Story time

I have spent the entire summer with my girls.  Their father is working full time, often six days a week, and we decided long ago, after the years in Barbados had me traipsing from Miami to Bim with the girls and all kinds of stuff alone (A-LONE), that we should take trips together from here forward.  We have had an epic Mommy Camp summer with more iPad and less study binder than I'd hoped for but also gardening and visiting and swimming and playing and talking.  I know that we will all look back on these dog days with joy and easy smiles.  At present it can be rather tough.

When we get ready for bed at night, I try to have a pile of library books on hand.  Because I have a new efficient and excited reader, we often get through the stack before I expected we would and find ourselves with time.  I turn off the lights in their room and we stare at the glow-in-the-dark stars around the room, listen to the hamsters running amok, and hear ourselves breathing.  These past few nights, the girls have started asking for "stories that come from my mouth" instead of books.  How did they know they had the right mommy?

I can spin a yarn, tell a tale, work some magic.  But with the stories that I tell my girls, there is something more.  The tales are not tall.  Have no wizards and fairies.  They are instead, opportunities I have taken to impart feelings of self-worth, relevance, value, intuition, connection, and divinity within.  In the last story I told last night there were three sisters.  The first sister wanted to see the world and put on her backpack and hiking boots, took a map, and a tent and went off to see what nature had to offer.  She walked through the jungle, climbed mountains, scaled walls, drank from clear rivers, and watched herds of animals as they interacted with one another.  The second sister wanted to see the world and all that man had made, so she packed up her fancy suitcases, beautiful clothes and traveled to the world's best cities.  She ate delicious food, stayed in amazing hotel suites, looked at art, listened to live music, saw live theatre, and was inspired by architecture and the built world.  The third sister stayed behind.  She crossed her legs and sat in meditation.  She did yoga.  She searched for the invisible string that connected her heart to all the hearts in the world.  She concentrated on love and light, opened herself to being compassionate and available to all people and all things.  She listened and watched and learned so that she could understand people and what made them do the things they did.

Before I could finish my story, my four year old called out, "I'm like her!  I'm like her!  The third girl is me." 

 I asked, "Are you sure?  You don't want to travel the world and see those beautiful things?"

To which she replied, "She already knows those beautiful things.  They are in her heart."

As I finished my story with the return of the two sisters to home where they regaled each other with wild tales and stories of impressive sights and sites, I closed with "all three found their way to the truth about the marvel of all things."  Both girls lay quietly, slowly breathing, eyes blinking to close.  I kissed them both on their foreheads and slithered out of the bed.

Each night there is a story like this.  Each night I heal the wound, the emptiness, the hurt and longing of my nights in my bedroom alone.  Each night I hope they do not feel those same fears.  I have no idea if these stories will be important, if they will stick in their minds, rest gently in their psyches to be recalled when compassion, love, connection, empathy need to be called up.  But in the darkness, after a long, arduous day spent in the company of chatty, little babes, I hope I am giving them stories that will take root in their minds and in their hearts when they no longer want to snuggle up to me and be told stories "from my mouth."



(c)  Copyright 2013.  Repatriated Mama:  Back to the Suburban Grind.