HEY BOO

what's in your basket?

One day, you decide to give up. You’re pretty sure you’d already given up a thousand times, but this time you’re giving up for the last time. On that day your daughter makes you a tiny boo basket. A miniature one. Was it the cutest thing you’ve ever seen? Yes. But it also showed you that you’d reached a new level of intimacy with yourself through another.

It began when I spent a lot of one afternoon watching every one of India Rose Crawford’s live-action videos with Olive. She hand-knit a tiny frog, and hand makes tiny things for her tiny frog and puts the things and the frog into various cozy scenarios, animating them with a combination of stop-motion and puppetry. In one, a frog bakes a cake. Then he packs a little basket with a big strawberry and a blanket and kicks his feet up against a tree.

The artist meticulously tracks the knitted frog putting on his apron, doing a little kitchen dance, folding up the blanket, and placing it in the basket, and taking his picnic. Then, when he returns home, he paints a picture of himself relaxing before he makes himself snacks and gets into his bed, rubbing his feet on the soft, clean sheets.

In another video, the artist films herself making a boo basket for Frog, complete with a pair of tiny slippers that she’s also hand-crafted. In the video, she also gives the basket to Frog, and we see his delight in receiving the gift.

What would be in your boo basket? I asked Olive and she didn’t know.

Of course, I was going to turn this into a lesson. I wanted to start giving a lecture about how one should always know oneself well enough to be able to identify all the tiny pleasures that makes one feel good, and then, thank god, I didn’t. Partly because that is so annoying but also, I DID NOT REALIZE until I almost sent out this email that boo, in this case means, scary, not boo, like baby or bestie, and so a boo basket is not at all what I thought.

A few mornings later, I woke up feeling just so down I couldn’t have hidden it even if I had had the energy of a thousand suns (ok, that’s dramatic…), so I said exactly what was going on and what the impact might be. I described, in detail, an aspect of the family situation that I had hoped was getting better. And then I said that I didn’t think it was going to improve after all.

At first, she tried to make some bad jokes, and I said one shouldn’t be convinced out of one’s feelings, and sometimes one had to just feel them. Still, it got me right out of bed. I started fussing around in the kitchen, and Olive brought me over a plastic Easter egg.

Is there something inside for me? I asked, hopefully. She said there was. Inside was a bunch of actual fluff.

I was feeling just bad enough that I couldn’t feel bad about not pretending I was excited about the egg and the fluff, and I set it aside. Then the same gift came back, only this time, inside the fluff, was a red die that I didn’t want either.

That’s when she came up with a sure winner: a little tiny scroll with the words I love you written on it when you unraveled the paper. She had placed it inside a little glass jar, which she had seen in another video where the artist had made Frog and an entire Halloween apothecary. Olive is not a demonstrative kid. I can count on one hand the number of times she’s said I love you out loud.

Thank you, I said, with genuine warmth. I love you too.

Love, love, love, she said, rolling the word around in her mouth like she was saying it for the very first time.

She showed me her porcupine puppet and made it do something small with its tiny hands, and I laughed.

I made you laugh, she said triumphantly.

You did, I agreed.

That’s when she had the idea of making me a boo basket, which she made on the same miniature scale as the one this artist had made Frog. The basket also utilized a bottle cap, which the artist used in her videos to take the place of a cake tin. She then made the tiniest zine imaginable, and on each page was a phrase from a motivational poem about doing your best and forgetting the rest. She made a tiny yoga mat out of paper and also a sandwich! The sandwich had two layers of bread, some cheese, and some lettuce, and was the size of a fingernail.

What’s your favorite drink? she asked, and made me a chai represented by a circular cutout colored in metallic rose, with tiny stars placed on the front with a pair of thin tweezers that I hadn’t even known we’d had in our house.

All of this went into the basket, along with a purple crystal, the same color as my birthstone.

She placed a handwritten note in front of these items and a painted rock from her toddlerhood. The note faced outward and read: YOU’LL NEVER BE STOPPED.

My mind boggled at this thoughtfulness, the symbolism of the miniature size of the expression, the hugeness of the creativity, and the unexpectedness of the gift. How it had come when I had let go of performing all hints of having it together. And how this is the only way all the layers can open up to reveal something glistening inside, two people, together in a good place, despite all outward appearances.

It’s like, you know your kids need you to be real with them, but you don’t know HOW real you need to be with yourself.

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