You're never too old to jump on a bed

I had a bit of a late start in getting married and becoming a parent. I had in fact always sworn to never get married and to absolutely never have children. As a result I had my fair share of conversations with people who were parents claiming to have learnt a lot from their children. Their greatest life lessons in fact were learned from their toddlers or babies or other appropriate form of offspring. Much like most life-sworn single, childless adults, I would roll my eyes and pretend to believe them. To me it came to sound cliched, annoying and something that was said specifically to irritate me (:-) because when you are single and childless, you really do believe that the world revolves around you).

And then I got married and had a beautiful daughter. I am far from being a 'natural' mother (how I envied those that are) and had to learn how to look after this little being. While dealing with postnatal depression and the need to be back at work to keep my mind occupied, the last thing that I was willing to notice was how much I was learning from this little being. There was too much of my old, single, childless self still in place to notice the power of what I was experiencing. Too much of the old me to allow the changes to happen that would make me into the changed person that I have come to be.

My daughter is now 26 months old and so much has changed that it is hard for me to keep up with all that is going on. The depression is gone, as well as the denial about who I was becoming. I am back at work and every morning I battle with the very real draw to be a stay-at-home mom whose sole focus is her children, her husband and her home. And then reality kicks in...usually in the form of my loving husband who just laughs at me and reminds me that I will go off my bracket at home. I need the intellectual stimulation that my career provides me, the fulfillment of helping others learn (I am a remedial teacher in a high school). I am currently  trying to work out what my next degree should be - or if I should try to earn more than one degree at the same time while pondering the perfect moment at which to get pregnant with our second child.

So what does this all have to do with my child? Well I have now started to become very conscious of the lessons that my daughter has started to teach me. Consider the lesson for today - you really are never too old to jump on a bed. Can you remember the last time that you jumped on a bed? I certainly can't. Actually, it is entirely possible that up until this evening I had never jumped on a bed. See, I was quite a boring child who wouldn't enjoy anything physical. Some of this had to do with the combination of my overprotective mom and my chronic asthma, but I do think that there was just the innate bookworm in me that preferred the stillness of the escape into the world of the written word. This made me into a tentative child who worried about getting hurt and thus resulted in the very distinct possiblity that I never did something as simply as jumping on a bed.

Anyway, back to the present. After a full day of teaching, a meeting that lasted 75 minutes and a drive home behind the world's slowest truck on a one-lane road, ever, I got home to my child. My commitment to her has always been that my first hour home after work is given solely to her. She chooses the activities that we participate in and she guides the hour. Today our hour was composed of 'having tea' with her plastic, brightly coloured tea set, colouring in the Pooh colouring book, drawing rocket shops on the cover of said book and then jumping on our bed. But it was not enough for her to be jumping on her own with me watching. I had to join in. With a ceiling fan dangerously close to my rather long hair (and I am not even a tall woman), I gave myself over to the child in me and jumped with my child. We jumped and collapsed and jumped and collapsed until the collapse was complete. I could move no more but I also had a huge smile on my face. The rather long day was a thing of the past, the painful colleagues were forgotten and my admin duties for tomorrow are a vague notion in the back of my mind.

Here is what I am hoping my daughter learns from our hours together - that her needs and wants matter, that I will listen to her and follow her lead in the pursuit of fun, that spending quality time together where she is my sole focus is vital to me. What did I learn from her today? That even when you are pretending to drink tea and eat cake with it, it is essential to take a moment after each 'bite' to savour the food. That when you are drawing, a curvy line can become whatever you name it to be, even a rocket ship. That even when you are in your mid-thirties, there is a way to safely jump on a bed so that you are not decapitated by the ceiling fan. It is all about the willingness to let go!!!