Our family recently started keeping an online chore chart. Along with keeping track of the jobs my children do, I send them encouraging messages. The kids send messages back—things like, “Why does everybody else have more points than me?” and “When will this job chart be done?” and “Thanks, Mom. You are very encurageing!!!!!!”
My four year-old is the most prolific message-sender (she is not going to be left out of anything.) Most of her messages look like this:
sdnl’bl’sdpo9jnc/cv’’;;;;;;;;;;;DNMSEFCMKDFGNfg;lcvmr cvlkz vfgne49ogrnz/z/
Every once in a while, though, now that she can write her name, she sends me this message:
stephanie
It is an excellent message to get. Those nine letters hold so much.
Her older sister, Middle, used to always be the first kid awake in the morning. She would find me writing, and often crawled into my lap and asked to type her name into whatever I was working on. It struck me at the time that together we were on to something big. On some level we were sharing a desire to create, both of us learning to put a piece of ourselves into the universe, wanting to see it solid before our eyes.
Sometimes I wonder if that is all I am doing with this writing thing—finding new ways to write my name, naming the people and things around me, grasping ideas or the tiniest shreds of what happens in a day and trying to make them stay a little longer by giving them names, too.
I was here. This is what I saw. Do you see it, too?
Like some sort of cosmic graffiti. It all starts with a name.
