ARCHIVE FOR Ben Berman

My four-year-old is not exactly a huge sports fan.

Toss her a football, and she’ll stuff it under her shirt and announce that she’s having a baby. Ask about her spirit animal, and she’ll tell you that she is a delicate butterfly. Sometimes, when she’s supposed to be brushing her teeth, I’ll catch her singing in front of the bathroom mirror, I’m a pretty flower, such a pretty flower.

My four-year-old and I were recently walking to the playground when she noticed a picture of a young girl, not much older than her, hugging a dog.

Aww, she said, what a cute puppy.

I didn’t have the heart to explain why a picture like that would be posted to a telephone pole, and so I smiled and continued walking when she started to sound out the letters in bold on top of the poster.

I’m between poems this morning, which always makes me feel a little lost and anxious, like a puppy waiting for his owner to return home, so I start flipping through an old notebook where I used to gather inspirational quotes.

Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a landmine, writes Ray Bradbury.  The landmine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces together.

Last night, my two-year-old spent the evening dropping fistfuls of fried rice from her high seat while singing Humpty Dumpty had a great faaaaall!

I probably should have intervened – taken her bowl away or redirected her. At the very least I should have stopped making sound effects every time the rice hit the carpet.

But as a poet, I’ve developed the ability to detach myself from my parental responsibilities and view my kids, instead, as adorable little metaphors.

My four-year-old is in the living room, playing with magnetic building blocks. She is as focused as I’ve ever seen her, paying as much attention to shapes as to colors, aesthetics as to structure.

But I don’t have a story until I have two stories, wrote Grace Paley, and along comes my two-year-old. It’s as though she’s just finished watching Donnie Darko and is convinced that destruction, too, is a form of creation.