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Note to self: Don’t give a potty-training child a Nutella sandwich. Particularly if she, like so many three-year-olds, is naked. You’d think you’d reliably consider brown spots to tell the child’s equator apart, but I know he left the table with a Nutella stain on his ankle, and I’m not sure the stain around his eyebrow was there when he left. , loudly announcing “I have to go POOOOOOPY.”
He usually does it well. It’s the cleaning part that doesn’t always work and sometimes goes terribly wrong. The juxtaposition of Nutella and poop was something he hadn’t anticipated. She always yells from the bathroom “Mommy! I want you to look at me!” And I often sit with her while she does her thing. It is a delicious moment to talk, hug and kiss the nose while I sit on the footstool in front of her little throne. This time, however, her little sister was in the high chair and since the little one knew how to roll over and stand up, it was not wise to go and take care of the three-year-old.
She came back, naked and smeared with something brown and I knew it wasn’t all Nutella. But she was smiling that smile that contains all the sunlight in the universe, blissfully unaware that something was wrong. She was my daughter, smiling at me with delight and love and a soon disappointed desire to sit on my lap. I vacillated between being a little gross and laughing out loud. She won the laugh.
I’ve thought of her like that so often. How is life really presented to us. It is the irrepressible joy of a child. It is the gift of GOD / THE UNIVERSE / whatever the hell you call the great unknown that we are all connected to. But sometimes there’s chocolatey goodness and sometimes there’s something that sucks. And very often we lose sight of the DELIGHT that is ours in every moment. We lose sight of the JOY that is our birthright as spiritual beings having a human experience. Even if all you’re experiencing is a sweet treat, there’s still more delight underneath it. And if you’re experiencing a bit of life’s junk, I promise you can get rid of it very easily by focusing on the delight underneath.
If you’ve ever given a three-year-old a shower while dodging a crawling baby, you’ll know there’s foaming and wiggling and giggling, and you’ll end up wet, but with a child’s arms around my neck. , and a tiny one pulling up to stand against my leg, life couldn’t be better no matter what it’s smeared with.