Artist's palette with mixed paint colors and paint brushes.
Life • 

Letting Go: A List

By Renae Hilary

Multiple times per day, I clean the area of my house where the kitchen, family room, and my daughter’s playroom converge. Every time, it looks freshly cooked-in, lived-in, played-in. You’d think I never did anything at all. I find bits of old snacks and cheerful moments of crusted paint, stickers, and glitter in places I didn’t even see my daughter go. 

Life with a two-year-old is like this. It hums along with a low-key chaos that lights up all the neurotic parts of my brain, the parts that crave order and neatness. Everyday, it makes me turn inward and search for hidden wells of patience. Every day, I get a little better at finding them. 

If I dwell in them long enough, I even get a little lost in the other part of life with a two-year-old, the magic part. This is the part where time and all the ways grown ups divide it into a million “shoulds” and “have tos” become irrelevant. A single moment can stretch into an entire afternoon of seeking, of holding a discovery in our hands, turning it over and over, learning its contours, and letting it lead us down yet another path, to the next new thing. 

So I let play dough crumbs collect on the floor and different Lego sets mix into uncanny hybrids of castles and farms and pizza shops. The more I relax about the small things, about the cleanup and the crusty floors, the more I find myself easing into this season of motherhood when there’s always another request or question on the tip of my daughter’s tongue, one more thing to know,, one more thing to one more way to fall in love with the world. So I take a deep breath and try to let go. 


Things I let go:

  1. Separate paint colors: More than anything, my daughter loves to paint. So do I. I love mixing colors, layering them to create depth and texture. Unlike writing or cooking or anything else I do, I rarely care about the outcome. For me, it’s about the process. For my daughter, too. But her process looks different than mine. I barely pour each paint color into the little wells on her plastic artist’s palette before she dunks her paint brush in each one, mixing them all together. First pink mixes with green, then green and pink mix with yellow, and so on. That last little well of color becomes a sort of technicolor dream, then quickly turns a deep, murky brown. For me, a nightmare. For her, the entire point: to learn how different colors combine to make others, to understand the texture and viscosity of the paint as it swirls together, to see how it all comes out on paper. 
  1. Ditto separate play dough colors: The play dough will never not be put away looking like the inside of a lava lamp. Each container holds a salty, psychedelic fever dream so far removed from the color indicated on its lid. 
  1. Our very own mommy-daughter baking show: What a wholesome activity, I think, setting up a little station to bake oatmeal cookies with my daughter. To make everything go smoothly, I lay out the two cups of flour, teaspoon of baking powder, two eggs, and so on beforehand. She can tip the little containers of dry ingredients into the big bowl and then I’ll crack the eggs. I’m so on top of things. We could have our own YouTube channel! But then we get to it. And my daughter surprises me by showing a lot of interest in the eggs. So I show her how to crack one and let her try with the second. She gets excited and squeezes a little too hard when I hand it over. Crack! It explodes everywhere. We have raw egg on our clothes, all over the counter, up our forearms. It’s everywhere except the bowl. I want to hibernate. And cry. But I also do not want anyone to get salmonella poisoning, so I run us both upstairs and we get in the tub together. I guess it’s bath time now.
  2. Creative control: I thought I’d be able to choose my daughter’s outfits until she became a teenager. But she regularly wants to wear Minnie Mouse ears to school in place of the cobalt-blue headband I bought to match her school clothes. You can bet that wasn’t my choice. 
  1. Clean floors: When you are in charge of several creatures that pee (one child, two cats), there’s a moment of horror when you see pee on the floor and realize you do not know who it belonged to (if you know, you know but human pee > than cat pee by a magnitude of a million). Then your toddler proudly proclaims, “Mama! I had an accident and that’s okay!!” Yes indeed. It’s okay. And thank goodness.
  2. Arbitrary deadlines: Preschool is a Petri dish. When my child wakes up with a runny nose, it can take us out for an entire week. Or more. Any given day, I may have to pause work in order to keep her home. My husband and I often get sick too. I guess two years of on-and-off isolation has left our immune systems with some work to do. All together, we are home sick about a fourth of the time. And that means, one fourth of the time, I am rearranging my schedule, working after bedtime to meet real deadlines, and learning to be okay with bumping artificial deadlines I’ve set for myself down the road. 
  1. Smooth bedtimes: My child gets strangely pensive as we approach her bedtime. Possibly the best procrastination technique ever. I’m sure she’s discovered that I have an internalized fear of accidentally dismissing her desire to learn. Or at least that I have a hard time not answering her questions. 

    The other night, she asked, “Mama, why do we get older?” My god, what a question to ask at 8pm on a weeknight. The pressure of getting her to sleep at a good hour tugged on my shoulders. But I dropped into a less-than-perfect explanation about biology and the nature of time, that it moves forward not back. As I I looked into her eyes, wide with the effort of absorbing information, I let it go: the late bedtime, the (likely) hectic morning to follow. Instead, I embraced the magic of the two of us sitting in this dark room, both understanding something more about the human condition together. 
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