Looking Through Prisms

This morning, the Adult Meredith is embarrassed that I used the word “rainbow” in yesterday’s post. She says it’s silly. Why is it silly? She can’t really say. But Little Meredith thought it was a great word, and she used it in almost every journal entry from 1989:

“I have rainbow crystals in my window. When the sun shines through them, they make little rainbow spots on the wall. I like to watch them dance.”

“I have some sharpened crayons. I also have some new headbands that are rainbow colors.”

“Today I found my pony, with her glittering stars and moon and her curly horns. She had rainbow hair with all different colors. My favorite.” (No, really?).

I became a BIG fan of Lisa Frank.

I “wrote” my first journal while sitting on the edge of my bed in my pajamas, telling Mom and Dad what I wanted to say because I couldn’t write yet. The result is an unselfconscious freedom that is often…OK, it’s often silly…and even lapses into a completely different language sometimes. Example:

“My little hat/Is so decat/As sodas from amoda/Parret from pioda moda/In dosa hair.”

But really – is it really so silly simply to be who you are? To be blissfully unconcerned about What Other People Think about your voice? And most wonderfully – not to care what you think about your voice?

I want to while away a February afternoon at the kitchen table again, pretending to be an inventor with water and food coloring, watching the plumes of red and blue and yellow and green plop, curl and feather in the glass. I’ll end up with all the same color, olive green and black, and I’ll be happy with that.

This blog is partly an experiment in learning to use the voice God gave me, the one He put in me infinitely before I was a fuzzy flicker on an ultrasound. Because I spent 20 years forgetting the things I knew at the kitchen table, and it turns out they were important. So I’m going to mix my colors, and I won’t care if I end up with olive green in the end, because

olive green is beautiful.