wave length

"Mom, my worm died!" my three-year-old cried, as I jammed his freshly laundered and balled socks into the dresser drawer.

"yeah, yeah....I'm sorry, honey..."

I had no idea what he was talking about, but you get used to that with kids.


"Kennedy said she's going to bring me fifty dollars tomorrow."
       "Oh, really?! Well, that's great..."
"Sydney says I can't be a diver because the sharks will eat me."
       "Sydney!  Just let him dive already!"
"Mom, I need to cut out your feet for school!"
        "Uhh....okay...."  (What does that mean?!)

Children will collapse in emotional distress over the most insignificant things, at least, insignificant to those of us paying bills.  And, when they come to me for refuge or resolution, I admit, I tend to be pretty lame with the whole sympathy spectrum, especially for the obscure topics of seemingly little relevance.  Kids surprise you with relevance, however... 

Slowly, I came around... The mulch bed in the corner of the drawer came into focus as I followed his eyes toward the eventual worm death-bed.  Now, two weeks later, I am embarrassed to admit that the habitat is still in place amidst his socks and pj's, and the worm has never been discovered, probably because it has never been sought.  Poor worm...and, I flashback to a scene, the day before, as I dug into the soft ground with great eagerness to landscape, handing worms to my son as we discovered them in moist lumps of crumbling earth.

Same son was playing in the large utility sink in the laundry room, and came in search of help with what should have been crocodile clean-up: irrelevant.  But, no...the sink had been plugged and water was cascading over the edge, flooding the laundry room quite well: relevant.

On another note, sometimes it's not the bewilderment as to what they are talking about that reaps disaster, as it's the losing track of what they are into.  Moms turn their backs.  There!  I have revealed the deep, dark secret to which every social worker is well aware.  We're not even talking about the cooking-home-made-meth kind of neglect.  I'm talking about cleaning-oatmeal-out-of-the-stove-grates, or camping-in-the-bathroom-while-you-potty-train-a-3-year-old, or nursing-your-newborn-while-trying-to-keep-crumbs-from-falling-on-her-face-because-it's-the-only-chance-you-have-to-eat kind of negligence.  These are the moments that afford opportunities for those with fast feet and uninhibited curiosity.

Once the silence is so loud and the pit in your stomach so deep, you must address the foreboding truth and find the children that have disappeared, only to uncover the science experiments or survivalist training or alternate uses for everyday household products.  Tonight, we had to confiscate switch blades from our older children, hopped up on "Man vs. Wild."  They had constructed a crude lean-to and carved spears to combat the small birds and bunnies that frequent our backyard terrain.

Children are definitely on a different wave-length from us, but that's what makes them so surprisingly charming and, frankly, intriguing to observe, as they slowly come to terms with truths in life like physics and water damage and tensile strength and irony and the definition of the endless objects and ideas flowing freely in and out of their minds and imaginations.