Klutz

‘Please, unplug that toaster before you stick a fork in it,” I hear my husband say, and without looking, I know which child he is talking to.
“But the bagel is stuck,” she mutters, after which my husband patiently explains what can happen when you poke around the toaster with a metal utensil. Crisis averted, I think, and not for the first time.

Isabella is a brilliant, lovely, extremely creative, and wonderful child. All in all, she’s positively delightful; she is also one of the klutziest children who ever walked the earth. There is no table in the house she hasn’t bumped into, no dust bunny she hasn’t tripped over, no staircase she hasn’t fallen down from. Put it in her path, no matter how small, and she will bash into it with gusto.

I have a theory. Isabella likes to ponder a multitude of things; very often what she is thinking about has little in common with what she is doing at the moment. She likes to think about Big Things, and forgets about small, practical matters. “How do we save the polar bears” she wants to know, and subsequently forgets to wash her hands, brush her teeth, or flush the toilet. She can’t be bothered to clean her room, because she is “writing a poem right now.” She dreams away, visiting far-flung places, while her dinner gets cold in front of her. And who can worry about whether your shirt is clean, or your homework finished, if you’ve just discovered what a Haiku sounds like? Isabella is a dreamer, not a doer.

She is not allowed to navigate parking lots without one of us firmly holding her hand; she simply doesn’t see the cars driving towards her. Isabella knows about everyday reality, and has firmly rejected it. “Wouldn’t it be fun,” she says, “if everybody rode horses and carriages everywhere, and cars didn’t exist?” And: “Wouldn’t it be great, if there was no money, and everything was free?” She believes in elves, and unicorns, and leprechauns. She believes anything and everything is possible, if you just dream about it often enough.

I wonder what the world looks like, to an eight-year-old, whose dreams and fantasies have absolutely no limits. I’m thinking it’s a happy place; although I am afraid it is just as easy to be trampled by a unicorn as it is to get electrocuted by a toaster.
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