Recently, I’ve been spending time with two adorable toddlers.
Their moms are two of my closest friends, and spending time with little girls who are just trying to figure things out is pretty special. But I have to admit… I’m not very good with children.
They make me nervous because I can’t always understand what it is they need from me. They don’t have very many words yet, so people in their lives have to rely on instincts and baby knowledge that I simply lack.
One of the little girls is just developing a vocabulary of her basic words, and it’s so cute when she says something I can actually understand! But there are times when I look at her, and I can see it in her face that she has so much to say, and lots to explain to me about how she sees the world. Even the smallest revelations about how a door opens, or how her legs fit into a pair of leggings seem to make her want to express a thought — but she simply lacks the words.
While I try very hard to communicate with both of these little beauties, I know I can be way off with my efforts. The other day, I was sitting next to one of the toddlers on a chair in her mom’s kitchen. She was feeding herself some raisins. She was so cute, and I wanted to connect with her so badly.
So I said, “Are you sitting on a chair?” followed by, “…And eating some raisins?”
My little friend just looked up at me with her sparkly blue eyes and blinked. She was probably thinking:
“Um. Yes. I am sitting on a chair…and, I am eating some raisins, Captain Obvious!”
Erg.
Sadly, my Captain Obvious persona only shows up when I’m around toddlers because I clearly tend to miss a lot of things in my life. Either I’m not paying attention, or I’m just out to lunch sometimes. But my tendency to dismiss many of the obvious things around me was particularly acute while we were living in Miami.
Back then, things that probably should’ve occurred to me somehow flew right over my head. That’s the really tricky part about writing this blog — I’m often baffled by how limited my “life vocabulary” was in the past. In some ways, I was wide open and vulnerable because I was so needy for something to work out for us; while in other ways, I was starting to close myself off into a self-protective cocoon in an attempt to keep myself from falling apart.
But if I can think of myself as a toddler who was just discovering new things about the world around me, I can see how honest and hopeful my heart could be back then. My frustrations were genuine, but my will to believe and keep trying was still kicking.
