...and all ye ever need know.
We are in the throes of illness in our house with no reprieve in sight. I can't drop Bea off at the Tagesmutter's because the TM is being taken down too...probably a good thing, in the end. We all came back from Vienna feeling pretty dodgy, and I actually came down with a dose of the flu which has taken the ground out from under me. It's not a full case, and I'm slowly recovering, but Bea is still ill, and now Hubby's been stricken, although he never gets as sick as I do...except for the Noro virus that ripped through us the other week. He was one deflated guy, and it took him a full week to get back to normal. For something to hamstring my ultra-healthy husband, it has to be made of malevolence.
Max, however, has remained healthy, and for that, I'm glad. The trouble is that we can't get a good night's sleep because hubby snores, and Bea wakes a LOT in the night, wanting a feed or from having a nightmare or just feeling crummy. The result is that I cannot break the back of this flu/cold/uber virus. I'm still running a low-grade fever of around 100F, although the nights of horrific chills and alternative sweats are gone.
Last night we had a change-up: we decided Max and Nix would share our big bed, and I'd go up and sleep in Max's room. No one can sleep on the futon in Bea's room because she is an incredibly noisy sleeper, not to mention that sometimes she flings herself around so violently in her cot that she slams bodily into the bars with a sound like a car hitting a brick wall. So that bed is useless, in practical terms.
After dinner, I gave the kids baths, then took Maxman upstairs to do his 15 minutes of reading aloud as I changed the sheets on our bed. I was worried with him being the only healthy one in our house that the sheets would be all germy and gross, so even though my head was packed with gook and my joints ached with exhaustion, I changed the sheets that were so disgusting I could've folded them into 3D geometric shapes and stood them in a corner.
Max lay on the floor, wrapped in a blanket, and read aloud as I put laundry away, then stripped the bed. He watched me wrestling the contour sheet onto the heavy mattress from his position near the clothes basket, curled up under our blanket and looking rather like a hatching egg with his head poking through the shell at one end. I had my hair in a high pony tail with my bangs (which are now down to my nose and very annoying) twisted and pinned off to one side. I was wearing a long purple night shirt, no bra (the girls were swingin' free!), and I was moving from one side of the bed to the other, trying to get everything sorted so he could get a full night's sleep, listening to the sounds of a hungry Bea shrieking down stairs. Evenings are rarely peaceful around here.
As I was scooting around, Max looked up at me with a slight smile and said, "You know, Mummy, I think you're a little bit pretty."
I smiled back at him, blushing slightly. "Why, thank you, Max! I'm not often called that."
A scowl. "Really? Why?"
"Ooohhh..." I sighed, plumping up a pillow and trying to put 30 years' worth of anguish into a simple explanation, realising that this bit of parenting was never in the manual, "I'm just not. Some people are pretty, some aren't. I'm not, never really have been. I'm okay with it, though."
"Well," Max said stoutly, "*I* think you are."
"Your opinion is worth a great deal to me, Max, so thank you." I took the blanket off him and spread it over the bed, then added the comforter. Max crawled under the covers and curled up happily. He asked, "Will Bea be pretty?"
I felt a Parenting Moment of Truth/Teachable Moment being born, so I took it and ran. Some things I've saved up my whole life to say to someone, others I just wing and hope my tongue doesn't betray me. "Max, let me ask you something. Would you like to be described as only one thing, when you are soooo much more?"
"What do you mean, one thing?"
I sat down on hubby's side of the bed, crossed my legs, and tried to explain. "Would you like someone to say of you, 'Max is so....' and have that be the ONLY thing anyone ever says about you? Like, 'Max is very handsome'? That's wonderful, but it says nothing about your amazing smile, your outstanding creativity, how beautiful you are with Bea, the astounding things you can build with Legos...do you think 'handsome' is enough to describe you?"
His eyes got wide. "No! No way! I'm way more many things than just HANDSOME!" he exclaimed.
"Exactly. So, yes. Bea will be pretty. But that is only a tiny, tiny part of what she'll be, certainly not the most important. Looks aren't. They never were to me, because I never really had them. But I had something far more worthwhile."
