Squirming on the couch like a fish out of water, Hazel let out the refrain I knew was coming, the words all kids have howled out to their parents in a torturous tone:
“I’m sooooo BORED.”
Okay.
I, on the other hand, was not.
I’d just finished trimming the foliage of our front-yard/jungle, cleaned three rooms top-to-bottom, and was (quite ironically) trying to figure out a place to put all of Hazel’s toys, several of which were new additions sucked in through a surprise birthday party.
It was hard, with my sore back and arms full of stacked board games, not to call her a spoiled brat and throw her toys out the window.
But I kept it together, not because she didn’t deserve to be yelled at (spoiled brat!)… but mostly because she had an important lesson to learn.
“Being bored is the beginning of something great,” I said to her. “You’re lucky. Good stuff is about to happen for you.”
She writhed even more, kicked her legs, and cried out “You don’t GET IT!”
“I certainly do,” I said, in a calmness that pleased me and infuriated her, as signaled by her flipping over onto her stomach and burying her head in the pillows.
“I’m not going to save you.” I said. “You have to dig yourself out on your own.”
And I left, because, as mentioned already, I had plenty of things to do, and if the things in my head weren’t enough to keep me busy, I had a dry-erase board full of to-do’s.
As I walked into the dining room, I heard her run outside to appeal to Mom sweeping the front walk. Mom said something, and then more moaning.
Nice. Mom held her ground.
Hazel came back inside, wandered around the living room for a bit before storming up the stairs and slamming her bedroom door.
She likely was in the process of flinging herself onto her bed or into her self-created “wiggle nook.”
It took about 5 minutes.
5 minutes of ending the excruciating pain of being bored…
I knew she was saving herself when I heard the faint angsty lyrics of Olivia Rodrigo coming through the ceiling.
I heard the tell-tale signs of a young room-cleaner: drawers closing, wardrobe doors slamming, and underneath the banging and clacking and achy words of Olivia, I heard the hum of a little girl who had found her way through.
It went on like this for a half hour. Alas, my joy of listening to a lesson-learned faded when a friend of hers showed up and they went screaming through the house out into the backyard to play on our waterslide.
Ah well. She got a taste.
But then, while they played outside, I went upstairs with another armful of books and toys and birthday cards, and art projects piled up to my chin, and as I side-stepped into my office (where I safeguard the art projects), I had an unexpected delight.
There, on my crowded dry-erase board, at the bottom, in her unbalanced grade-school handwriting, was a sign that I had gotten through… or rather, she had gotten through.
In pink highlighter…
Hazel’s To-Do List:
–Clean room
–Fix sewing machine
–Sew
Ha!
The hardest part of work is the beginning. Plato said that.
Hazel got through the hardest part.
As I turned away from my dry-erase board, the art projects and folded, little paper things slid off the stack of boxes and scattered on my floor like falling leaves and snowflakes.
I sat on the hardwood, in a place I never sit, and looked across the multi-colored landscapes, origami boxes, homemade pop-up books, and half-done comic strips. I picked up one and pinned it to the wall between a picture of a talking ice cream cone and an exploding robot.
These little humans; miracles amidst chaos.
I wonder what she’ll sew.