“Moooooom, there’s a naked baby in the closet!”
Being a mom is surreal. I love it, but it is definitely strange at times. The things I hear my daughters say, the things I hear myself say, the parenting debates my husband and I have – none of these things are what I expected and I often find myself pausing and thinking, “What strange rabbit hole did I fall down?”
The naked baby in the closet was the result of my daughters playing with my old dollhouse furniture. I was in bed with a migraine while the girls kept themselves entertained destroying my old dollhouse on my bedroom floor. As they played, I drifted in and out of awareness of their conversations, catching a sentence here and there. Then that gem was shouted up at me. It took my pain filled brain a minute to figure out what she was talking about. Of course, she was referring to a miniature baby whose clothes had vanished at some point in the last twenty years before the baby was stuffed inside a miniature wardrobe and locked up in the dollhouse. Makes sense.
But not all our conversations make sense. Like my younger daughter proudly telling me that now that she is four she isn’t afraid of zombies, only to run screaming from the room two seconds later, “I have to put on jammies! Zombies eat naked people!” (It was bedtime and she was in the middle of changing when we had that conversation.) Or when I put on a DVD of the Disney “Beauty and the Beast” movie. A few minutes into the movie both girls started shouting, “Turn it off! Turn it off! This is not appropriate for children! This movie was not made for children!” When I asked what they wanted to watch instead, they answered, “Dinosaurs are appropriate for children!” So we ended up watching “Walking With Dinosaurs” – a series about dinosaurs eating each other and their babies. In this house at least, robotic dinosaurs and Tim Burton movies are fine, but Disney movies (they had the same negative reaction to “Princess and the Frog”) are terrifying and clearly “not appropriate.”
Through all these trips into the alternate realities of my daughters’ brains, I can’t help feeling grateful that they have their imaginations, creativity, zeal for inventing new worlds, lack of fear of science, and distrust of movies centered around dead parents. Parenting is not easy, and I am far from a perfect parent, but I am encouraged when I see my girls thriving as strong individuals.
This blog will follow some of their trips down various rabbit holes and the lessons I am learning from them about life in the real world.
(psssst – Inspired by my daughters, I started an Etsy shop. Please feel free to check it out, too.)
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