to do lists are for the birds

I couldn't sleep last night. The duties of the week were all mixed up in my head, making for an awful insomniac stew: following up on an interview for an article on local immigration, bringing supplies for a Teacher Appreciation breakfast at Frances' school by 7:50 this morning, writing my yoga group to see if they still want to meet even though it will be Mother's Day on Sunday, emailing Doris because my vacation hours are screwed up at work, booking a flight to Iowa next month to welcome my new niece or nephew, shopping for the after-school cooking club on Thursday...etc.
 
I finally fell asleep, and when I woke up, all the items on my jumbled list remained undone. So I tried to do a little here and there, a stolen email while making breakfast, a note to myself scribbled before we pulled out of the driveway. After a morning of errands, I returned home with Gabriel feeling a bit low on energy yet privately plotting out the most efficient afternoon possible for myself. And can you believe it? The kid wanted some of my time and attention. Had he not gotten the memo about all those other big fish that needed frying?

So I made us lunch and we ate it outside in the treehouse, which is the platform at the top of the slide and a rather nice nook in our swing set. We were quiet. We listened to the birds talking and singing their sweet little birdie heads off and Gabriel suggested we pretend to be Eastern bluebirds in a nest, eating some beetles that happened to look like grapes. For the first time in hours, my mind emptied out and the spring breezes swept through. A clean house. I exhaled. Without that kid to slow me down, I might drive myself nuts.

We spotted so many birds from our quiet perch. At one point a cardinal fluttered onto a wire but a few yards away from us. I pointed him out, and just as Gabriel located him, he opened his bright orange beak and began to sing. Really sing, as in songbird-opera-style singing. Frances and I just studied her bird book together last night and talked about how much we'd like to learn bird calls so we could recognize the voices that wake us in the morning.

He was singing so lustily, I could not resist. I answered him. Gabriel looked at me with his big brown eyes widening in awe. 'Mama! You whistled like the cardinal!' I sure did. Here is the best part: he sang back. Then I whistled my imitation of him, and then he replied, and we went back and forth like that for a minute or two, each singing a few measures, before he flew off to the shelter of the big magnolia tree.

Friends! I had a conversation with a bird today. Maybe this happens to you all the time. But with the exception of an expressive cockatiel named Mabel that we had when I was five, I have never in all my life talked to a bird like that.

When Gabriel did some wacky trick to get my attention this morning, saying 'Mama, look at me,' I was able to understand it in a brand new way. Instead of my long-held take on that kind of thing (a universal megalomaniac cry of childhood reducible to ME ME ME!), I heard an invitation. I had been distracted, I had felt burnt. Gabriel danced in front of me, saying come out of yourself, Mama, and enter into relationship with me. Let's be together.

His mind is not hurtling itself towards a future filled with obligations, questions, and potentialities. He isn't busy anticipating all the things that come next. So when a child says look at me, sometimes what he or she is really saying is look with me. Look with my eyes, so you can see how amazing this tiny ant, this sticker, this cracker I have chewed into the shape of a horse really is. Look with my eyes, and hear with my ears. And maybe, just maybe, we might learn to sing a bird's song together.

p.s. I know these backyard bird pictures are impossibly hard to discern, but can any of you identify this little gray songstress? Black cap, black tail feathers, noisy as heck? Our bird books are coming up short.