I got a rear view mirror concert yesterday.
Our 5-year-old was giving full lip sync commitment to Frozen II‘s “Into the Unknown.”
(And somehow he even knew to pop that tongue out on Idina’s high screlt.)
He squinted his eyes shut, widened his mouth into cheek-ache smiles, and flung ice crystal geometry from his fingers.
He’s a mirror to me. I don’t know how God crafts souls, but ours share a blueprint.
He flings himself into the world with tenderness, trust, and abandon, and I can’t help but see little me in parallel stages.
It’s healing and painful.
He grieves hard, too: learning the grownups had ice cream after he was in bed, brother-altered art projects, and Duplo accidents incite Greek tragedy-level keening and Shakespearean vengeance.
These glimpses teleport me back to fragile and open child me.
And how illogical and unfair my ego’s been:
Why didn’t you put a stop that? And that?
Why couldn’t you be normal? You cried over broken cookies.
If you didn’t talk so loud and cartwheel everywhere you went, kids wouldn’t have called you sissy.
Any trip to our early timeline with demands for adult-level agency, advocacy, and violent shut-down is a visit to prison.
We look at our little selves through bulletproof glass; and soon the furrow in our wounded adult brow means the kid part of us just stops picking up the phone.
What if we realized the jail is as imaginary as the one Noah and Jude put me in on the couch when they play police?
And what if instead of laying down cruel and kooky demands on our souls when they had small bodies and wobbly brains, we opened our big person arms and asked, “Can I give you a hug?”
There’d be a lot less owning and destroying in your YouTube video suggestions.
And here’s a song you can sing and make big gestures to:
