Cool Aunts & Lazy Waves
Episode 10:09:2023 - Prompt: Natural
Where Natural took me…
I first had an image of the twin girls that stayed with us for a week. I’m not sure why they flashed into my mind, but I felt instantly connected to what I’m not.
A mother.
These five-year-olds have a mother and aren’t ‘lacking in that department’. Their mother is 100% in their corner. But for some reason - and their mother took notice, too - these twins really took to me.
The trust they put in me to guide them, hold them, play with them, feed them, bathe them, swim with them, and so on.
It was just magical.
And there were moments, like when one was asleep on my left side and the other awake on my right side, that I understood the natural feeling of warmth.
Like I was a protector and also a comfort, and that made me feel grounded during a week that was socially on high speed.
Dare I say I felt special?
At the same time, I’ve never felt ‘lacking in that department’ as far as not having children. It’s not something I’ve pursued or longed for or aggressively prevented.
In fact, I said something odd to my cousin’s husband many years ago.
“I think of being a parent like I do smoking cigarettes… some people like it.”
He laughed and said, “Did you just equate having kids with smoking?”
Meanwhile, kids seem to be naturally drawn to me, especially as I get older.
I think I’ve become the “cool aunt” for everyone’s kids. And I’m cool with that.
Which brings me to a more revealing take on natural…
I have always been seeking Natural…
In advertising, we call it Authenticity.
It’s kind of a shame that my brain has been co-opted over thousands of hours talking about how to portray authenticity in the advertising space.
We consider lensing & lighting, camera movement, choreography.
Casting characters not models.
Art direction and props for a “lived in” environment.
No one wants to look like a catalogue floor show, although often that is the result of hundreds of billable hours and hundreds of thousands of dollars to shoot a 30-second spot about pizza delivery.
Natural is a nearly impossible state to maintain.
There are glimpses…
Like when I’m on the floor with the twins building a town with huge Legos. I don’t care to make perfect structures or a logical layout. I want to know what the five-year-olds envision and follow their directions.
I let go of what I’ve learned about urban planning, architecture, and physics.
I think pure creativity is Natural and harder to access in our middle years - perhaps harder to harness in the technological age.
Children, of course, are full of pure creativity, and I think we can return to that state as we age… the less we worry about outcomes.
But we should be able to access Natural throughout our lives with intention.
For me, Natural means I am not trying hard to Be in the moment.
It’s one of the hardest things to do.
I know when it’s happening, however.
My heart rate lowers and my breathing evens out. The clock is unimportant. I hear the wind in the poplars like lazy waves on the shore, Ray Davies crooning somewhere in the room, my dog’s deep sigh as he puts his head back onto my ankle.
I think it’s just as critical when working on longer projects as it is deciding on the next word I’m going to write/type right here, right now.
Where does NATURAL take you?
YOUR TURN: I was surprised. NATURAL did not come easy as a prompt.
I thought I’d have more to say but found I had only a few topics of interest (to me) and they required more context and research to share without causing confusion.
Trust me.
I tested them out, and I kept hitting the rambling wall. I don’t mind tangents and seasoning, but the rambles weren’t getting me anywhere.
SO… I am excited to read what you come up with for NATURAL.
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Planning an at-home birth with a camera tripod fixated on my lady parts while immersed in a tub of my own fluids and a damp cloth draped on my forehead as my midwife judiciously directs me to breathe, breathe, breathe while I push, push, push without any medication, was a fantasy.
The closest I came to having a natural childbirth involved my divorced parents, anchored on either side of me, watching their first grandchild enter the world. Nothing unusual—I had a Pitocin drip and an epidural before the nurse removed my catheter; my father pressed my left knee to my ear and forced me to push while I screamed, “I can’t push anymore!” And my mother fed me ice chips and cheered me to “keep going,” while my then husband videotaped the doctor’s hands carefully removing our daughter from the canal.
I respect those mothers who can endure natural childbirth. I couldn’t. My first experience of giving birth was unconventional, but purposeful and proper.
Hundreds of angry hornets, acting on their natural instinct to protect the nest, swarmed around the landscape crew. They had cut down a dead tree along the walking trail above the driveway and discovered the tree was occupied. As the crew quit the site, I grabbed my phone and called our exterminator. The next day, the exterminator arrived and said, “The hornets entered the tree through a knothole and hollowed out the tree. Since the tree fell on that knothole, it’s going to be a little tricky killing the hornets. Tell the landscape crew not to cut until I come back next week to make sure the hornets are no longer active.” I understood the hornet’s natural tendency to protect the community—I’ve done it myself. A few years ago, I was standing on a busy street corner in New York City when I heard a woman’s frantic shout, “Emmanuel! Wait! Stop,” and the pit-pat-pit-pat sound of a child’s sandals hitting pavement, coming from behind me. I looked at the “do not walk” traffic sign and turned to confirm what I suspected was happening. “Stop, stop! Emmanuel!” yelled the slender young woman, pushing an empty stroller and running desperately. The scampering child, I guessed two years old, stopped on the sidewalk two feet from me. He gazed back at the young woman and tossed his black silky curls. Then his dark eyes widened, and his mouth hinted an impish grin. “Emmanuel!” the young woman shrieked. She was still several yards away. He jerked as if to take off running again, this time into the street. I grabbed his baby fat arm. Then I looked at the woman and said, “I’ve got him!” “No,” he cried, trying to squirm away from me. The young woman arrived two long seconds later. “Thank you,” she said to me while taking the boy’s hand. “She scared me,” I heard him say to the young woman as they walked away. “You scared me,” she replied. “You can’t be running away from me, Emmanuel, it’s not safe.” I was sorry to have frightened him, but he, his mother, and I were only doing what was natural.