Although Lily has been walking for over a week now, she does not yet view it as a mode of transportation. Walking, for her, is a game that starts with a parent placing her at one end of the living room and yelling with great excitement, “Walk to Jake! Walk to Jake!” It is unclear how much of this sentence Lily understands, but it is certain that she know who Jake is — or “Ja” as she prefers to call him.
So she lets go of parental hand or furniture or whatever is keeping her upright at the moment. She bends her knees like a rider on the New York subway trying to avoid being jostled into the nearby armpit of a person who does not appear to have bathed recently. And she swivels, step by step, around this new thing called a center of gravity until she can throw herself into her grinning brother’s arms.
Good stuff. And a reminder that the shifts in our lives that matter aren’t necessarily the big changes we are accustomed to seeing. It isn’t just about “walking” as this monolithic milestone every parent and grandparent and person who cares about a not-yet-walking child anxiously awaits. It’s the small moves, the stumbling Walk as Play, then the Steady Walk, and the Run. It’s Jake inventing new dance moves or jumping off of pieces of furniture he’s been warned multiple times not to jump off of.
Walking, it turns out, is a whole lot more than just walking.
And so I turn to the little shifts in my own life with gratitude. Like that minor major decision to devote my morning to writing.
I call this a “minor major decision” because it doesn’t seem like such a big deal, only it was. I was crumbling and frustrated, mired in rewriting a novel that I never had time to rewrite.
“If you could just set aside a couple of hours a day,” Mike offered helpfully.
“I don’t HAVE a couple of hours a day!” I cried. “By the time I drop the kids off at preschool and put away the dishes and put in a load of laundry and answer email, I barely have an hour before yoga class. And I’m NOT giving up yoga!” I yelled before he could suggest such a thing. Which he wouldn’t, knowing, as he does all too well, the difference between me practicing yoga and me not practicing yoga.
This difference was not lost on me, but it didn’t keep me from feeling guilty for doing something that is so central to my soul. I’d try to give it up on some days and find myself so tied in knots I accomplished even less.
“I know my children are just the most important thing right now,” I bravely confessed to my therapist. “And I’m happy with that. But I feel like there will never be time for me. I’m just too old to do all the things I dream of doing if I wait until they’re in college. Or,” I allowed, “kindergarten,” seeing as how I’ll be pretty old even then.
But, of course, you’re never too old, and I’m forgetting that only goals disappear, wrenched from our grasp by reality and changing circumstances and the fact that goals are themselves elusive, something we set in front of us to rush through life without noticing all the shifts along the way so that all that happens when we reach a goal is we make up a new one to keep us hurrying along.
And so my therapist offered a brilliant solution. “Why don’t you not do the dishes or put in a load of laundry or answer your email in the morning?” she asked. “Can’t you just sit down and write?”
The obvious answer would have been “yes,” but something held me back. It felt so HUGE, this minor shift.
“But I really can’t stand having dirty dishes on the counter,” I muttered shamefully.
“Ask Mike to put them away,” my therapist suggested, not so easily dissuaded.
“There’s just so much laundry to do,” I tried, but it didn’t work. “I guess I could do it in the afternoon too.”
So I unstuck my pattern. I stopped clinging to the structure that I thought made me safe but was really holding me back.
And since then I’ve been writing. Oh, I’ve been writing. And it’s fun. And I can’t wait to share pieces of it.
Plus, I’ve had time to work. I’ve cleaned out the kids’ closet and consigned a boatload of their clothes. I’ve managed to buy the gallon of milk we need every other day and to sometimes cook dinner and to do all the things that need doing except take the poor bored dogs for a walk.
So I started thinking about how hard it is to make a little shift and what a big difference it can make.
Which is when I noticed that Lily seems a tad, um, demanding these days.
Not that she isn’t a cheerful little girl, full of hugs, constantly flashing her snaggle-toothed grin, moved to hysterical laughter by something as simple as her brother drinking out of the sippy cup she is holding.
And, yes, Lily has always been a girl who knows what she wants, and one capable of great drama if she doesn’t get it. “Lily! Lily!” I often find myself nearly yelling as she winds herself up into a storm of anger. I wonder if people walking by — or my husband, for that matter — think I am cruel yelling at her at these moments. But then she stops, as if hearing her name yelled at her has cleared her thoughts, brought her back to earth. And then I hand her something like a toothbrush and she is happy once again.
They seem more frequent these days, Lily’s storms of frustration and anger, and it’s no surprise. She spent all that time wishing she could walk, and now she can. Yet, as far as she can see, it’s brought her only within tantalizing distance of running after her brother and his friends, one of whom I am just sure will be her first boyfriend in ten — can I say fifteen, please? — years. In other words, walking hasn’t done much for her except give her a big boost of happiness at how happy it makes her parents. Which isn’t nearly as good as getting to run after Jake.
And since she can’t run, Lily demands that I run with her. More exactly, she wishes for me to proffer my finger as the bit of balance and reassurance she feels she needs to walk. And yells at me if I am too busy to offer it. A lot.
You’d think I’d just say, “You need to be frustrated if you want to learn to walk.” And I frequently do. But I also understand how she is feeling.
Lily is being asked to take a huge, scary leap. To literally let go. And not so long ago I found it nearly impossible to do a little thing like pledge not to do laundry in the morning.
My little shift has brought this huge change, opened up more time than I ever thought I could find. And Lily’s little shift to Walking as Game has brought about a pretty big change too — greater frustration.
Which, I suppose, is a lesson to place in my back pocket for when I need it next. Sometimes we agree to go along with the change and it doesn’t work out as we had expected. We don’t always get big pats on the back from the Universe for letting go. So we get frustrated.
But here’s the secret, and I’d share it with Lily if only she understood me: The frustration isn’t necessarily the end of the line. It might be just a stopping point between taking the first step and, one day very soon, running.