I was standing in the Mid-Kid yard. I was crying and I was afraid because I wanted to see my mother. I could see my older brother and my cousin on the other side of the fence running and laughing and playing some sort of chasing game with sticks. It seemed so free. Them out there. Me in here. Stuck amongst the diaper-draped masses. I am told my first words were “stuck”. I was playing in a laundry hamper and couldn’t manage my way out of it, I shifted and toppled, and then uttered the only concept I knew, the only concept I had come to grasp a firm understanding of as an infant, the word: stuck.
Being stuck. Them out there, and me in here. This would become significant. But for now it just seemed sad, or before sad if you will. Sad enough to be sad but not sad enough to actually know what being sad meant or why I felt sad in the first place. It seems giving words to children to express their feelings and articulate their world only provides a lens in which adults will understand what their world means to other adults, and “oh now I know what you mean Sally, because you’re using your words!” But could words ever truly capture… would they ever really understand? Had they indeed forgotten the very feelings they asked us to express?
Stuck I was and stuck I was to remain for quite some time. A woman working there named Ellie, notices me at the fence and begins to lumber over in a hurried-but-laid-back kind of a way. Ellie was a woman as kind as an April rain but as fierce as the thunder that followed and who always came at the right time to get me unstuck with a warm hand and gentle smile. She seemed to have so much love inside of her. She had more than enough to share…”aww what’s a matter sweet child? You missin’ your mama over here in the mid-kid yard while the big kids’re a stompin’ around all day like elephants?” Just then Ellie scooped me up into her pillowy arms, winked and said, “Don’t worry. One day you’ll be a big stompin’ elephant too.”