"Your heart?" he guessed.
I laughed. "Well, yes. But something much better than that." I pointed to my head. "I had my brain. I can make up stories, talk to people when they're sad or troubled...with my brain, I can do anything I wish. I may not be pretty, but I have an outstanding mind that is capable of everything. THAT is what matters to me."
He snuggled down and thought about that for a minute, then asked, "Why do people think looks are so important, anyway?"
Another chapter missing from the parenting manual. Hell, this one's not even in the appendix or footnotes. It's one of the things you should have learned (and learned how to articulate) by the time you have kids of your own. Luckily, words have always come to me fully formed in my head, often in long flowery phrases, ready to be dispensed. It's a gift, yes, but it's also the reason I don't sleep much...and the reason I sometimes say aloud to my brain, "Stop talking so much!"
"Because, my love," I told Max with a sad smile, "that's the sort of world we live in, I'm afraid. It's the first thing anyone will notice and probably the only thing because actually talking to someone, knowing their mind, takes time and consideration, two things no one ever has enough of. It's sad, but that's the way the world works. And I'm very sorry to be the one to tell you that."
He seemed untroubled, though. "You're right, it's not fair," he said. "What about being beautiful, though?"
One-two punch. Luckily I was having a clear moment in the fog of illness, and I was able to say what I really wanted.
"Max, beauty comes in so very many forms, only one of which has to do with your body. Lookit...when you see a sunset in a clear sky, that's beautiful, yes? Kindness to someone who's in pain is beautiful too. Watching you with Bea and hearing your laugh. Seeing you happy. A flower growing toward the sun. All of those things are beautiful. But how you look? That is SUCH a small, small thing, and by far the least important when it comes to beauty, at least to me."
Then I told him a story I've never told anyone else. "When I was teaching, I had a teacher friend who taught retarded kids, deaf kids, kids with brain damage that everyone thought weren't worth saving because they weren't perfect. She was not pretty in the typical way...she was very round, frizzy hair, glasses, and her skin had some kind of problem where it was always red. She wore glasses. So no, by the standard definition, she was not pretty. You would not look at her and think, 'Wow, she's gorgeous'. Not even close.
"But one day I saw her at an assembly, signing to her deaf students, and her hands were so graceful, so smooth, and she was so engaged with her students that it brought tears to my eyes because she cared so very much. It was one of the few times I think I've seen pure, true beauty. And it was so incredible that I remember it, 14 years later."
"She was beautiful?" said Max. "Even though she wasn't pretty?"
"Yes. That's the great thing about love. It can make you see beautiful things in people. If Bea had been born retarded or deaf or crippled somehow, would you love her any less?"
Max looked really thoughtful, then shook his head confidently. "No. Not at all."
I smiled and hugged him. "That's beauty, Max. Remember it."
"So beauty is love?"
"It can be. Love can make a person beautiful. I promise you, when Daddy and I are old and wrinkly, we will still love each other and find each other beautiful. AND..." I added, tucking him in securely, "you can also be sure that no matter where you go on this planet, someone will always love you immensely."
He scrunched up his face and said, "God??" as all little kids do when they want to get the answer right because God is rarely a wrong answer.
"Yes, God, but I meant me. And Daddy. Both you and Bea will always be loved by me and Daddy. And so...to bed, and goodnight!" I hugged him again. I didn't want to kiss his cheek because of my cold, so I lightly kissed his head, figuring that was safe.
"Goodnight, Mummy," he said, closing his eyes peacefully, and within moments, he was deeply asleep. He looked like moonlight.
I walked out of the room, closed the door, and allowed myself a fistpump. For once, I got it right. And I hope in years to come, he will look back on that conversation as one of the good things that happened in Germany, that night in my bedroom under my hand-knitted blanket and think, "That was the night Mum told me how to find beauty and told me I would never need to feel unloved. My Mum's love is so powerful I can feel it, even now that she's passed on. I can feel it in the air and the sky and the ground...and it's brought me through."
One can hope.
That was beautiful. And brought a tear to my eye.
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