You know how a shoe salesperson asks that of a kid while squashing the end of the shoe, and the kid stands there hardly daring to breathe lest the big toe show up in the wrong place in the desperately-hoped-for new shoe, and if you have Morton's toe, your big toe isn't your longest toe at all but your second toe, which is common enough that shoe salespeople should be more sympathetic but aren't or at least weren't when I was a kid and my mom was demanding adequate grow room for that long-ass toe because grow room makes shoes last longer?
Grow room applies to all kinds of things. For example: I have finally grown into a genuine appreciation for oatmeal topped with blueberries and salted almonds and drizzled with honey.
And though I find it hard to believe now, I wasn't a tremendous fan of kids before I had one.
As it turns out, most kids are nearly as awesome as dogs. Especially kids who appreciate dogs.
So I grew into that. (Reed and his friends made it pretty easy.)
What passes as breakfast at our house.
Because cats need love, too.
Perhaps because I have been the opposite of growing this week (I've been, as the Holistic Psychologist terms it, stuck), which is also perhaps universal at the moment because of the ambivalence of March in addition to the world's current covid-versus-vaccine holding pattern, and if there's one thing I've learned it's that I'm neither wholly distinctive nor wholly alone in my feelings ever, I made a little list of things I've grown into:
Virginia Woolf
gardening
bird-watching
cabbage (which I'd never eaten till I met my Irish husband and learned to enjoy it à la his mama, with corned beef and potatoes and carrots and, most important, a small dish of mustard for lavishing)
And finally, since I watched the Soleil Moon Frye movie the other night and was both intrigued by her thoughtfulness and repelled by her self-absorption (terms that I know describe this journal but might also describe, as established above, a generation or a globe) . . .
Let's talk about the mamas who took time off from a career to fledge their babies and then came back--to a different job, to another profession, to additional schooling, to part-time work, to full-time work, to big growth which involves big fear and fucking well doing it anyway in addition to a home and a family and creativity and putting out love and enacting positive change in the world--
HATS OFF TO YOU.
