My granddaughter, Mavis, is obsessed with being outside; With rocks and dirt, specifically.
She simply cannot get enough.
At the slightest suggestion of going outside, she is bringing every shoe in the house to every person, demanding their immediate participation in facilitating her acquisition of them.
She will not stop at anything.
She will try putting Crocs on a helpful looking dog.
This is amusing to me, as I have always been an outdoor girl, but, in the age of the rise of electronics and social media, to get my own daughters outside sometimes has felt like it needed to involve them all being drugged.
My youngest is a slight exception, but, at 13 now, even she tends to stay in the corner of the couch on her phone.
Mavis’ mother, Alena, in particular, was never one for the outdoors, or camping, or hiking, or doing anything that might make her even remotely hot.
She would much rather be inside reading a 500 page book, or baking something.
She is the truest form of an introvert.
When she was pregnant I just smiled at her when one day she said she “really hoped she didn’t get a kid who tried to force her to go outside all the time.”
I didn’t tell her I prayed for exactly that from that moment on.
I knew time has a way of making mothers eat those sorts of words, anyway.
LOL, right?
Joke’s on her.
Mavis is like God heard her wish, and
(instead of answering with a yes)
decided to turbo-boost a feral one.
It’s like He added in EXTRA desire for outside as a lesson against ever saying that kind of thing ever again.
While my daughter, Alena, would prefer a fully insulated and orderly stocked living space,
Mavis would be perfectly happy dressed in beads, with a bone through her nose in some remote village’s mud hut.
I told Alena this is what happens when you marry someone who loves experiments.
If you want a mellow baby, marry an accountant.
I could have told her her baby would turn out covered in mystery drips and odd little bits no one could identify.
Her dad once made homemade mead out of Mountain Dew, for Heaven’s sake.
I blame this little Mowgli on the genetics of my Son-in-Law.
We took Mavis to the beach yesterday for the second time because she has begged every single day to go back since the first one.
As soon as we got onto the beach, she lay face-down and embraced the ground, saying, “Awww.”
“You really love it, don’t you?” I asked her, already knowing the answer.
She simply confirmed, “Wuv it,” and then kissed that ground like it had just proposed to her.
Her mother, having lived her life mostly in libraries and places that are temperate and soft,
was having to breathe through flared nostrils as Mavis ate handfuls of sand, and giggled as she bathed in a creek run-off that we once saw a dead cow in.
I just smiled watching my daughter doing box-breathing, thinking, “Ha. This is so good for her.”
I have to admit, there IS something fulfilling in seeing your children experience a child of their own that challenges them.
It’s like a little reward for you putting up with the teenage years when they thought they knew everything, and were forever telling you their own version of how they thought things should be done.
I can remember my own mother telling me she “hoped I had a daughter just like me one day,” meaning stubborn, and opinionated, and I ended up with four of them,
so I EARNED THIS.
I feel like I’ve come to some sort of Reward Phase in having a granddaughter who loves the outdoors like I do, and who is not adverse to a little dirt.
Besides building up immunity, I think it teaches lessons about other things:
It’s OK to get your hands dirty, to love something passionately,
to be yourself, no matter what you end up looking like, or what others think of you.
I always admire people who live their lives with their proverbial hands in the dirt.
The world is full of too many inside observers.
We need this kind of girl that shows people how living is really done!
Little girls right now are facing a world of resistance, suppression, and silencing, where they have to fight double for everything they earn.
I am all for raising wild-headed, loud little dirt lovers, willing to dive in and get the work done without concern for things like perfect comfort.
I think we need feisty, and kind of feral.
To me, it kind of feels like Feral Season.
I laughed to my daughter as she hyperventilated through cleaning Mavis up for the car ride home.
“It’s fine. It’s good for her,” I told her as she fretted over the sand in my car, and in the diaper bag.
We have a wild-one on our hands,
and the world needs them desperately.
Many things right now are hurting, and I’m so glad my granddaughter will grow up knowing it’s OK to get in there and get your hands dirty,
Whether with rocks, or with a whole world of people and problems.
The grit on our hands only makes us stronger.
A little dirt never hurt anyone.
Mom Outnumbered
Hi! My name is Kerri Green; Wife to Justin, and mother to four highly entertaining daughters -Alena, Chloe, Tessa, and Paige. I am an artist, a writer, a daycare provider, a lover of people, a believer that there is humor and beauty in all things, and the author of Mom Outnumbered; a blog about real family life, and my observations of it. My goal is to make people laugh, to be there for them when they cry, and most importantly, to let them know that they are not at all alone in this up and down world. I live with my family in Sebastopol California, and I am opening the window into our life. So welcome! Come in. Sit down. Just please don’t mind the mysterious wet spots.
