Sorry. I did not mean to shout. I only wanted to call your attention to the fact that it's not empty. It looks empty, but it's not empty. So I would implore you to stick around. Maybe you could help me out. I'm here, but I'm not here. I never should have let the kids play with the substance of reality. I should have stopped them before things got out of hand.
In my defence, I was very tired.
I try not to be. I try to be very alert. Very awake. However, things are not always as they should be when you're dealing with a baby. Or a toddler for that matter. I know that they don't exactly know each other all that well. I don't know either of them all that well. I've only known the toddler for three years. Really only just getting to know the baby as I had only met her a few months ago. Granted, they're just getting to know themselves and each other. I guess the problem is that one's first impression of oneself is that of a child. We all get to know ourselves as children and so we always sort of think of ourselves as children. Hang out with your own kids for long enough and you begin to wonder where their parents are.
But somewhere in the background of everything, there was a sense of being very responsible for these two kids. And I really needed to be able to do something in order to maintain a certain level of coherence. However, the baby was not making it all that easy. It was suffering from colic. As we were all suffering from its colic. No sleep at night. That might have been where things started to fall apart.
There we are all were. In the living room. A typical morning. Just the three of us. Couldn't be more simple. You don't ever really have strong and firm understanding of what's going on with this sort of thing happens. As a progressive parent you want to allow your kids plenty of room to explore the world. You don't want to set limits. You don't want to stifle their creativity. Part of this is because you don't want them to get some kind of weird psychological complex. Part of it is because you've forgotten how to be a kid and they have to teach you the whole business all over again.
It's uphill work. You spend most of your adult life trying to avoid being a child again. It's undignified. And if they ever find out that you aren't actually the adult you're pretending to be, they'll take all of your adult things away. Your car and your beer and things. They can't let children have that sort of thing and they WILL take it away and you don't want them to do that because if the did you'd have to pout and get all cranky and then they'd send you to bed for a nap.
So you try your best to let your kids be kids and keep them from the kind of limitations that you have picked-up over many, many years of being an adult. And that's where I guess I was when I let them do what they were doing that morning. We were all suffering from a lack of sleep. And so I guess I wanted to be progressive and open minded when my toddler decided to start building a tower with more blocks than there actually were in the living room. she was pulling big plastic blocks out of all the empty space in the room, effectively overpopulating it with her tower, most of which didn't actually exist.
I should have stopped it at that stage, but I didn't.
The baby crawled forward and inverted the tower on itself. And I probably should have said something, but I didn't want to stifle her creativity. And anyway she was a baby and didn't know any better. But I did need to get up pick her up to keep her out of trouble. The problem with this was the fact that inverting blocks that did exist into blocks that didn't exist caused matter to evaporate very quickly. And so the space in the room was all out of joint. I stood up, but not in the vertical sense. I stood up outside of a few different dimensions. Things skewed at odd angles that didn't actually exist and everything started evaporating.
So you see, it's not like it doesn't exist or anything. All of the matter in the room is still very much here, it's just scattered into various places that you wouldn't normally think to look. And I guess I've gotten myself into this problem so I shouldn't be asking someone else for help, but you DO appear to be a responsible adult and I seem to have become a bit lost in this whole childhood thing. So I guess I feel the need to ask you to help me out. Come right in. Just don't play with anything.
If you start to play with something, you start to let the mask fall. And they all know you're just a child. And they will all take your stuff away. All of my stuff is here. I know it doesn't look like it, but all of my stuff is in here. It's in here somewhere. It's not empty in here. It's all in here somewhere. I just can't find it at the moment. Please don't leave, though. I know you're in here somewhere. I just can't see you.
But don't leave. I couldn't stand it if you left. Perhaps we can reach out into all of the strange directions and play hide and seek. I know one of us is the baby. And I know one of us is the toddler. We don't even have to pretend that there's an adult anymore. I think we're safe now.
