Author: Daniela Ginta Page 78 of 99

“Carve me a rat, please, mom?” Umm, well, yeah. So I set to carve a rat. Trying at least. It’s not easy, you know. I mean, think of the snout. Pointy, just long enough and not too long. Gosh, I thought I had it and then it broke. So the rat didn’t happen. An hour or so. Sasha wanted me to make him one. Hours of making nothing then, you’ll say. But no. We’re up to our ankles in wood chips. Carving and chatting. “Would the man who invented carving be able to carve a rat, mom? He would, right?” Ha, I have yet to hear of a gentler way of telling someone “it ain’t happening for you but thanks for trying.” Now the tail breaks too. You gotta have the right piece of wood, you gotta see the rat inside the wood, Sasha. Yeah, I get my knowledge these days from Surf’s Up, they carve surf boards there. Dinner is not even started, I have loads to write, but we carved until the carving dripped dry from our fingers. Then we moved to painting rocks. I could do it for hours. Well, OK, I did. We did. Sasha and I. Chatting, choosing rocks from my extensive collection. They’re alive now, the rocks. Dinner’s still MIA, writing has to wait, laundry and tidying up are raising some nasty brows at me. Who cares. Carving and painting rocks can’t wait. They never will. They can’t. There’s turtles, trees, stars splattered on rocks and shells, mount Galiano and a bioluminescent ocean with a little me swimming in it. Now you see why dinner cannot make it to the table before those painted rocks.

I confess (facts):

• My boys never had dinner ready at six. The best and proper of intentions sway like cattails and yield to the wind. Fluff away, blue skies, kids running and climbing and jumping like squirrels. Dinner time is arbitrary, you see, because so much gets in the way.
• My boys have an untidy room and I silently condone it. They’re too busy being kids. I am busy with them. It could be writing, mudding-up at the river, carving, painting, making pink paper pigs or forgetting ourselves in some salmonberry bush on the way to or from the secret place.
• Lack of organizing life but taking time to organize painted rocks has me drive the boys to school in my pajamas occasionally. But here’s the thing, the rocks have been wondered at and we kindly shared compliments about how neat we made them look. The way we like it.

The promise:

• Dinner at six. Never.
• House/yurt/tent tidied up to lick-the-floor standards. Never.
• As long as we can have it our way, summers will never have an ounce of scheduling in them unless the boys will ask for it.
• All day pajama days and occasional stay-home-from-school days or get-out-early-for-hot-chocolate with mom. Just because.
• They shall carve with real knives, come up with the craziest competitions to show me who is better and tougher, and together they’ll keep snickering while watching Planet Earth and hearing David Attenborough narrate about wild asses from the southern hemisphere. What? It’s donkeys he’s talking about of course. For real.

“The true harvest of my life is intangible – a little star dust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched.” Henry David Thoreau

… whose life are you living? Yours completely? All yours? Send me a photo, I’ll frame it and call you my hero. I will. Just promise me it’s the truth. I am not there. Yet. Will I ever? I am trying. If Yoda was any right, we go by “do or don’t do, there is no try”. Yeah right. I’d like to challenge him on that, knowing deep down that he is right. You either jump or get ready to regret it later on. So you jump. There’s no promise of unscraped knees, know it. It will hurt, but you know you did it. You tried. What else is life about? I’ve seen people, my loved ones, growing old and wrapping themselves in the thick raspy blanket of regrets. Arms and legs hurting, thoughts acting like spoiled brats. Whose life was it after all? Theirs. Not theirs. You speak the truth and there’s no promise you won’t choke on your own words. You hang your thoughts up in magic trees and you might still trip on them. There are no promises. Take it as such. Breathe and shrug. Long and tangly, wooly, sometimes soft and other times scratchy, your thoughts will peck at you from around every corner. Every now and then you’ll realize that some are yours and some are other people’s. As long as you know. As long as they don’t become the scratchy blanket later on… as long as you still jump if you feel like it. As long as you’re not letting yourself be pushed and then tell yourself “oh but I did it, I wanted too…” No one wins, that much I know.

