Dear Zianne,
You officially have a favorite book. Your dad reads to you about Gerald the Giraffe almost every night before you go to bed. You sit there quietly and turn the pages as you hold the giraffe stuffed animal your Dada won for you at a work event. Sometimes you get excited and hit the pages as he reads or sometimes you thoughtfully point to objects on the page. Your favorite is the picture of the moon up in the night sky.
And here is the moral of the story… we can all dance when we find a song we love. Gerald, with his long, awkward giraffe legs, is not a good dancer. He gets all tripped up when he tries to sway to the music. The other animals, who hold a huge dance each year, make fun of Gerald for his lack of dancing skills. He walks away from the party feeling sad and dejected until a cricket whispers some advice to him, “Sometimes when you’re different, you just need a different song…” Upon hearing this, Gerald begins hearing the sounds all around him, the swaying branches and the singing insects, and his body begins to sway to the rhythm. Soon his dancing becomes so extraordinary and beautiful {he is a giraffe leaping through the sky after all} that the other animals have gathered around in awe. Gerald ends the book by saying, “We all can dance when we find music that we love…”
I’ve been thinking lately how motherhood is like dancing. Different moves on different days. Different songs. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Sometimes it’s a literal dance, especially when your dad gets home from work and we all dance around the living room to “Rockin’ Robin” to celebrate being home together as a family in the evening. Sometimes it’s fast-paced like a jig as I dart around the house trying to be a mom and a homemaker and a student all at the same time. My steps are quick as I switch the laundry to the dryer, drop a handful of Cheerios on your highchair tray, and unload the dishwasher before you eat them all and get bored, all while eyeing the stack of books across the room that are waiting to be studied. And sometimes the dance is slow, like when you wake from teething pain in the middle of the night and I gently rock you back to sleep or when we sit on the floor in the afternoons and I build towers out of blocks for you to knock over again and again and again.
Sometimes the dance is so tiring that I go to bed exhausted like I just finished competing in an Olympic sport. Sometimes the dance is so slow and joyful that I go to bed fulfilled and reflecting on the blessing of parenthood. And most of the time the dance feels like a freestyle event. I don’t have it choreographed in advance and there is no time to rehearse. I just sense the music of the day and I take the steps that feel right. At times this method feels a bit chaotic. Part of me wishes I could practice a little bit before going on stage, but we all know motherhood doesn’t work like that. Thankfully I’ve found that even when I make it up as I go, in the end, the dance is really beautiful.
Love always,
Mama
||P.S. Read other letters to Zianne here.||
