We were in the kitchen having breakfast and it was 11am, and Cam had just spoken to me about shirking my motherhood duties because it was so late. He stood at my bedroom door like I was someone who needed to be told what to do, “It is 11 o’clock and the girls are both downstairs saying they are hungry and they have not done any school work.” In response I quickly made up a half truth, “Well you see I am trying to train the girls to drink water and eat fruit because they have this terrible habit of making baked treats from Wholefoods their breakfast on the day we go grocery shopping, so I told them to go downstairs and eat something from the fruit bowl before we go grocery shopping.” Cam had to accept this explanation as sensible but he was suspicious because he had surely heard me get up quickly and tuck the computer away as he was walking up the stairs. I often do this little scurry. I will be at the computer writing when I am supposed to be doing something else, and then when I hear Cam and I know he will make me feel badly that I am not being the best mother I can be and so then I have to quickly come up with a half truth, because I know he is right.

Without much choice, I dashed down the kitchen stairs to join the girls. The house was very cold as we really try not to use the heat, but with that inner skittish feeling of wanting to do too much, I knew the warmth would help put my tense body at ease and so I turned the heat on to take the sharp cold edge off. It was the coldest day of Autumn so far and when I entered the kitchen it appeared the girls would also be pleased I had put the heat on. Elle was covered from head to toe in layers, woolen slippers, a woolen sweater and a woolen beanie. Through chattering teeth she said, “I-I-I-I am so c-c-c-old.” and she curled herself in a tight ball atop the red kitchen stool. Maya was not wearing as many clothes as Elle, but she was hovering by the stove top cooking herself toast. We no longer have a toaster and this is part of my let’s live with less phrase I like to say instead of buying things, so to cook toast we now use a bent wire form that Cam made and the open stove top flame. Now some of you might think this is dangerous, but we consider it just like camping. Whilst watching her toast, making sure that it neither burnt or fell from its balancing place on the wire into the flame, Maya was rubbing her hands together over the warmth. “I am keeping warm by cooking my toast!” she said. “Oh dear, we really seem a little poor don’t we!” I exclaimed. Now I was not saying that in a disheartened way, but merely as a way to share with the girls that being cold and cooking toast in such a rudimentary way could be an experience of being poor, and that we should be grateful that we have choices and that we are actually choosing to be cold and cook our toast on a piece of wire. “But we are not really poor are we? We just like doing things in a simple way because part of helping others not be poor is us knowing how to go without ourselves.”

It is always my goal to help break down many of the social ideas of what rich is or that being rich in an objective sense is even an ideal, and instill in our girls that richness lays in gratitude and being content and helping others, and that things, even something as simple as a toaster, does not define us.

Maya is a wonderful conversationalist, and so she added, “We are not poor, or rich, we are right in the middle, just like Bluebell.” Now any mention of Bluebell please me so very much, because it is through Bluebell that Maya sees the world. “Actually Bluebell is a bit richer than us, because she has more little things and she has me to be her slave.” Maya said. I was interested in the fact that Maya sees herself in service to her felt fairy. “Well, that makes you just like a mummy then really doesn’t it,” I said chuckling inwardly to myself, “A slave to a little person that has more things than you, makes you just like me!”

Now the use of the word slave does not feel very nice, but in jest, to one that actually finds freedom in their role of motherhood because they are so closely tied to it therefore, there is no other choice, you consider yourself decidedly chained, and it is the perfect paradox.

I have been noticing more and more, what a little mummy Maya is. The way she is preparing herself, and the world is preparing her for motherhood already. In my mind it should be that way, that we cultivate motherhood as a profession of choice for those that want to be full-time mothers. { The government needs to support this! } Best know it right from the start I say. Elle on the other hand shows no desire to be a mother and tells us repeatedly that she is not having children and that she is only having a husband and two dogs.

So the day progressed, we got a little schoolwork done, and lots of play and I secretly just wanted to work on the girls advent parcels. It really is so hard to stop the girls playing to teach them some random facts. “Girls, what is the deepest part of the sea?”

