Caterpillars
All this Fall in the Big Yard, we kept finding these big, bright yellow caterpillars, and it seemed clear that they were related to the profusion of bright yellow butterflies that we see flying all around the trees back there. The trees have these brilliant yellow flowers, the same color as the butterflies, and together they just look like an everyday miracle of nature together– vibrant, coordinated, in harmony, and abundant.
But those little caterpillars. They are so soft and delicate when they are babies, growing fat and pulpous, tumbling out of the trees and into the hands of excited preschoolers. The kids wanted to hold them, and keep them safe. In their tiny, strong hands was probably the most dangerous place they could have been, but the kids persisted, because we all loved those chubby little guys and wanted them to have a chance to grow and to live.
Throughout the season, we would find them starting to build a chrysalis, first threads starting to bind them as they became still. The kids know how caterpillars have to transform to become butterflies, and love to read books about metamorphosis over and over, again and again, just the way those caterpillars keep going still and weaving their threads until they are all closed up inside, one after another. We would see this happen before our eyes, and every time we found a new one, the kids thought of ways to protect the chrysalis while it was working. A couple of times, we built a little structure around one that made its home in a perilous place, like right on the climbing wall, or on the ladder up to the play structure. They were everywhere. They built inside of our hollow wooden blocks, and when they did, the kids left the special block alone for weeks while the caterpillar transformed. We carried them on leaves and in our hands carefully to the garden beds and the trees, hoping they could find a suitable place to hide and grow while hungry little birds swooped all around.
The kids managed this, mostly with just ancillary adult help, because they were invested, and they knew what to do. Sometimes their ideas were designed more to maximize our collective enjoyment of the beautiful caterpillars than to maximize the caterpillar’s safety or the life it was trying to live, like keeping them in observation jars, which got passed around from hand to shaky hand. But mostly, the kids understood that caterpillars like to live outside and eat green leaves, and that after a while, they need a quiet space where they can develop in peace. The kids trust that the caterpillars know what they need. They don’t try to talk them out of the life they are making for themselves.
Meanwhile, the kids would go back to playing, and the adults would go back to worrying about the kids. Will this game they are playing cause someone to get hurt, in their body or in their feelings? If I stay right here trying to manage their interactions, can I prevent that pain from happening? What if I impose myself and make them play something else instead, so that everyone can stay safe? It’s like those preschoolers, trying to keep caterpillars safe by holding them in hands built strong for climbing trees and pushing wheelbarrows. We want so badly for them to become brilliant butterflies that soar, that we take them away from the life they are making for themselves, struggling to trust them that they know what they need.
Some days, a child comes in to school having a hard morning. Sometimes they didn’t eat or sleep well, or their parent was out of town, or they are worried that no one will play with them, or some other reason that never does come to light. It’s hard for a kid coming in with those kinds of feelings to just jump in and play the way we see them do on other days. The other kids sit in the circle, run to their friends to negotiate a game, and jet out to the yard, and this child, this day, hangs back, maybe clinging to a parent who needs to leave for work, or asking a teacher to read a giant pile of books that should take long enough to just sit out the whole morning’s play, or refuse to do anything but swing on the swings.
Every kid has a day like this sometimes. It makes adults a little nervous. We are always making meaning out of everything– it’s part of being human. We are looking for patterns to make sense of the world. We have lived all these seasons, and when we see a child cling to their parent’s legs crying, or a child who won’t play with kids we thought they liked, or just melting down, we build these imaginary futures inside ourselves where a child is going to struggle every day. Where this hard day defines who the child is.
But I am not a collection of my hardest days. None of us are, not us or our kids. We are not going to be able to provide a life for our kids that is free of pain and struggle. There are no observation jars big enough to hold them. And anyway, kids like to live, largely outside, eating what they like and what fuels them, finding quiet spaces in the habitat we provide for them to develop in peace. It’s hard to trust a person that they know what they need to thrive, especially when that person is little and vulnerable and we want so badly to see them soar. The way we can help is to trust them, listen to them, and believe them, so they can trust, listen to, and believe in themselves.
