In September our neighbor brought us three caterpillars. They were beautiful, fat things, with bright stripes and hungry mouths. With great excitement, the children and I pulled out the little butterfly house and made them a home. We stocked their new home with carrot greens (their favorite) and collected sticks to climb and build cocoons on. We learned that they were black swallowtails and what they would look like when they emerged in the spring. We thought we knew what to expect.
So we were not surprised when they climbed high and spun perfect, camouflaged cocoons on their branches. We checked this stage off our list.
But expectation can be a dangerous thing.
A few weeks later, Lexi noticed two flies inside the butterfly house. Sealed inside, it was clear that they had not snuck into the butterfly sanctuary overnight. We had some more reading to do. Suddenly, instead of learning about the life of butterflies-to-be, we were learning about these parasitic flies and how they came to be. In fact, they had been there all the time, silently, invisibly incubating inside their caterpillar hosts. After eating all but the heads of our caterpillar friends, they emerged, leaving behind hollow cocoons. There were great, fat, disappointed tears on Lexi's cheeks as reality dawned. Instead of lovely, delicate butterflies, we had raised two carnivorous flies. Not the lesson we had expected.
Life is messy. Maybe it is our need for order and predicability that allows us to pretend otherwise, again and again: to pretend that we have some control over our corner of this vast, uncontrollable universe. I am no different. I want to make sense and order out of chaos. Something I can wrap my head around and hold indefinitely. Against all evidence to the contrary, my mind still craves some illusion of control.
It is this desire I struggle with the most. If peace comes in the absence of desire, it is this singluar desire that stands most formidably in my way. Uncertainty was so much easier to bear, somehow, when I wasn't responsible for other little humans. If life's curves hit me alone it was acceptable. I knew I could withstand my own heartache, injury, fear, illness. But the saying is true: once you have children your heart stands up and walks outside your body. And suddenly the uncertainties are so much weightier.
I want to enclose them in my arms and hands and keep them safe. I want to defy the chaos for them. I want to build a barrier around each of them studded with hope and prayer and love that can somehow repel unexpected dangers and protect them from harm. As though some how any of us can move through this life without hardship and obstacles. As if growth happens without adversity. And yet I still want this for them: to control the uncontrollable.
When the October snowstorm hit this year, I sent them to bed with misgivings. Upstairs seemed so vulnerable when the trees around us were bowing low to the storm, bending, and breaking. We moved them to the front of the house at first. And then, at midnight when the big oak in the back yard let go, we moved them into the basement. They slept peacefully, and woke with surprise to find themselves relocated and the world around them whitewashed with snow and rumbling with the sounds of the generator. Paulo and I slept fitfully, him with an ear to the door, me with an ear to the dull thuds and reverberations of trees still being crippled in the snow. I wrapped my arms around Ellie's warm little body, listened, and tried to let go.
This is all we can do, really. Love and let go. The love part comes easy. It ambushes me from the crook of a little arm, from the space between small teeth, from behind twinkling brown eyes, from the booming laugh of the man who carries this with me, taking my breath away. But each day I have to remind myself to find ways to let go. To do what I can to tame the chaos, and then to accept the rest. To see each moment as it is, instead of what I expect it to be. To be in this present moment instead of straining so hard to see and shape the next.
The sun over the frost is beautiful this morning. It's casting small, straight rainbows through the beveled glass onto the dining room wall for the children to catch. We are warm and everyone is well. Our bellies are full and the house smells of fresh coffee and clean laundry. The kids are laughing together over Legos and later family will come to eat with us.
Maybe next week someone will come to remove the rest of the debris from the storm and the fear that knotted in my stomach that night will be just another story to tell. And in the spring we might still see a black swallowtail butterfly. After all, one cocoon remains unscathed and inside we can hope, maybe even expect, a butterfly is forming.