“The Mariana trench!” Maya hollered from the living room where they sat on the floor playing in their miniature world. “And which ocean is it in?” I added. “The pacific ocean.” Maya answered.

I am not even sure what facts a child of the world needs to know today, and so many facts seem temporary, so I really just wonder, and then when I think, oh that is interesting and that seems true and factual, then I share it with them. If they choose to remember it, then it is something of interest, and if we all forget it, well then we must not have really cared or been interested, and there is really no use in being anything less than interested, it leads to boring, bored, dull… and well you might not have guessed it, but it can lead to being plagued.

There is this theory, some of my theories are pretty wild and wacky, but I consider negative energy, negative thoughts like a modern-day plague, and I am very careful about not catching it ourselves. It can sneak up on you and no amount of hand washing can help the world with this one, it is something that gets into the mind, and once it is there, it can be so hard to shift… it can be like a cold and just effect you for days, but for some it is like an illness and people live with it their whole life, and this is the trickiest part, some people can be born with it. Some people however  seem to have a wonderful natural immunity to it. As a mother I know that glaring, frowning, sulking, stomping, is just the kind of stuff that shuts out the light and if you want to stay plague free, then you need a lot of light. Darkness, is where the plague thrives, and this all has to do with energy, and so you will hear me say, quite a lot, “Maya, lets keep the energy light!” Energy is a word that gets used a lot in this house. Good energy, bad energy, filling me with energy, draining my energy. I love their energy, their energy seems off, let’s conserve energy, lets release energy. Energy is just the sum of all your feelings and everything that matters, and is sort of an up or down, inside or outside, good or bad, yes or no, right or wrong thing.

Our days, while they can be a string of joyous moments of togetherness, they also can be quite the contrary, and if I am forcing facts on the girls, that they are not interested in, I see that misty musty grey cloud hovering, and it can become a real energy drain… gurgle gurgle gurlge, glug glug glug… and it puts us in the muck. Some muck is ok, some muck can help us grow, but you have to be very careful to know your best muck.

We had been studying sound and we were discussing sonar, and how sound helped us distinguish mass and depth, and why sonar was invented, then we ended up watching a short film, the The Mariana Trench Mysteries about an explorer who went in a submarine that sunk to the deepest part of the ocean. I mean that is a pretty fascinating place, the deepest place on earth. Everyone should take a look at that. I always love this type of learning, that involves a story of someone who was moved to do something extraordinary, and in this case, it was to go really, really, deep.

It is easy to overlook that sonar was an acronym, { SOund Navigation and Ranging } and that sound pulses were used in water to establish depth or masses, with echo location… which is the same thing that bats and dolphins use to navigate. I wanted to go on a whole heap more about Ultrasound and pregnancy too, but I felt I might upset myself worrying about unborn babies, so I will leave sonar there for now.

Sound really is so interesting, sound is a feeling. It is a vibration, it is something that can touch your heart, and reach that very center part of your brain, that special secret spot of knowing. It can activate your pineal gland, your mind’s eye, sound can take you to other dimensions!

You can see how easy it is that morning lessons at our dinning table can turn from sonar and the deepest part of the sea, to bats using sound to navigate, to the middle part of your brain known as the pineal gland, to the sound of your inner voice and us navigating life using all of our inner sound.

Conversations with the girls can go any which way, we really can talk about absolutely anything we want, and you won’t be at all surprised to hear, we too, go really, really deep.

“Well you see, we really have three eyes, but you can only see two, but the third eye you can feel, and when you feel that tingling feeling in the center of your forehead, it means your inner vision is awake, it is like an antenna, and it means you are tuning into life!” Now I don’t really know when the right time to talk about the third eye is exactly, but my hunch it is around late childhood, early adolescence. It is not something you need to talk a lot about, but like sex and all those other adult things you need to at least be aware of prior to becoming an adult, casual dappled conversations here and there are important, because you don’t want to get to that stage in life and have to have an awkward conversation. I mean, you can see it can’t you?

