Seeing
It’s easy to breeze through the times when Ess is happy, to let her play on her own when she’s content. There are always adult things to be done: cleaning, bill-paying, paperwork, planning, reading pieces on politics, philosophy, coding… and I have noticed I tend to conflate the important tasks with the urgent tasks. I can usually complete the urgent ones while Ess plays, but with that momentum I find I am sailing into important things and then… not very important things.
There’s a speed bump before the fork in the road, but if I can maneuver to the alternate route, I end up in a mindset where I’m thinking about trying to participate with Ess. It isn’t obvious in the moment, but stepping back I realize the bill-paying and cleaning will be there long after Ess grows up. So the three of us have played Zingo (though at this age it devolves into Ess doing “let’s pitch all the pieces around”) and we read of course, but I’ve recently found something worth practicing. I was helping to get Ess out of the car the other day, and instead of thinking about getting her inside, so she could have a bath and get ready for bed, I tried to short-circuit my adult tasklist. I just stopped. And I looked at what Ess was doing. I mean, we are always looking at what Ess is doing (and Mykala is frequently cleaning up after what Ess was doing during the long days while I am at work), but this time I really tried to see.
Perhaps sensing this, Ess immediately began chattering away, narrating what she was imagining, what the two little play bugs she had were doing, going in and out of their house, where were they cold, where were they warm, can I hold this one, see how this one is clean and this one is dirty, and look how the antennae on this one are gone. (I’ve added a picture of what they look like when they’re new.)
Essie’s imagination, the world she’s in, has a richness that surpasses my own. Almost everything is new, and everything is interesting. Her excitement is contagious, her narration frequently hilarious, and her desire to share it all is easy for me, stumbling through the smokescreens of adulthood, to miss.