stretching out for three or so miles ahead of my little blue arrow. But looking out my windshield, Whoa! I saw an undulating roller coaster ride, still three miles long, and linear as the crow flies - not turning from side to side - but certainly not “straight “.

It got me thinking how, from afar, a person’s road might look really straight. Even, well... “even”. No insanely obvious jerks to the left or right; no health scare, car accident, or lost job. But if you were on their road, riding shotgun, and could see the peaks and valleys - one after the other in succession, and maybe feel the sinking pressure in your chest and head as the car tilted skyward, the dizzying weightlessness at the top of each crest, the flip-flop of your stomach as you slid down the other side, and finally the sinking weight of your body pressing heavily into your seat at the bottom of the hill, the next hill looming before you - you might see it differently. Of course you would see it differently! You would feel it. 

As a kid, we called these “Tickle-belly Hills”. We would chant for my dad to drive faster so we could feel them more intensely.  Each of my own kids feels Tickle-belly Hills differently. My girls say it hurts their heads and makes them feel dizzy. Jonah says he feels it in his thighs, and Natalie says it makes her headachy. My big boys used to laugh because they could feel it… well, let’s just say they could feel it down there, somewhere. Some of them hate it, some love it.  For me, it hits me in the chest and in the pit of my stomach.  It’s part thrill, part dread. 

Lately, I keep hearing people say how overwhelmed they are, saying they have “a lot going on“. And it seems more often than not, someone in the peanut gallery answers back “yah, we all do.”

Yah, we all do. 

Probably. But that certainly isn’t helpful. Because while we all have a lot on our plates right now, everyone’s plate is different. Everyone feels that road in a different way.  And it’s easy to look at someone else’s map from above and see it as a straight road, but that doesn’t mean it actually is.  It doesn’t work to compare, and we should try not to, but we do sometimes.  I do. We feel like no one knows how hard our road is right now. And hey, they probably don’t. Because you can’t compare caring for twins to being laid off, or being on quarantine to moving. And when someone says, “we all do”, they might be saying, “don’t forget me, I’m hurting too,” or even, “I can’t help you carry your load right now. Mine is already too heavy.”

Maybe we just need to answer the weary wave of that white flag that laments, “I have a lot going on”, with a call of “shotgun!”, and take their road with them for a while. 

Yeah, (I think) we all do.