02-26-11

With some, it's a newfound concern with healthy foods or family relationship. With others, it's a religion long abandoned.

With me, apparently, it's playing dress-up.

Long, long before this diary - which makes it long, long ago indeed - I was profoundly committed to a closet full of flowing capes, poet shirts, funny hats, full skirts, and scrunchy boots. Of course, that was the 1980s.

Fast-forward through 20 years of very boring suits and spike heels with matching scarves and bags, and here I am in Mommy-land with the freedom to do, and to wear, whatever I want.

So, with this insane freedom enfolding me, I find myself now profoundly committed to dressing up Progeny and dragging her to every Renaissance festival in the tri-state area. Who knew?

Progeny loves it, of course. We have much preparatory talk about "Peay Desses" (pretty dresses) and hearing "max" (music). She knows what "road trip" means. And the other month she lisped out - to my heart's delight - "Mommy sooo HAP-py! Mommy go wenfest!"

Yes, Mommy is so unspeakably happy to go to Renfest. We've bought pastries and pasties. We've ridden elephants. We've tried on endless little princessy hats. She has bumbled around to bagpipes, hopped to hammer dulcimer, and lyrically twirled to lute.

I have one great mental picture of her - because I wasn't fast enough with the camera - in her tiny brown-and-red tabard dress, standing in the lanes and staring up from knee-height in delight at six or seven huge barbarians in furs and leathers.

As I watch my little one taking such joy in all this music and motion, I remember who I used to be. And it's a chance to remember the good parts without all the angst and squick: the creativity, the colors, the joy of sharing a good day with like-minded people doing something slightly bonkers.

I wrote once that I was not ready to stop and be still for a child. Now that I have a child, I realize that I haven't stopped at all. Well, I have. But in a good way. It's a stopping of meditation, of examination, of "being" rather than "doing."

It's a stopping, and a quiet backward-moving, in a quiet eddy of this emotional river. It's a fleeting time, and such an amazing gift.

And it's a God-given and entirely unexpected chance to wear Peay Desses once again.