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When my children were very young I went through a period of baking bread at home once a week. I had the downtime and I loved the way it made the house smell and I really wanted them to have that experience of eating warm homemade wheat bread with soft butter and honey. Neither of them remember any of this and I don’t think it matters that they do, I wanted them to have that sensation and they did and it’s in there somewhere, it’s a part of the love. I didn’t have a breadmaker and they ‘helped’ by punching down dough and rolling off bits of it to make things with.
I guess I’m kind of a hippy that way. I washed their cloth diapers and hung them on the line to dry (sunlight is a natural antibiotic). I nursed them each for a long time. Everything they ate was organic and made at home. I never bought commercial baby food, preferring instead to put whatever I served them through the moulinex, a contraption that ran on a grinder and a handle.
Within a few years they were wolfing down Big Macs along with everyone else, although I never bought them, ate them or served them. Instead of all the peace toys and ‘educational’ toys people gave them they made guns our of bananas and anything else they could find until I finally just broke down and bought some for the neighborhood ‘wars’.
I knew that everything would change as they got older and more independent and experienced the world around them. That they wouldn’t stay little forever. I didn’t want them to. although I could not imagine what they would be in their big, tall man bodies, they were so small and perfect.
They are still perfect now. Life has sanded off some of the edges that I loved. That happens. They are both grown up men, one is very tall. They both do adulting very well. They have good relationships and make good decisions. They also make bad decisions and fight their own demons and there’s nothing to be done about that. That’s part of the deal.
What I wanted for them, and for everyone, was just a first few moments in ‘the garden’. Maybe not Eden, I like apples and sex and even snakes and I knew they liked the first and third one and would probably get into the middle one, too. I just wanted them to have a moment of sunlight in the quiet and it also gave me a moment to sit and watch them do it.