An Unexpected Delight About Parenting

Before you have kids, and if you’re planning on children, you hear about that whole, "as soon as I saw my baby, I didn't think I could love that like..." and “love at first sight is real..." Yada, yada, yada, blah blah blah. (You yada yada’d over the best part!) This happens, yes. Your heart will grow and all that jazz. But buckle up buttercup! There are so many other unexpected surprises and delights about having kids that I never knew about!

The other day, my 8 year old, Gabe, was casually talking to me about a poem he liked from school that day. First of all, “poem I heard in school” got my geeky, word gears clicking right away. He then starts to try and recreate this poem.

“She can’t go to school because she’s sick and has a fever and all these other things..”

I pause from chopping veggies and turn around and recite, from memory:

I cannot go to school today said little Peggy Ann McKay. I have the measles and the mumps, a gash, a rash and purple bumps. My mouth is wet, my throat is dry…

His eyes got big, “Mom, you KNOW that poem? That’s the one we heard in school!”

I then told him that not only did I know that poem, but Shel Silverstein is one of my favorite poets and I was introduced to him by my second grade teacher too. We did a short unit on poetry, where we covered one of his poems, handed out in a single sheet of paper, and after that I was hooked. I could not get enough of Mr. Silverstein. The puns, the pictures that sometimes explained the poem, the hilarity of eating a whale or being so hot you have to take off your skin. It was the beginning of a lifelong love of words and what the tiny worlds they could create. Mrs. Weaver (God bless her teacher soul) let me borrow her personal collection, one by one, which I took home and devoured.

I told him this, and then went to my bookshelf and pulled out a very worn copy of A Light in The Attic. The dust jacket is long gone and the middle pages are coming out. I showed him the inscription on the cover. It was a gift from my mom. I remember getting that book 28 years ago. (Am I that old already?!) I loved having my own copy, and I would read it often, like, just for fun. This “reading poetry for fun” thing has since led to quiet and pleasurable moments with other poets. Shakespeare, Shelley, Whitman and Poe. I even made my husband Chris visit the Poe house with me when we had a 4 hour layover in Baltimore a few years ago. I stood in his tiny room and imagined where he might have heard that heart beating from beneath the floor. I wrote earlier this year about my teenage fascination with Emily Dickinson, she struck a chord with my adolescent phase, for whatever reason. And then later, in college, I could not get enough of Elizabeth Bishop. There is a poem of hers called The Moose. It’s essentially about a bus full of people on a late night trip. Each time I read it, I am taken on this quiet ride of the human condition. Loneliness, joy, sadness, surprise, recollection and forgetting, birth and death, nature and machine...my silly heart is simply swelling up thinking about this favorite.

Do I look macabre? I was going for macabre in front of the Edgar Allen Poe House.

I didn’t go into all this detail when we all gathered around my decades old book, while my three 8 year olds took turn reading poems and cracking up and a man forgetting to put on his pants or a homework machine that’s actually just a little kid in there writing down wrong answers. It was a delightful night that tickled my word loving fancy.

So, I didn’t know! I had no idea when I signed up for this mom thing, how utterly delighted I would be when my kids ALSO liked what I loved. I’m not going to hold my breath for anyone welling up in tears over a poem about a bus ride, but for now, our shared love of Shel Silverstein is more than enough.

A Kara DeGering Gallagher primer in favorite books of poetry and prose.

When I tucked my son in that night, he sleepily told me, as if it was an afterthought, that his favorite part of the poem was when she realized it was Saturday, so she felt better and went outside to play. I kissed his forehead.

“That is my favorite part too buddy. Gnight.”

What has been YOUR unexpected delight about parenting? I want to know!