Magic Moments

and the slog to get to them

(Photo of Greta from 2018)

My life is much like anyone else’s—ups & downs, twists & turns, good days & bad days, magic and slog. This is how it is for everyone, with seasonal storms of positive and negative.

My favorite thing, though, is when the negative gets swooped away dramatically by a positive. You’re going along thinking “this is NOT what I want to be doing right now,” when BAM! Something absolutely SPARKLING happens to you, and your perspective has suddenly changed, all is bright, and things are all of a sudden beautiful.

In my head I call these Magic Moments, and one such moment happened to me last night. It was so wonderful, it was like the warmest of hugs!

My girls each got a pair of ice skates for Christmas. We have an ice skating rink just across the river from us—about a 15 minute walk, about a 3-4 minute drive—very near. It’s a sweet little rink with a lovely staff of young people, affordable community-based prices, skate rentals, a vending machine, bathrooms that are just gross enough to be part of the experience without being a scary health hazard, and a sense of safety about it. People just leave their possessions all over the place inside, it’s great! They have a homeschool skate time on Tuesdays that are at a discounted price, and we've really enjoyed that. The girls and their friends all love ice skating (and one of their friends works at the rink!) so it’s no surprise that for the past couple of winters they have spent a lot of time there.

Now, I love ice skating too, and join when I can, but the girls have been going so often that it’s typically an outing that requires me to do a simple drop-off and pick-up, leaving Sylvi and myself alone for a few hours to do whatever we might do in that span of time. However, last night when they were all getting ready to go, the big girls really wanted Sylvi to come along, and Sylvi herself was all for it.

Oh boy. This was not what I’d planned for my evening. Martin was in the middle of an on-shift weekend, we’d hosted his family for Christmas that day, I had spent the day and night previous cleaning and cooking to be ready for his family. I was wiped. Also, it was cold. (I mean, of course it was. Hi, January!) And Sylvi is not an accomplished skater—she’s actually a terrible skater. She just holds on to me while I pull her around the ice, until she discovers the fun of playing noodle-legs and falling down and I inevitably spend the second half of the session picking her up off the ice over and over while she cackles at her own hilarity. She hates skating with anyone else besides me, even though her sisters beg for a turn hauling her around. Sometimes it’s really wonderful, but wonderful or not, it’s always an event that takes a lot of energy and maternal patience.

Of course, we joined. And of course we were late. Because of course Sylvi didn’t really want to wear layers because of the potential rumples, and there were tears, then a run back inside after everyone was buckled in the car because Sylvi wanted cookies for the journey. And of course when we made it to the rink I had trouble parking, making us even slower to get to the session. And of course, once inside, Sylvi and I spent twenty minutes in the building, fussing with her skate adjustments to get them to the perfect state of comfort. And of course we went out to the ice only to realize we’d lost a mitten somewhere and had to go back inside to look for it. And of course the big reason she’d wanted to go was for vending machine snacks, for which I had no money, but for which she begged anyhow. And of course within the first half hour I felt like I had made a mistake in giving in and coming along to the ice skating rink.

But then—

BuT tHeN!!!

Okay, wait, I have to backtrack—

Last time I joined the girls skating I had left Sylvi with Martin, so I’d been able to skate myself. Usually the speakers are proclaiming pop music, a lot of Taylor Swift and artist completely unknown to me because I am geriatric in my life and in my listening. But this time they randomly played “I See the Light” from the movie Tangled, which is not by any means Sylvi’s favorite movie, but it IS her favorite soundtrack, and we listen to it ALL THE TIME. It’s really adorable the way she sings along with such gusto to all the songs. When that song came on, my other girls and I all squealed and wished that Sylvi had been there to hear her favorite song playing over the loudspeakers at the skating rink! Alas, we just had to tell her about it, and she was happy to hear it, but wished she had been there in the flesh for what was clearly a very special moment in time.

(okay, back to real time now)—LUCKY FOR HER, it happened again! And lucky for me, it happened almost as soon as she and I had finally made it onto the ice together after such a process. The song began to play and she noticed immediately, and absolutely lit up.

(Photo from two years ago, but that’s the reindeer balaclava!)

And suddenly, with that simple occurrence of her favorite song playing in one of her favorite places, the struggle that had been, up until that moment, of getting a five year old onto the ice rink at 8pm simply melted away and all that I cared about was her joyful smile shining up at me from the depths of her reindeer balaclava, her immense happiness so radiant that the little bits of ice fluff covering the front of her coat all just melted away. (Okay, maaaybe an exaggeration.)

And that was it. That was all I needed. A cheesy Disney song turned my frustration of momming into a moment of “how can this possibly be my life, how am I so worthy of existing in this absolute dreamland of motherhood?!”

It’s always like that for me, I’m always grumbling about the dreary parts of mothering or life in general, and then I’m often shown in a swift and simple way that everything is beautiful. The tantrum happening when its time to leave the house, the going back inside for a cookie, the arms full of stuff, the dropped mittens—it’s all part of the path to seeing the absolute magic that is right in front of my face all the time, if I would just open my eyes and see it.

(This is Anja at the rink 10 years ago!)