Many people have particular feelings about Mondays. Songs make Monday declarations. My friend, Liz, shared hers on Facebook this week—I’m feeling overwhelmed by the week and I’m only 25 minutes into it. I could relate. I was trying to wrap my mind around a full week of solo parenting (started Tuesday, courtesy of the antiquarian bookseller trade) and a full week of everything I usually try to jam in to boot.
Wednesday, I remembered how Damaris, of the tender and humorous and recipe-filled Kitchen Corners blog used to have another one, which featured “Monday Moments.” These were her way of finding the good in the oft-challenging Monday—and in so doing, reminding us all to look for them.
During Saskia’s naptime on Wednesday Remily—that would be my Remy plus his cousin-grade pal Emily—were at the dining room table making origami Valentines for their respective classes. She’s in fifth grade; he’s in second. I was at my usual work perch of a kitchen counter overlooking the dining room, and so I quietly listened to their pretty incessant chatter. I learned that they chose the same paper for the sister pair in second and fifth grade, figuring the girls would realize their friends had been making the origami together. I learned that none of their peers “comprehended” origami, really, save for Anna, taught by Emily to do it. Lucien’s friend, Alex, is “amazing at origami” according to Remy and “has fifteen books about origami.”
Periodically, Emily would suggest that they work in silence in order to go faster at the origami task. Each time, within moments they were chattering again. It was so sweet to witness their collective resolve followed by their inability to remain quiet. They were having too much fun chatting.
**
Earlier that day, Remy and I had spent the walk to school trying to figure out the whole Valentine’s conundrum. He doesn’t like to make one Valentine and copy it. Twenty Valentines are a lot of work, especially for a perfectionist. Let me repeat: especially for a perfectionist. While he liked the idea of origami, he doesn’t consider a creation passable if there are any rips in the paper. Guess what? Sometimes, there are rips in the paper.
I wouldn’t want to count the number of times he’s crumpled or torn up some otherwise beautiful piece of art because he perceives of one tiny mistake.
To the extent I am able, I work hard to help him figure out how to let things roll more, how to settle with not always executing a task perfectly.
This is one reason the afternoon felt so capture-the-moment-ish. He was relaxed (he often is, making origami, but he often isn’t when doing so in the service of a particular outcome).
**
When I am trying to help him sit with mistakes and imperfection and the stuff of life, I am very clear these things are really a-okay. I am very clear the process of life—call it, life—is messy and imperfect and very often about accepting disappointments and moving on. Since becoming a parent, I’ve become a great fan of the do-over, a great believer in learning to appreciate—very often right in the moment—how the other person feels and acknowledging that. I’ve become a super big fan of moving on. Truth be told I sometimes feel sorry for people who don’t get a chance to live with the mucketyness a family brings to adult life (even if it’s quieter and more orderly and I am sure more restful and even more productive in oh so many ways without) because my compassion has grown through all this conflict and messiness and even the tears in ways that I can’t quantify but for which I am deeply grateful.
Good that I feel that way, because my sleepy self had to wake up enough in the evening to intervene between the elder brothers over a dinner-making issue. Every day has its tiny or not so tiny moments of conflict and that is wearing.
Anyway, I’m a little rambling here because I didn’t sleep well (I really don’t when the dear husband is away) and in my thinking about the origami moment and the sense of anxiety I feel about my own work, I realized (again) that this being a writer gig has been object lesson in frustrations and disappointments and imperfections. I have my big highs—this week, I got to go to a decommissioned military bunker where library overflow now lives—and lots of bumps-and-bruises moments. As I see with Remy so clearly, while the doing part of working is wonderfully satisfying, the sense of how work is received—from others, and yourself—isn’t. It’s hard. I was up in part because it’s particularly challenging to help someone else with something you’re struggling with yourself. There it is, as my cousin Lisa would say, life being all life-y. Remy and I have talked about that exact phrase, and he totally gets it.
