Fifteen Gifts – Day Five

For an explanation of this project, click here.

When Harper was a baby, Jesse and I would drop her off at the church nursery and say something like this: “She’s OK playing by herself, but she might realize we aren’t there if you start talking to her.” We knew she was shy, and talking to strangers, albeit friendly strangers, was overwhelming. It’s hard to feel those feelings as a 40 year old; I can’t imagine they’re smaller when a one year old feels them.

Neither Jesse or I want Harper to be defined by her shyness. We don’t want her to think she can’t do something because she’s shy. On the other hand, we want others to know she doesn’t need a lot of noise and stimulus to make her feel comfortable and happy. She’s quite content exploring the world with her best friend, imagination.

This is not to say she doesn’t want friends, or is unfriendly (though it may come across that way at first). It’s complicated, and as people who are still figuring ourselves out, Jesse and I, I suppose, were both eager to explain and protect Harper.

After a while, Jesse and I stopped offering apologetics for her and dropped Harper off to play with blocks and baby dolls. One Sunday though, a woman I didn’t know but who knew my name (one of my many flaws), greeted me with a grin when I went to pick Harper up. She told me what a delight Harper was; that she was impressed with how well Harper played, humming and making quiet conversations with the baby dolls as she pushed them in the stroller.

I imagine any parent adores hearing that another human being had fun with their kid as they are, and this was true for me. I have never forgotten this woman’s words to me. Every time I saw her in church I was thankful that she told me my kid is not only OK, but she had  fun with Harper. The conversation she and I had wasn’t really even a conversation. Perhaps ten words were spoken between the two of us, and that was all. What she said resonated, though. She let me feel that Harper is not strange, or too shy, or too emotional; that she is wonderfully and fearfully made.

These days I am overwhelmed with all there is to do, and all that is coming my way. I am tired, and my creativity feels low. Yesterday morning, instead of working, I sat down to check my email and learned that this woman, who said such kind things about my baby girl, died.

Maybe it is sentimental, maybe it is trite to cling to a hiccup of a conversation that happened between strangers, but what she told me made a difference and so when I spent time with my 8th graders, I imagined what I would say to their parents, who trust me to attend to them for 90 minutes every other day.

I believe there are infinite ways to say we are wonderfully and fearfully made. Today, I will attempt to say it 21 times:

Your child noticed that the only words in ee cummings’ poem today was, “You,” and “God.” When I asked if she had a reason why that is, she wondered if it was because he wanted readers to notice what’s important. “What’s really important,” she said.

Your child was the first to raise his hand when I asked what a metaphor is. “Taking two things that are different and making a connection.” Then, he wrote about high school – it’s an octopus, and all those legs are choices, different paths to go down, different decisions to make, and he doesn’t want to get too coiled up in all those paths and decisions.

Your child saw me in the hallway this morning and quietly said, “Mrs. Feyen, do we need Sleeping Freshmen Never Lie today? Because I have it. I have it!” “Yes,” I told him, “we will start that story today.” “Great!” he exclaimed. “Because I have it!” Today in class he drew a picture of a boat with searchlights and white capped waves. “In high school,” he wrote, “I will search for hope, and that is why my ship is called S.S. Hope.”

Your child told me today he can make the following: pasta, pizza, cookies, eggs, and something else but I forgot. He said it like that wasn’t a lot, and I told him, “That’s great!” He smiled and told me a recipe for penne.

Your child turned in the most beautiful poem today. Here’s a bit of it: “I’m from books, From the way the words float off the page, I’m from the characters who become like friends, I’m from the first page and the last.”

I read part of Sleeping Freshman Never Lie with the class today, but we had to move on to something else. Your child never put the book down. He read it for the next twenty minutes, not even trying to hide that he was reading it when we were doing something else. I’m so proud of him. I wonder if he’s found himself in a story. I hope so.

Your child makes the best and funniest facial expressions. It’s impossible for me to keep a straight face when he makes them. He helps me take myself less seriously. I’m thankful for that.

Your child has the best smile and best sense of humor, but it’s a quiet and quick sense of humor, and sometimes I wonder if part of the joke is how fast he can say the punchline. He  always has a punchline, and it’s always funny.

I’ve been trying to write an essay about pointe shoes and have been stuck for a few days. Your child wrote a poem about them and I read it today. “I’d rather be a used, old pointe shoe, hand-sewn, ribbons unraveling, smelling like death, stinging like life. To have been broken through the layer of silk, To be exposed to the rough, tangled wood, is to live.”

Your child is the first to say, “I don’t get it,” and one of the greatest artists in the class. “I’d rather be an old pair of cleats,” she writes in a poem, “memories, stories, within the shoe, old, been through the mud and grass. I’d rather be broken into.”

Your child writes about baseball in a way that almost makes me not afraid to play it.

Your child is always the first to volunteer to read her writing, especially poetry. When she begins, her voice is shaky but by the end I can tell she’s found a piece of herself in “doing it scared.”*

Your child is well-read, articulate, and a quiet leader in this class. Her classmates admire her, and so do I.

Your child brought me a donut one day. “I’m sorry for the way I acted last class,” he told me, handing me a vanilla frosted one with sprinkles. “I brought donuts for my birthday, and would you like one?” (He and Harper share a birthday.)

Your child once told me that every time she sits down to write she finds something new out about herself.

Your child sits quietly in class, and at the beginning of the school year it was a sorrowful, scared sort of quiet. Today, he is still quiet but he is happy. He has some buddies that make him smile. He writes about the same subject, and I’m proud of him for turning it over and over and wading through it again and again.

Your child has the most gorgeous handwriting. It is script, and it expresses a beautiful, complicated mind in the making.

Your child quietly walks up to me and tells me she doesn’t think she got it right, but she tried, and could I look at it? She always finds something I hadn’t thought of, or seen. Yes, I tell her, she got it right.

Your child writes about water, the ocean and surfing, and I feel as though I’m in the deep, blue sea when I read her stories.

Your child is witty, mostly with his friends in class, and every once in a while I get to hear what he’s said. I chuckle without him knowing I overhead.

Your child tells me she wants to write because she believes it will please God. I tell her that her writing already has.

We studied “Flower in the Crannied Wall”  by Alfred Lord Tennyson yesterday:

Flower in the crannied wall,

I pluck you out of the crannies,

I hold you here, root and all, in my hand.

Little flower – but if I could understand

What you are, root and all, and all in all,

I should know what God and man is.

Thank you, Mrs. Holtrop, for holding my little flower for a moment, and telling me about it. I hope I can pass the favor on again and again.

*”doing it scared” is a phrase from my friend Jill Reid’s daughter, and I think it’s one of the best phrases out there.