Putting Cheese on the Chihuahua

It's a beautiful spring day. I'm listening to the burble of the creek out back, and trying to identify some of the myriad of bird calls coming from every direction. The mountains of western North Carolina are magnificent this time of year. I'm attempting to focus on the view outside of my window, but my mind is not cooperating. It keeps returning to the image of my three-year old neighbor, Katie, meticulously piling grated cheese on the back of her very patient dog, Zella.

I was on the phone last week with Katie's mom, Tina, and in the background I heard delighted peals of laughter. I asked Tina what was going on, and she explained that Katie was amusing herself with Zella and a packet of cheese. At the time, Tina was suffering from a sinus infection, due to give birth to Katie's sister in a few days, and was quite willing to have Katie amuse herself while she took a break on the couch.

Wow, I thought - how do you *do* that? How do you manage to relax when you have a toddler loose with a dog and a package of sticky cheese? While I imagined trying to pull cheese out of matted dog hair, Tina chuckled along with Katie.

When we hung up, I just sat back in my chair and shook my head. I wondered how I had ever managed to raise two kids, two Cairn terriers and one Shih Tzu without becoming completely neurotic. Had I blanked out those times of mess and confusion? Did I unconsciously create a more orderly past?

I believe that the answer is yes. And no.

My tolerance for certain kinds of messes was definitely limited. When Tina told me about the day that she found Katie and her friend, Savannah, sitting under the sycamore tree applying "dirt make-up" with a feather, I grimaced. I knew that my reaction would have been to head immediately for the bathtub, whereas Tina realized that that particular afternoon had the potential to become a special memory for Katie. She said that she never had seen her so dirty, but the wash-up could come later.

I know now that this is true. The best moments of life can be those unscripted hours of pure flow, where your reality and imagination become one. Little kids know how to do that, and we do, too, except when we forget.

As a mother, when you focus on the brown dirt rather than on the beauty of imaginary make-up, you quickly shift into the world of adult rules and regulations. You fear germ contamination and unanticipated laundry-duty. You think of time schedules and potential conflicts with those time schedules. You're everywhere but in the moment you could be appreciating with your child.

And as a single parent, you can feel doubly burdened. This was my experience, and if I had it to do over again, I would have chosen to have more fun. I would have seen less dirt and more make-up. I would've chosen to laugh at a cheese-layered dog.

We all know about 20-20 hindsight. Woulda, coulda, shoulda. I don't spend much time doing that anymore, but occasionally I will think about how I might have handled things differently.

Maybe I could have found a little more humor in that morning when my 5 year old daughter convinced her 3 year old brother to drink a concoction of pickle juice and spices. Or when, just as I was leaving for work, the school sent my son home to change clothes because he was soaked from dancing in the rain.

I actually do remember my own magical moments from childhood: taking a freshly laundered load of towels and spreading them over patio furniture to make a tent city to hide in; transforming a neighborhood parent's meticulously organized garage into a darkened "spooky house"; removing a manhole cover to check out what was under the street.

I'm sure that my own parents were not amused. But oh, did we have fun.

And now I'm endeavoring to re-learn that kind of spontaneous fun by watching the masters do it. I'm finding that it's one thing to value being in the moment, and another to be OK with the fact that you might have to clean up the chihuahua afterwards. But the trade-off is totally worth it.

Thank you, Tina and Katie, for reminding me how to be a kid again. (And thank you to Katie's dad, Scott, for creating the new creekside playground for all of us!)