a little Magic Please

"We find delight in the beauty and happiness of children that makes the heart too big for the body" Ralph Waldo Emerson

That last post was a bit dour and scary. When looking for rainbows I guess I'm going to see a lot of rain. In trying to be a better parent, or even just trying to be a parent at all, I'm challenged in ways that makes everything I went through to get pregnant look like a cakewalk. I've never done this before, I'll never get a chance to do it again, and I wish I had more answers. What I do have is a lot of faith that with some effort, love and patience the very power of the childhood years themselves will help me out a bit.
I was unprepared for the awe I feel over childhood. Magic is defined as the power to change the ordinary to the extraordinary by unexplained means, and by that definition childhood has to have the most magical of anything on earth. Many times I have seen children touch something very, very ordinary with their presence -hanging around by the tennis courts, chomping on a snack, finding a cardboard tube- and instantly the experience is deliciously hilarious, exciting, giggly. Curly ringlets bouncing up and down, sweet laughter like bells spilling over the sidewalk, little bodies shivering and shaking all over from happiness- and from what? Just life; plain, boring, unembellished life of the variety that would be hard pressed to crack a smile out of anyone else. It's touching. It's lovely. It's beautiful. A coordinator at a nursing home told me that just having children around was therapeutic for their seniors. Dostoyevsky said "the soul is healed by being with children."
I found this little quip in Wallace Stegner's immortal Angle of Repose : "Botanists tell us that the blossom is an evolution of the leaf- but they cannot say just why that particular bud should take from the same air and sunshine a fairer substance, a deeper color... and become something at which each passerby pauses, and goes on his way happier for the sight." On the sturdy stem of boring, daily, routine activities children can make the moment blossom with rich delight, exquisite pleasure, joyful and easy hearts, all fruitful ground for planting a lifetime of beautiful connection.
But the sweet spontaneity that transforms the leaf into a bud can also turn into a handful of crushed dust. In their excitement, kids can spill, break, stain, scrape and mess the moment; quite unintentionally for the most part, but still. The question to put to me is if I can keep the magic alive, the bud unwithered. To do this I must put a smile on my face, clear a path of safety, wipe and scrub and tidy, and then look in their eyes and smile again.
As I'm gearing up to build better bonds with my kids, maybe I need to be prepared to also become a magician.