Today's Parenting Strategy: Non-parenting

Forty-five minutes into K's nap--a very quiet, uneventful forty-five minutes--she calls me into her room. Surprised, I go in to become even more surprised. She's still in her bed, but she's now surrounded by about twenty different books. Naptime clearly does not mean the same thing to her as it does to me. "This book scary," she says as she hands me Where the Wild Things Are. I'm sure there are a lot of things I probably could or should have said in this situation, but instead I took the book from her, laid it aside, and said, "Well, you don't need to read it." And then I walked out. I can blame this on busyness or hump day or pre-vacation distraction, but the truth is, sometimes I'd just rather avoid parenting.

Vampire detox, anyone?

And I emerge from the Twilight saga at last. It's hard to believe how many pages of frivolous text I've managed to consume in the last week. And it's painful to accept that I can never seem to read quality literature that voraciously. But it was a nice break from reality.

My only recommendation? Stop at Book 3. Because it really wasn't worth Book 4, at least not to me. And I just hate to finish feeling like I would have been happier stopping, oh, say, 750 pages earlier.

Now bigger and better things! Er, next week. Shouldn't everyone have the weekend off?

The Missing Message

The current bedtime (or, really, any time when we're the least bit still) favorite is Shel Silverstein's The Missing Piece. I have a love-hate relationship with Shel Silverstein (and, as an aside, have you ever seen the picture on the back of The Giving Tree? Because it's beyond love-hate into frightening. I should know; he's forever frozen in the photo from my 19th birthday. And yes, I was still into Silverstein at 19, so you at least know I've been thinking about this for awhile). Anyway, I think his books are insightful, interesting, and finely illustrated in their sparse sort of way. But they make me sad, and the message is so deep I struggle to find it sometimes.

In The Missing Piece, there's a circle with a chink missing. Hence, the missing piece. He goes in search of the missing piece. He's rejected. He finds pieces that are the wrong size. He finds pieces that are the right size, which are either lost or broken. Most of the book focuses on his unsuccessful quest to find his long-lost missing piece.

When he finally finds it, he discovers he can't do any of the things he loves now that he's "complete". So he sets the piece down, slowly and gently, and rolls away. The message ends up being one about our own completeness, chinks and all.

But I never get to this message. I'm always stuck on the shattered broken piece, the sting of rejection in the circle's soft apology, the forlorn missing piece left behind. I yearn to see these stories told so that I can see them as beautiful, just as I see the self-acceptance that the circle finally finds. Maybe, shy and often lonely as I am, I identify more with those stories that then one Silverstein tells.

So instead, I enjoy the fact that on the page of most rejection, only on this page, some child has taken their green crayon and scrawled across the entire page. The library "Officially noted" this defacement. But I like to believe that somewhere, some child has done what we must all do. They've taken the saddest moment and made it theirs in vivid color so opposite to the black and white Silverstein uses. We should all take official note of that.