“Mum why on earth did you not explain to me I had a third eye?” Adult Maya would say. “Well times were different then, we did not talk about that stuff so freely.” I would stammer. “Well it is a new age Mum, and we talk about that now and anyway it is hardly new age, the Egyptians loved the pineal gland, I mean you could have brought it up one day when we were at the MET looking at the eye of Horus. I thought you would have felt it was important that I know there is this part of my brain that can give me clarity and help me get through life in the best possible way!”

I really have no cement idea of what I think adult Maya will be like, but I am sure she will be very smart, and that would be a sad conversation to have, and so to avoid any conversation like that in the future, I make sure I share the a little ancient wisdom now and then. Because, yes, that my friends is where the magic lays. Where we have been and where we are going.

Now some of you might be very uncomfortable with all of that so in fact it does not even have to be an esoteric conversation, you could just call it ‘deep open thinking’ but either way, a mother needs to know what this type of feeling is, what it feels like and how to know when that ‘deep open thinking’ feeling is happening, and how best to use it, and then after all of that, you have to be able to make sure your children can see you living life deeply thoughtful, open and free, and recognize how your thinking guides your life, and that they learn to think in a deeply thoughtful open and free way too.

Cam comes and goes from our bubble, he works from what we call the sunroom, which most families in our town use as a playroom for excess toys, but instead of toys in our sunroom we have our Daddy, which is actually the best plaything in the world! We feel very lucky that Cam works from home and it is took us a long while and some bravery to make that happen, but it did happen and it is the best. I wish all families that wanted to be together could work from home. It takes discipline on his part not to hang out with us all day long, and he often tells us to go away, but that is ok. He does however like to stop to play the guitar now and then and come and go for food, to praise schoolwork and good deeds, and to engage with me.

I was sitting at the dinning table working with the girls and Cam was on his way to the kitchen for his intermittent ‘beverage preparation’. It seems that he had grown tired of cooking toast on a piece of wire because as he walked past the table he said, “I just ordered a new toaster, it’s a Darth Vadar one, you stick the toast in the top of its head.” He likes to think of clever things to say to me to fill me with these fearful visions. Eek! Just the mention of those three words, Darth Vadar Toaster sent my mind spinning into an awful junk yard abyss. “A Darth Vadar toaster, what an absurd thought. That is going on my very very very long list of unnecessary things that should not exist in the world.”

I give Cam that pursed lip squinty eye look that shows him I think he is very funny, but I know he would not dare buy that because, well, because I would have a fit or cry or take a deep breath and calmly send it back.

For a brief moment I sat there in the junk yard muck, ruminating. “Why does this toaster even exist?There needs to be someone that is the boss of things like that so they don’t even get produced. There needs to be someone, someone like me actually, with a clipboard and a red pencil who stands at the gates of where stuff arrives and puts a big X { Rejected } on all those things trying to enter our world. That is what this world needs, a mother that is the boss of all the stuff!” I truly see this portal you know, that place where the vessels arrive and all the things are hidden in boxes inside boxes inside boxes. But I have x-ray vision, I have a third eye, I have the sense to know, I am a thinker and doer by golly! And I get so worked up about this stuff and I want to create a movement and I want change and I want to feel that sense of power when the whole world is crumbling because of Darth Vadar… toasters and the dark side trying to take over our life.

Meanwhile Maya is speaking to me… “Mum, you have to listen! I was asking you a question,” she says a little frustrated when I am distracted with saving the world.

It is so hard to come back once you are out in the void like that you know, floating around in that space of all the things you know. Thank goodness for my children who plant my feet back firmly on the ground. I don’t have to save the whole world. I only have to be their mother, which essentially means. I am that person already! In our home, I can say “No!” and since I am so kind and polite and loving, and I don’t really want to hurt the Darth Vadar Toaster’s feelings I could also say, “I am sorry Darth Vadar toaster, but you are not welcome in our home. Come back in your next life as something else please.”

Thank you for reading Magnesium Blue

Artwork and words by Kirsten Rickert, all rights reserved.