Skip to main content

Pressure Drop

When my children were very small, they were relatively transparent.  With the exception of the mysterious times when sleep eluded them or unruly behaviour was the only way they could think of to express something, once the mystery was solved, the diaper was changed, the tylenol or the snack was dispensed or the nap was caved into, they went back to being transparent.  They told me directly (most of the time) what their motives were all about. (I am just painting the walls to welcome Santa, I flushed the spiderman down the toilet etc...) 

We were the ones who held our cards close to our chest. We'd sprinkle their day with little white lies to prop ourselves up and get to our destination (Sorry, the pool is closed today...This soup has no vegetables in it...I am so busy planning a really big slide that I cannot make a little slide today.)

 Inevitably, their transparency has clouded a little and our own cards are falling from our hands.

As they learn to say things a certain way to ensure that a friend or one of us does not get hurt, and as their motives being more layered and obscure (to us), we begin to feel propped wider open to their knowing gazes.  They've learned about white lies.  With just a twitch of a line on my face, they pick up on a pressure drop and they swallow what it was that they were about to bring up.

As I give up controlling the facial twitches, they take up tugging on every line.

Labels:

Comments

  1. Kate Hall4/23/2014 8:34 am

    woosh. that is an important transition. i wonder how easy (for adults) it will be to return to the land of 'no white lies'... not even the white ones ... the probable sadness in watching the kids pick up on adult communications is mixed with that ineffable something... that they too will re-learn the no white lies when they cycle back to it...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I entered August without you.

 I won't visit you this month.  You won't call. I will raid your garden and you won't get any of the vegetables. I will make plans without telling you about them. We'll go to the store and not buy you one single thing. Whole books will be read and I will not tell you which ones. I will watch movies and not inform you. The nasturiums will ripen. Last month was different. I changed my schedule and took time off work to be with you.   I dropped all kinds of plans for us to be together. You sent me messages, I received them. I picked up food that I thought you would like at the store and sent you pictures of every beautiful thing I saw. I sang with you. We watched the Great Canadian Baking Show. You chose the recipe for the garlic scape pesto and gave me instructions for making the gooseberry jam. I am in August without you. You are in July.
1 comment
Read more

Keep telling yourself that.

We talk to ourselves everyday, all day (and night) for the whole of our lives. We started talking to ourselves before we knew we were a self, we forget what we said because we forget everything from before...when we were too young and busy developing our brain to remember those early years. There is still lingering residue of long forgotten conversations I have had with myself as a toddler sitting around in the crevices...sloughing off occasionally into words I tell myself still.   We talk non-stop, and not just with dialogue.  Our goosebumps communicate to us, our tingly feelings, our neurons, our peripheal vision.  They are all submitting data into our self and expecting us to react, respond or all to often, expecting what they are sending us will be ignored. After all that talking, you'd think we'd know what we think about most things, but occasionally we are stumped.  Unless we stop what we are doing and really concentrate sometimes that voice(s) ...
1 comment
Read more

Shake your Bummy

In recent weeks, two things have come to my attention, this article by Mary Beth Williams,  T he real key to good health  and the viral hit created by Dr. Mike Evans,  23 and 1/2 hours: What is the single best thing we can do for our health?  Both coincided with when I was turning my attention to new years resolutions and reflecting on the year that was. Thanks to both,  a reckoning came to be.  Mary Beth Williams' candid advice was to get your heart stronger because you never know when you are going to need it.  She herself has been receiving treatment for lung cancer. Dr Mike Evans' way of putting the exact same thing? "Try to limit your sitting time to 23 1/2 hours a day".   In my day job, I sit a lot. I occasionally rise to retrieve something from the photocopier or to make a coffee, but an awful lot of the time, I'm on my bum.  This is in steep contrast to my night job. At the end of the work day, occasionally in the middle, I h...
5 comments
Read more