Yesterday was lovely and warm and sunny. We cracked open a brand new box of sidewalk chalk and had ourselves a wonderful afternoon out in the yard. Right before dinner I decided to take the kids for a quick walk around the block, so they both saddled up their trikes and off we went. Zibbit’s legs are a bit too short to reach the pedals, so her trike was abandoned after only a few minutes. She was running behind Babs trying to keep up, and I thought to myself, “Gee, I hope she doesn’t trip. It sure would be a nasty fall since she’s not wearing very heavy clothes.”

Guess what happened?

Guess where we ended up?

If you guessed the ER, 2,000 points for you!

She tripped on her shoe and fell directly on her face. Her nose and forehead are one big skid mark, and right above her top lip is a very deep cut that hung open and bled all over me. She got three stitches, poor thing.

And then, since I apparently have no short-term memory or any kind of ability to learn from recent experiences, we went for a walk this evening where she promptly tripped and fell again. She now has four skinned patches on her knees, two from yesterday and two from today. I told the doctor last night that I think I might just roll her up in bubble wrap every morning and call it good.

After so many tears and scrapes and bruises, finding this darling little nest in the corner of my backyard filled me with a very strange mixture of hope and worry. Four innocent little eggs. Beautiful new life about to break into this world. That mama bird is going to have her hands full.

* 1,ooo bonus points if you know the movie this quote is from!

I wonder sometimes if I have the right qualifications to be Babs’ mother. We just seem so very different from one another. I see so much of her father in her that I question exactly how much of me was used in the making of this product.

I’ve spent my whole life trying to be quiet. Trying not to be noticed. Even those years that I spent with wildly colored hair were meant as a distraction from the “real me”. I had a cleverly constructed wall built up to protect the “me” that huddled trembling behind that barrier. I knew that if you rejected me, if you called me ugly, if you thought I was a wacko and you didn’t want to be my friend, it was because I looked so different. It wasn’t because you really knew me. So I hid. And was quiet. It’s only been recently that I have slowly allowed the me that I know to venture out from behind that wall. It is a difficult and terrifying journey, but I’ve realized that if I don’t come out I might lose myself forever.

Babs, on the other hand, does everything big. She doesn’t walk, she runs. She doesn’t skip, she jumps. She doesn’t giggle, she throws her head back and erupts with the loudest and most contagious belly laugh you have ever heard. Everything about her is vibrant and alive, and her presence virtually hums with energy. You’ve never fully experienced the joy of life until you’ve experienced it with Babs. Nothing can hold this girl back from achieving her dreams in life. She is a pure, unharnessed force. I love her fiercely and intensely, the way she needs to be loved. But much of the time I am left baffled and overwhelmed in her tumultuous wake.

There are times, although they seem few and far between, when I do notice a brief glimpse of myself in her. She loves the same things I remember loving when I was four years old. She has the same concerns and so many of the same fears. But where I balled everything up deep inside her emotions exist like an ever-changing weather pattern orbiting the surface of her life. She is sunny and bright, shining her light on the world around her and then suddenly and ferociously stormy. The openness with which she experiences her emotions unnerves me. She holds nothing back. I want to fold her up and shield her from the world’s judgment (the spirited child, the difficult child, the strong-willed child are labels that are too freely given and accepted), but there’s nothing I can do to protect her that wouldn’t also stifle who she is. And I never, ever want her to think she is anything less than amazing, just the way she is right at this moment.

We were out in the yard today while Zibbit was napping. I was sitting on the steps, silently withdrawn into my thoughts like am so often. Babs was bounding through the grass in wide, looping circles, searching for frogs and bugs and maybe even a fairy or two. The sky was overcast, so I was dressed in layers but chilled, goose bumps scattered up my arms. Babs was wearing a sundress, no jacket, no shoes. Her hair was windblown and stringy with perspiration, her cheeks flushed bright, and I was struck again by how different she and I approach and encounter life.

After awhile, she ran towards me and pounced into my lap, howling with laughter as I struggled to stay upright under her sudden weight. I gave her an Eskimo kiss, then sat back and traced my finger across the bridge of her nose.

“Did you know you’re starting to get freckles?” I asked her. She sprung up from my lap and scrambled in the house. I heard the scrape of chair legs across the kitchen floor, and followed her in to find her standing on a stool inspecting her face in a mirror. I stood next to her and showed her the faint sprinkle of freckles across her nose and cheeks, and when she saw them she broke into a huge grin. She turned to me and touched my cheek.

“Mommy,” she whispered, “that means I’m going to look just like you!”

I’m sorry I’ve been so absent lately. Blogging and I are not getting along these days. I get through half a post, then delete it realizing it’s all crap and I’m a horrible writer with nothing interesting to say. There are so many stories I’d like to write for you, like how Babs asked me the other day how babies are made and I almost crashed the car because I thought I had at least another couple of years to prepare for that question. Or how I love to go to lectures, but I swear that doesn’t make me a boring person. I’d love to write about the sunless tan I tried to apply, and how I ended up looking like I had a contagious skin disease instead of the bronzed beach beauty I was hoping for. I want to write about these things, but I just can’t find the words. The words are not there. I’m waiting patiently for the words to come back, and hopefully they’ll be here soon. Or at least maybe they can send me a postcard from wherever it is they’ve gone off to, so at least I know they’re doing alright.

A few weeks ago winter gracefully stepped aside and spring breezed in with all of her colors suddenly and vibrantly on display. We had a brief moment of warm and mellow sunshine which was quickly blotted out by the thick, oppressive cloud cover that my area of the world is known for. Although I enjoyed the chilly stillness of winter, when the rain came with spring I exhaled a breath that I hadn’t known I’d been holding. Rain is what I know. Rain is comforting and familiar. It means snuggling up under a quilt with a good book and a hot cup of peppermint tea. Rain gives me peace.

I remember one afternoon last spring; both of my children were down for their afternoon naps, and the storm that had been slowly rolling in all day finally burst overhead. Thunder boomed and hail fell in sheets so thick the street was a river within minutes. I wrapped myself up in a blanket and dashed outside, huddling beneath the overhang on our front porch. The sound of wind and water filled my ears and I closed my eyes, inhaling the fresh smell of sudden rain. My senses were consumed by the incredible force of it all, and I felt so completely safe. There I stood, mere inches from the freezing water, protected by my blanket and my solid home behind me.

I treasure that memory, because the security I felt was so rare for me. I’m frightened of so many things. My imagination creates the most horrific scenarios, and if I pay attention to them it seems like my family is in constant danger. Everywhere I go, every corner or alley or shadow I pass holds the possibility of evil hiding in wait. In those rare and precious moments when that fear is forgotten, or drowned out by the roar of a spring thunderstorm, I am flooded with such a blessed comfort and relief. I wish I could bottle up that feeling, the Absence of Fear, and carry it with me to hold beneath my nose like a smelling salt. Every whiff would remind me of the serenity of that stormy spring afternoon… the rain and hail pounding all around me, the cool wind prickling my cheeks, and the shelter of my home and my blanket all that I need to keep me safe.

Second grade was boring. Mind-numbingly boring. My teacher was just horrid, too. First of all, she would never let me go to the nurse when I suffered from Not Wanting To Do An Assignment Syndrome. Which is just cruel. Plus, she kept getting on my case about how dirty my fingernails were. I was quite sure that this was none of her stinking business. But I soared through the curriculum nonetheless- I was utterly non-challenged. Math was a breeze, spelling was a piece of cake, and reading? Are you kidding me? I could plow through three chapter books in the time it took my classmates to stumble over one story from the textbook. Basically, I was awesome, and I knew it. This was probably the only year of my life I have ever been cocky. It was also the year in which I performed a little experiment that involved a thumbtack and some very unrealistic expectations about the resiliency of the human body.

One afternoon, as the minutes drew on and the seconds ticked by ever slower, the rest of my classmates were sitting at their desks working quietly on an assignment. I of course had finished my work within the first ten minutes, and sat back in my seat smugly surveying my feeble-minded peers. The poor fools. I imagined them all groveling at my feet, their hands grasping at my ankles as they pleaded and begged to be rescued. “Help us, Karli!” they would cry. “We can’t spell ‘because’! You must help us spell ‘because’!” I would stand straight and tall, the wind blowing in my hair, and spell out proudly: “Because! B! E! C!–”

Wham!

I was rudely pulled from my daydream by the sound of Justin, the class jock, stomping out of the room with the hall pass and slamming the door behind him. Now he was a real jerk. It was because of him that I religiously remembered never to wear a dress on “Friday Flip-up Day”. I scowled at my feet, fuming at the injustice of idiotic second grade boys, when something caught my eye. An errant thumbtack had fallen off the bulletin board and rolled underneath my desk. As I stared at it, the sharp metal tip glinted under the fluorescent bulbs of the schoolroom. In that small flash of light I saw an opportunity, and I wasted no time.

Calmly I sauntered over to my teacher’s desk. I smiled at her and broke off a couple pieces of tape from her dispenser. “My paper ripped,” I told her, and she returned my smile. Back at my desk I bent low over my paper, using one of the pieces of tape to repair the non-existent tear. Watching my teacher out of the corner of my eye, I waited a few moments until I was certain she wasn’t looking, then I slipped under my desk and landed on all fours on the floor. Carefully grasping the thumbtack and tape in one hand, I crawled between the desks until I reached Justin’s empty chair. Silently, methodically, I rolled up the tape and stuck it to his seat. Then I placed the thumbtack pointy side up on top of the tape.

Oh, this was genius. I pictured Justin coming back to his seat, sitting down and yoweeeeeeee! flying up into the air! Quietly chuckling, I started to crawl back to my desk when Justin’s seatmate suddenly caught sight of me. “What are you doing?” he snapped, and slammed his hand down on the seat as he bent over to look at me. I saw his face go white. And at this point my memory gets a little fuzzy.

I remember seeing the puncture in the palm of his hand and I remember my teacher shaking her finger at me furiously, ordering me to write fifty lines about what I had done wrong. I remember being so mad that my plan had been foiled. It would have been so perfect…

The very last thing I remember (and this is the part where all of my junior high teachers are nodding their heads and murmuring ‘ah, so that’s where it all began’) is handing my teacher a sheet of paper on which I had drawn fifty literal lines in a final moment of reckless defiance. I was too scared to look at her, so I didn’t see her expression when she told me to go back and do it again. But oh, to be able to go back in time, and be a fly on the wall so I see the look on her face. I bet she had a little twinkle in her eye. Because I was undeniably in top form that day. Absolutely genius!