Metamorphosis
By Elizabeth Berget
@elizabeth_a_berget
I’ve been known to say that you could not pay me enough to even step foot inside of a butterfly garden. But as it turns out, all it took was several minutes of intensive begging from my children before I hesitantly consented to their impassioned pleas.
I have long had a phobia of butterflies, which I know is like being scared of fairies or like saying you don’t like Beyoncé. Of course, I think they’re beautiful—from a healthy distance—or from behind a window. But their legs ... it’s their legs that I cannot handle—those long, black, alien appendages just waiting to dance upon my scalp unnoticed. And their movements are so unpredictable: will their fluttering wings take them right past me, or will they stop mid-air and decide to land on my face? Stuff. Of. Nightmares.
My kids, due to a lot of hard work on my part to not pass on my neurosis, love butterflies. And one fateful day while we were roaming the zoo, they caught sight of the butterfly garden entrance, which I had managed to strategically avoid in past visits. The bright springtime colors of the sign drew them in like moths to a flame. Before I knew it, a chorus of pleeeeases filled the air around me, and we were standing in line while I practiced the breathing techniques I’d learned in therapy, trying desperately to calm my fluttering heart.
When it was finally our turn to go in, I grabbed their hands and rushed them along the semi-circle path towards what was feeling more and more like a finish line. I whispered affirmations to myself: You can do this. You once lived in rural Africa. They can’t hurt you. I tried with all of my being to act like a normal person, but my fight-or-flight instinct kicked in; I dodged every fluttering wing like I was in The Matrix and pulled on my kids’ hands, silently willing them to hurry.
We made it through in record time. Not a butterfly landed on me. I was feeling pretty good; I had made the ultimate sacrifice for my kids. Mom Of The Year.
And then we got to the end—a net-enclosed area where the zookeepers were to check us and our belongings for any rare and expensive butterflies clinging to us as a means of escape. I continued my breathing exercises as the zookeeper said, “Okay, looks like you’re all goo—”
She paused as she squinted again at my backpack … which triggered me to involuntarily bodyslam my backpack to the ground with a stifled scream.
My kids leapt away from me.
The zookeeper looked at me like I was crazy.
I mumbled an apology as she scowled at me and motioned us through the door with a rightfully annoyed wave of her hand. I ducked my head as my cheeks flamed red and made my exit in disgrace, heading directly to the nearest zoo coffee shop to drown my shame in a frosted brownie.
But just like women somehow forget the pain of childbirth in order to have another baby, several years later, I had apparently forgotten that mortifying moment because when my kids pleaded with me to capture a monarch caterpillar so that they could watch it turn into a butterfly this past summer, I somehow agreed.
I agreed to bring a butterfly into my house.
The teacher in me was delighted with my kids’ curiosity. The rest of me briefly considered telling them that it was against the law. But my kids had convinced me that they’d take care of it and that they wouldn’t let it escape and land on me, so I relented. Over the next few days, the kids dutifully fed the caterpillar, while I eyed it with suspicion as it sat on my kitchen counter.
After about a week, the caterpillar made his way towards the top of the jar and hung upside-down from a stick. I began to grow nervous because he hung that way and stayed absolutely still for about twenty-four hours. Like mothers from ages past, I was now fully invested in what was to have been my kids’ butterfly project, and my Google search history was filled with articulate queries like Monarch butterfly upside-down still and sick? Monarch butterfly very still and dying? The internet assured me that this extended stillness was normal.
The next day, after we’d been out all morning, we came home for lunch and found our caterpillar cozied up in a bright green chrysalis, which again hung perfectly still for the next week and a half. I cannot tell you how many times I glanced over at the chrysalis in the days that followed, while cooking dinner with one hand and changing a diaper with the other, and wondered at the stillness taking place inside the jar ... envied it even.
And then one afternoon as I entered the kitchen with a laundry basket on my hip, I shrieked: “He’s out!” Where once had been a fat and admittedly gross caterpillar, there was now a beautiful monarch butterfly, bits of the chrysalis still clinging to him. My kids came running, and we all sat and gazed at our butterfly through the jar as his body stretched out and his new wings unfurled, while I tried to avoid making eye contact with his legs.
Long after my kids had lost interest, I kept finding myself returning to the butterfly jar. I took fifty-seven pictures with my phone, then another thirty-two more with our real camera. And while my camera clicked, I tried to figure out why I was so taken with this butterfly. I wasn’t surprised by the rebirth ... the change was as familiar as the life-cycle diagram in my third-grade science textbook. It was what had led to the metamorphosis—this beautiful transformation had not come from an extraordinary amount of effort; rather, it was the result of an extraordinary amount of stillness.
