pickles and popsicle sticks: pee pee and patterings

“I need to go pee pee,” Sebastian called out. I responded, as any mother would have done, briskly, instinctively: dumped the muffin and the coffee on Lance’s lap and ran. As I ushered Sebastian to the women’s washroom, he stalled. I turned to him with a wave of urgency and then it happened: the moment. “I’ll go in here,” he said, turning to the adjacent door. “Oh ok so… I’ll just wait right out here for you?” Words I had heretofore never uttered. So I stood there: outside the men’s washroom, feeling helpless, awkward, strange. The butterflies that by and large lie dormant in my belly fluttered into my throat as my eyes moistened. The tears didn’t fall. I was too busy, I suppose, puzzling over the novelty of the experience, assimilating it. The dewy droplets hung suspended, then settled, dropping inward as I just. stood there.

When I turned to Lance, beaming that I’d had a “moment”, he replied casually, “oh yeah, he does that.” And that’s when I wanted to cry. And scream. When the fuck? Where the fuck? What the fuck – did I miss all these last four months while I was consumed with intensive studies?

Four terrible horrible no good very bad months, is what this past semester was. Sure I garnered invaluable literary wisdom, insights, and analytical tools, but for all this sophisticated theoretical flair, bloody nothing that was social media worthy, nothing to post on facebook, nothing to blog about. It was a time of imbalance, of sleep deprivation, of grey rainy days. Time management was a bitch; it eschewed family and individual wellness. Sebastian said to me one night, as I was tucking him in, that he wishes I would get up “early” one morning so that we could work on the book he was writing. And I went to bed, as I routinely did, at around 2 am, after hours of reading, with bloodshot eyes and a pinch in my heart, knowing that I would wake up just as foggy and hazy, and that the morning would be as always, harried and frantic.

I know that gratitude is the key to happiness blah blah blah. And I can certainly talk about the rarified joy and freedom I discovered when after hours upon hours of studying I stepped outside into the crisp air, and on a rare occasion, picked up Sebastian from school and went grocery shopping with him; about the mundane acts of dishwashing and laundry that became delightfully heightened and served a welcome respite; about the time I took a study break and spent the day blissfully organizing closets while dancing to Cabaret music, marveling at the marvelous sense of freedom I was experiencing.

But for these heightened moments of the mundane, there was also the pleasure of lying with a cool pillow pressed to the face, feeling glum and despondent. Yes I did plenty of wallowing, plenty of cursing and self-indulgent pitying. And there’s a “key” in there too: to feeling “terribly horribly no good very bad,” and to wishing that your happy friend’s ice cream will fall and land – in Australia. W.B. Yeats said: “Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy.” I do believe there’s a measure of happiness to be had in wallowing moments too. Think sad melancholic music. Think angry white woman music. Think a cozy throw and a tub of chocolate chip cookie ice cream.

Sometimes things just don’t mix. Or maybe it’s that they flow – from one to another -- rather than mix. Gratitude has a flow to it. As does wallowing. Each discrete, each its own sort of good. But the edges are permeable and the distance between the two is wispy. Kinda like that space between a child’s fit of tears and fit of laughter. Maybe they all share similar “patterings”; the need to be in it, whatever it is, in the moment, and to move away from it, in a moment.

Sebastian is teaching me the importance of “patterings”, or what the rest of us would call patterns.

There are the color patterings on his coloring sheet, the patterings that he forms for his special objects on top of the bookshelf, the patterings that he wondrously detects on the little stones that he finds in the school playground. I like that in his word “pattering” we hear patter, tiny tappings that insinuate a certain rhythm, a certain cadence. They are small and many, like the rain in many places /from many clouds to be absorbed, to be drunk… (Yehuda Amichai, “Not Like a Cypress”)

In Vancouver, the rain is certainly absorbed. But I only know one person who will drink it, who will get drunk on it, who exclaims, “I like this day” as we walk outside towards her daycare, rain or shine: for Liliana, everything is a laughing matter. There’s something about this child that makes me laugh, makes me happy. Something, I suppose, that emanates from her laugh, her happiness.

At the dinner table she makes faces, throws back that boisterous laugh, and performs flippant mimics of me, repeating my words with the same (only augmented) intonation and air: “Mamamushka” – big and oozing… “What happened to my baby? Where’d she go?” affected and teasing.

Hearing your words echoed does something to you. It makes you laugh at yourself. It makes you reflect. It makes you feel a little silly. It makes you realize, ultimately, how much and how little it really matters: all of it. This is perhaps the biggest challenge: to be able to care vigorously about things. And to let things go. To let them go so that you can let them in; this is the paradox.

I’ve noticed that when I get angry and frustrated, when the kids drive me fucking crazy, when a baking endeavor turns into a messy fiasco,

or when a nightly bath turns into a torrential flood,

and the inevitable primal scream issues forth from inside me, they laugh. And I follow. They have a way of lightening things, these darn kids, of clearing the space, allowing things to burst and to dock.