The other afternoon my three children and I brought my young
niece to the seashore to celebrate the first decent warmth and sunshine
we’ve had in weeks.
We played a short while on the playground equipment before
making our way down to the south shore beach. The tide was high and there were cumbersome
banks of seaweed which meant that there was very little beach exposed. This
made walking difficult so my niece and I decided to sit a moment or two on a
fallen tree, the sun bleached trunk of which had been positioned by some
previous visitor as a bench of sorts.
Sitting there as my three children aged 13, 10 and 8 years
old all beach combed, enthused by the first visit warm enough to beckon
thoughts of summer nearing, my little niece, not yet two years old, looked out
upon the wide expanse of sparkling blue sea in front of us. She then
thoughtfully cocked her little head to one side peeking up at me from under the
brim of her pink ball cap and said:
“I don’t know what that is Aunt Jill-ah?”
I sat for an instant, caught in the moment of
innocent wonder. Without my really noticing, so many years have passed since my
own children were new to the naming of their world. We’ve long since moved on
to different sets of questions with more complicated answers such as the one our
youngest recently asked regarding whether “you can get a baby without a man
being involved?”
To be quite honest, although endlessly inquisitive and
earnest acquirers of language skills, I do not recall any of our three breaking
the world down into the sum of its parts in quite the same manner as my niece
does.
“It is water Lily”, I meekly answered, “you know the ocean,
the sea.” I furthered hoping to satisfy her need to name. Seemingly settled with my response she sat
and gazed out to sea while I was left wondering if I did justice to the
vastness, the beauty and utter import of both her question and what we were
looking at.
Perhaps language is only a mediocre tool for chopping up the
grandeur of life so that it is more easily digestible, ponderable. Maybe the
best way to drink in the largeness of such moments is one sip, one simple,
incomplete answer at a time?
As we left the shoreline to head back to the car my niece
turned around and waved goodbye.
“Bye ocean!” I said. She turned, smiled and chirped “Bye blue
water” making the farewell her own.
When our oldest child was my niece’s age, instead of asking us
when she didn’t know what something was, she
simply made up the names of things. Thanks to her unusual naming practice we
had a list of words as long as my arm which made sense only to her immediate
family. Tookashish meant cookie, hackashish was water and so on. We thought it was cute and creative at the time, but
didn’t really take much pass of the fact that she was actively naming her world
as she saw fit.
Still an avid lover of words and now a brand new teenager,
she often struggles with the inadequacy of language to describe the emotional roller coaster she’s recently been hit with. We are hoping that
she will continue to tap into that creative resource she has mined so many times
in her young life thus far, applying imagination to the gap when words fail.
My young niece has no qualms about asking when she needs help naming her world, at those times when her repository of
words doesn’t match what she sees or experiences. Teenagers on the other hand
have more difficulty asking for help.
Our thirteen year old has mountains of words, but the terrain she is
trekking is so unfamiliar, is such uncharted territory for her that most words
feel awkward, trite and render themselves ineffectual at
communicating a depth of feeling or experience of confusion which is so deeply
personal. Probably this is where words such as “whatever and “this sucks” enter
our vocabulary and become so widely used by certain age groups.
So at the moment I have two young gals in my life who are
actively trying to name a strange and beautiful world, a world which for
different reasons feels foreign much of the time. Each girl bound by the
constricts that language presents us with at various stages of childhood
development.
Yet, as my oldest said to me just the other day, words used
well can give us the perspective we need sometimes. What she actually said was:
“You know mom, I know
why I appreciate a really good book so much- it just gives you perspective.”
I couldn’t have said
it better myself…what that perspective is and what constitutes a really good book
are of course, purely subjective but I totally get what she means. Another perspective
is very grounding for us when the vantage point we most often peer from wears
thin, or when we ourselves don’t seem to have the words that match our
experience. Language applied well can
both transport and tether us, granting us both oars and gills with which to navigate
the often tumultuous sea that we call life.
Happy Sailing!!
Jill