I am nearing forty, and it now takes both hands to count my own life-cycles—daughter, student, graduate, missionary, teacher, wife, mother—each new phase an unfurling of colored wings, a rebirth, a death. Through each of these stages, I have marched to the beat of the same frantic drum, pushing myself to do more, to be more. Mine was the anxious back that carried the group projects in elementary grades, and each December 31st, I would dutifully copy New Year’s Resolutions into my Lisa Frank binder. As a teacher, I was often the last to leave school at night, and once I was engaged, I read every marriage book I could get my hands on. I would wake up at 5 a.m., stepping lightly to avoid the creakiest floor boards, in order to find an extra hour to do more, wanting a life marked by excellence.
But there is nothing like small children to slow your roll.
In the first few months of my first born's life, I would sit on our green couch, nursing for hours as we worked through supply issues and mastitis, and while there was a part of me that loved to do nothing but snuggle him and smell his perfect head, there was also a very real part of me that throbbed with the desire to be getting more done. I simply could not believe that spending entire days wranging this tiny person’s sleep and eating habits, while only managing to cut four of his ten fingernails, could ever be considered enough. I’d nurse him while my mind counted and recounted the closets that needed to be organized along with each and every pound that I wanted to lose, my mind a scrolling marquee of all that I was not accomplishing, all of the ways I was falling short, as I sat imprisoned on that green couch.
I had thought that the same rules that had rendered success in my past incarnations would also apply to motherhood—do more, be more; strive, thrive. So as one kid turned into three, my days began and ended with lists: after surviving the morning gauntlet of Cheerios and soggy diapers, I would turn to my bullet journal, the svelte ghost of Lisa Frank binders past, noting all I hoped to accomplish. Throughout the day, I would fill my desk in the kitchen with enough post-it notes to rival the ending of A Beautiful Mind, reminders to research gym fees and to find the next size of toddler rain boots and to check all of our hand soaps for parabens. But I was finding that all the lists in the world could not compete with how long it takes to read Little Blue Truck forty-seven times in one day at my toddler’s request. And at the end of each day, I would defeatedly copy the same list onto the next day’s page in my planner, consumed with both how far I’d fallen short as well as with guilt over the moments I had been impatient with my children while trying to get anything done.
A few years into motherhood, I once conducted an experiment and timed how long it would take my three children under the age four to walk one city block to the library if I stopped every time they asked me to—allowing them to see this ladybug, then that one, this blade of grass, then that one. I bit my tongue and refrained from hurrying them along. It took us twenty-three minutes. Twenty. Three. Minutes. As we walked, I felt the familiar racing of my heart as my mind reviewed all that was left to be done in the day because I was interested in getting to the library, checking out our books, returning home, and moving on with our day. My children, however, were interested in noticing.
What I didn’t know then but only am beginning to joyfully understand now is that these babies who at times felt like deadweights were actually soothing weighted blankets, forcing me to slow down. That green couch of my earliest days of motherhood was not in fact a prison, but my own green chrysalis of compulsory stillness, filled with burp cloths and assorted pump parts, slowly preparing me for a more vivid way of living.
Because seven years into motherhood, I am finally learning that stillness is anything but fruitless—it is transformative. All of those years of muscling my way to productivity had brought me little else besides occasionally crippling anxiety and a trail of connective moments overlooked in my pursuit of efficiency. But like toddlers to a ladybug, it is from a posture of stillness that I can notice and respond to both myself and to those I love from a place of wonder, a place of peace. In stillness, the power of availability triumphs over the power of hustle. In stillness, my inner voice of urgency is drowned out by newborn wails and toddler giggles. In stillness, my messy closets become the best hide-and-seek spots. And in stillness, I sense myself emerging into who I was really meant to be.
And that is why I continued to stare at the butterfly long after my kids had begun to ask to set him free. But I eventually blotted away my tears as my husband carried the jar outside. I stood at a safe distance while he removed the lid and released our butterfly. And I breathed a silent prayer of thanks as this parable lifted itself into a sunny, blue sky.
Guest post written by Elizabeth Berget. Elizabeth is a wife, mama to three, homeschooler, and photographer who has always done her best thinking while writing—from her angsty teenage journal entries until now. She’s lived in Africa and Asia but is really just a country mouse with a Minneapolis zip code. She strongly believes in the restorative power of Jesus and a home-cooked meal, or even just a really good cheese. You can find more of her words previously on Coffee + Crumbs, at her website, or on Instagram.