The one thing I’ll tell my boys. The one thing I’d like for them to put in their back pocket and hold forever. Listen to your heart, be quiet enough at times to hear the soft whisper of your thoughts, cover your ears when the rumbling gets too loud, say it how it is, tell the truth and expect to not be able to please everyone. Be fair, be true, be you. Know that it will get mucky at times.

Your thoughts, your path, your life. To share.

I gave the boys haircuts. It was time. Tony resisted the idea. Am I going to look OK? People will laugh at me. What if I’ll look ridiculous? You won’t, I tell him. He could walk with a pumpkin smashed over his head and he’d still look good, I press on. It’s the mother’s argument that kids reject but need and love to hear. Oh, I’m being subjective, you say? If not me then who? He groans, secretly pleased. Moooom…

Why does he care what others say? Already. He’s not even 10 yet. People say things, I agree. The world judges. It just does. It points long fingers, it laughs, it shrugs and moves on. You’re still licking your wounds inflicted by those long fingers by the time you’re yesterday’s news and the world moves on to the next haircut that has to be analyzed and the next life choices that have to be dissected. I tell him it won’t matter what others say. If he feels good about it. Is my word enough? Ha. Am I believing it? Trying. Then why do I explain myself to others, why do I explain my haircuts and all my other decisions? Whether the world agrees or not to the things I do or wear or strive for is not important in the end. The world will not lie down on my pillow at the end of a tough day, I know that by now. It’s a fact.

In my world messy hair is known to be collateral damage to tight hugs and waking up in the morning to a world of wonder. Why make it go away then?

Once I got this haircut followed by some blow drying that made my hair look mess-less. Perfectly so. Every strand was straight and conforming. I could hear tiny wailing from somewhere in there. I took the back lane home, put my hair under the tap and tossed it back to the usual. I really am not a perfect-hair kind of gal, never was, never will be. So I’ll tell the boys again and again: Imperfect is good. It’s real. It’s ready for when the wind blows hard. Because it does. It just does. It’s good for tumbling in the sand should you find yourself at the beach. And you will. Life has it that way.

Sasha asked for a mohawk the other day. I said I will think about it.

“The silence sings. It is musical. I remember a night when it was audible. I heard the unspeakable.”
– Henry David Thoreau

A question in my mailbox today read “What’s your relationship with silence?”. I thought about it. I could not write about it right away because the noise in my head was overwhelming. The noise outside my head too. Well, a good starting point then. Seek the right words.

Being silent. Most times, where I live silence is as abstract a concept as diving horses but worth a shot nonetheless. Early mornings. During the day when the boys are in school is quiet, most days. Still. Sometimes it becomes too quiet but that’s another chapter in the book of paradoxes of my life. I came to love the noise of my boys, you see. Sunshine.

I love silence as much as I am afraid of it. A good and necessary paradox. Silence can be deafening, have you heard of that? Those are the times when silence follows you like a dreaded ghost and you want it gone because it’s loud and makes your world shake. Hollowness. You drown silence in phone calls, background music or just noise. Anything but silence.

Then there are times when silence is draped over, cool and velvety and the only sounds that reach through are but words or bird songs in the distance. Sleeping bugs. Soft. Like learning to swim, learning to float through one’s silence is a necessary skill. Vital I’d say. So you can find that sun-patched winding road to yourself and hear all there is to hear. Questions and answers woven into what has to be searched for and dealt with.

In welcome silence I find my answers. That’s the sunny side of my relationship with it. Sneaky threatening silence chases me away from comfortable places within myself. A less brighter side. Less of this lately though. There is something to be said about living with joy, it takes away that rough scary edge of deafening silence. There’s no time for it you see.

Silence. To have and to breathe. To think. To hear.