Freeing butterflies from the belly
Thoughts on an unexpected nighttime improvisation
“Daddy?”
My eyelids lift slowly. It’s the middle of the night, and Cub is standing next to my side of the bed. I pull off my CPAP mask and turn off the machine.
“What’s up?” I ask, putting on my glasses. “You OK?”
“I have butterflies.”
“Butterflies? Like in your belly?”
“Mm-hmm. Can you come into my room?”
“Sure.” I get up and follow across the hall. Cub climbs into bed and pulls up the blanket. I sit alongside, on the edge of the mattress.
“Can you describe what you’re feeling?” I ask.
“Butterflies, moving around in my tummy.”
“I see. Are you feeling nervous about something?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hmm.” I pause.
Without thinking, I move my right hand to a spot in the air above Cub’s belly. “What’s this?” I ask playfully.
Cub looks at me, curious.
“Is that a butterfly?” I whisper. “Yes, it is! Here it comes!”
My left hand crosses over my right, palms up, and my thumbs interlock. Finger-wings flap deftly into the air and over my shoulder, while the tip of my tongue whips back and forth lightly behind “ooh”-shaped lips to make a fluttering sound.
Cub looks at me, mouth frozen in half-smile, surprised by what’s just happened, wondering what will happen next.
“I think I see another one,” I say, eyes alight with the game. My right hand returns to the spot above Cub’s belly. “Yes, here it comes!” Left hand joins with right, and a joyful flutter of wings springs again from Cub’s abdomen and escapes across my shoulder.
“The last one is a big one,” Cub says, smiling.
“Oh, yeah? Let’s see.” I lean forward to investigate. “It’s a really big one! Are you ready?”
Cub nods eagerly.
“Here it comes!”
Thumbs interlock again, and this time, my elbows join in a vigorous flapping of enormous wings. The great butterfly sounds like a helicopter lifting off and away.
“Wow,” I say. “That was a big one.” I pause and allow a happy breath to pass in and out. “How do you feel?”
“Good.”
In my personal experience, every creative act I undertake contains an element of mystery and grace that can’t be reduced to any particular story I tell myself about it.
Though Cub and I engage in imaginative play often, we had never performed this kind of improvisation before, and I have no idea what sparked it. That said, I can describe some of the conditions that, I think, enabled it to happen.
In the weeks prior to that late-night wake-up, I’d been trying to do a better job of noticing whenever one of my kids made a bid for connection with me, whether a request to read a book, help build something, or take part in some imaginative play. I wrote about this back in October.
I’d also been reading Aaron J. Jackson’s Worlds of Care, which I wrote about in December, which offers a powerful account of how the simplest acts and ongoing adjustments of a dad’s body, oriented toward the child, provide the practical foundation for shared meaning and trust to flourish between them. This prompted me to pay more attention to how I was using my body when parenting. For example, did I turn toward a request with ease and gentleness? Or did I turn away, tense with resistance, and start talking about why I “couldn’t” do something? And what was the tone of my voice in that moment?
Then came that particular late-night wake-up. Such wake-ups provide a useful indicator of where my habits of interaction tend, because the wee hours blunt my capacity for reflection in the moment, and I default to practiced forms of response.
Looking back on my and Cub’s butterfly improvisation, a few things come into focus. However tired I might have been, I didn’t try to push that feeling away: it was simply a quality of my experience. I didn’t focus on getting myself back to bed. I didn’t rush to try and “fix” or “explain away” the feeling that made Cub unable to sleep. Instead, I got curious, and I listened, and when Cub’s butterflies didn’t appear to be attached to any particular worry or fear, we were left with the butterflies themselves—and that’s when the unexplainable happened. Perhaps my being tired in the middle of the night made it easier for me to imagine the butterflies concretely and respond to them as such, instead of consigning them to the parched realm of psychosomatic metaphor.
Did all the reflection, reading, writing, and efforts to clarify my attention lead to my and Cub’s improvisation? I don’t know. Mystery and grace abound. But it’s an interesting story with the power to keep me on the right track. The best that any of us can do is cultivate the right conditions.