You Will Be Small Until You are Infinite; To My Toddler

You Will Be Small

Until You are Infinite: To my sweet girl

You will be small and people will love you simply for being. You will be of no threat to them in your innocence and smallness and they will receive you.

You will walk by everyone you meet and blow them kisses and screech “Hi” as loudly as you can just to connect.

A day will come when you will no longer be received. You will be “too much” for some people, and not enough for others. Pain will hit you like a piece of glass separating the two sides of your body that at times you will not be able to get to the other side of. For the first time, you will be larger, and feel smaller.

You will shrink into yourself using caution as to where you direct your kiss blowing and hello screeches and eventually they will whither away as a part of who you used to be. But, I will remember who you truly are. I will remember the eyes you saw through as a toddler and I vow to remind you of what your vision carried with it in each connection you made. Only love.

When you are slamming doors in my face, resisting any of my attempts to get into your heart, when you no longer need me, I will remind you of your own love, even when you’re spewing hate.

You will grow. Change will wreck havoc on the comfort you’ve known and confusion will wrinkle your forehead and bind your mind to captivity.

When the time is right, you will again, be ripped from the chains that bind you into a new kind of comfort that you’ve grown into from your old comfort, requiring you, to yet again, be harnessed to something new and unasked for. You will feel afraid but act anyway because you are brave.

You will harness your freedom or your fear, and whichever you choose will end you up where you’d hoped from the moment you conceived of a dream. Except it will never look they way you’d imagined it. It will look radically different and you will be grateful anyway.

You will feel alone time and time again and each time, there will come a point of your loneliness that you will be reminded how “together” we are.

You will feel like half of a person and be reminded at the end of each half assed attempt to make it through the day, exactly how whole you are.

You will feel broken. You will rip open wounds, and each time, you will get closer to the core of your truth.

You will grow large, and look down at toddlers like you one day. You will not say, “I used to be that small.”

They will remind you of yourself before you knew pain, before you separated yourself into compartments of your wholeness and only opened certain doors to certain kinds of people. You will be glorious in the relief that comes from wisdom and aging, knowing that it leads you to the one place you’d forgotten to remember in yourself.

The place that excitedly says hello to everyone as if they’re a new best friend, and blow them kisses not because they did a thing for you but because you see them, and you’re excited that they exist along side you.

I wish I could take out all of the pain that comes in between the time you stop blowing kisses and the time that hopefully, you do enough self work, to remember that you’re entitled to kiss blowing and it’s not harassment, but connection, and connection can be proceeded with trust rather than avoidance.

But I can’t.

My wish for you my love, is that you remember life as you saw it when you were a toddler, where every stranger was your friend and savior, where discrimination was not a concept, and where love truly did, trump fear.

My wish is that you remember it, every single day of your entire life, but remembrance is a practice. And practice takes commitment to what you value.

My love, if you could see the way the toddler in you values every single person with overwhelming joy, that you walk by, and not let the pain of living take you too far away from yourself with each hurt, you will look down at toddlers like you one day, and say, “You are not small. You are infinite, and I am in you, and you, are in me. Thank you for seeing me.”

You will blow them a kiss back, not in awe of reminiscence or self pity at how fast it goes, but in the gift of remembrance.Together, you will both go to ground zero of a collective truth and play on the floor with the toys of your own innocence and love the other for it.

I wish you joy, but to taste her, you must be willing to remember. You must be willing to harness this sight of the world, which is held by the strings of love and you must be willing to see what you saw as a toddler, even when the world has thrown you to your knees, kicked you when you’re down, and asked you to stay on the ground.

You will get up and say, “I am not small. I am infinite, and I am in you, and you are in me,” and when you stand in love, rather than fall to it, you will remind those who’ve perpetrated upon you that they are infinite, and where infinity resides, joy is an offering.

My heart, your sight through the eyes of the Christ within you, is your greatest gift. May each day, you reopen it, so it may be re-gifted, and you yourself, will remember what you taught me as a toddler. We are not small. We are infinite, and excitable, and loving and deserving, not because we did anything special at all, but because we are children of divinity, expressing ourselves in form, here to remind each other of one thing. Who we are in the eyes of God.

Innocent and ever present, love in manifest form.

Thank you for your gift of remembrance my sweet sweet toddler within, and my sweet sweet toddler, in form.