Rite of Passage

I grew up in our local performance art scene - ballet, children's theatre, choir... Whatever would get me up on a stage. I met my husband-to-be when we were in our early teens in community theatre. We re-met many years later on performance poetry stages. Performance and stagecraft has connected us from early days.

Tonight there was a rite of passage as we dropped Brother-Bug at the same stage door we raced through as know-it-all adolescents (and before that, as nervous children) on our way to backstage call. A parent volunteer took my baby boy to touch up his lipstick and help him into his costume, in dressing rooms that I frequented more times that I can count in days past.

Brother-Bug doesn't realize yet is that the first time you touch feet to stage you've joined a tribe, that you've met your right of passage and come through to the other side a performer. It's mostly Papa-Bug and I, watching him on the stage his first time, reminiscing of our early performance memories, who walk through the rite, teary-eyed with flowers in hand, who see the rite for ourselves.

I don't know if Brother-Bug will continue dancing or performing. If he's anything like either parent, it's not a thing easily resisted once you've been under those warm stage lights. What I know is that when I picked him up backstage he was calm and grounded, but also starry-eyed. And I know that he loved it and wants to go back on the stage and back to ballet class.

I couldn't believe he is old enough, competent enough, to be up there on the stage that featured in so many of my youthful aspirations. I hope that next time he's up there, I'm a little less teary-eyed so that I can see him a little better.

And away he goes...

A Catching Up

Life is so full! With cooking, writing here and other places, creating, sewing, parenting, and everything else I do... I have lots of draft posts started and few finished.

We are enjoying the winter and learning a lot right now.

Brother-Bug went with me to see The Nutcracker in December and has been dancing variations ever since. Sometimes he is Clara, sometimes the Mouse King, sometimes Fritz... He is taking official ballet lessons now, to everyone's delight. They are a little bit hard, as he is not experienced in a class atmosphere, but his teacher is great and he dreams of being a Baby Mouse in Nutcracker next year. And the little boy in his ballet shoes is so very cute.

Anticipating his first class...

Another wrinkle in our days has been the removal of sugar from Brother-Bug's (and therefore all of our) diet. He was continuing to have some focus and behavior issues that just didn't feel right to me and the Papa-Bug. We don't expect our kids to behave like angels, or look like magazine cut-outs, or even keep their clothes on for more than ten minutes. But there was something way off about Brother-Bug's (often complete) lack of emotional control. A friend suggested taking sugar and dyes out of his diet for an experiment... and that did it! He still has his moments, but we noticed a change within a couple of days. Asking him to get his glasses is no longer a potential nuclear disaster area. We can get out the door with our pants on correctly and he politely asks if his shoes are on the right feet. This might sound trivial to some folks, but for Brother-Bug and us it is huge.

Learning how to cook, bake, and incorporate sweet into our lives without sugar has been a fun cooking challenge. One of those a-yet-unpublished drafts is about the various dessert options I have discovered and created. It's amazing, and not a little scary, to me that almost every damn food in the grocery store has sugar in the ingredient list. I am thankful that we cook so much from scratch because I don't have to read the label on the wheat, oats, or beans.

Sister-Bug has no news to report. She is sweet, weird, and anticipating her birthday - which isn't for another 2 months.

My 52 Prayers project is going well, so I will leave this post with the card I drew for this week. I can hear Sister-Bug waking up.

Watercolors and ink on book page.