Dirt won’t hurt.

This “motherhood” thing is a most educational experience.

I never – never in my wildest dreams – thought I’d be okay with my child’s legs and clothes looking like this as she played:

I never thought it would make me laugh and grab the camera rather than panic and begin brushing it off. I just never thought I’d see a sight like that and shrug, thinking, “Eh. It’s just dirt.”

I do, though. I see her playing and getting dirty – dirt under her little fingernails and in her ear and around her mouth because she wanted to taste the shovel after I planted flowers – and I don’t panic. No, I don’t let her make a meal of the dirt, and no, I don’t let her chew on the gardening tools, but neither do I bring playtime to a halt because she is no longer spotlessly, glowingly clean. I’m not a lover of the brown stuff, but neither am I completely dirt-phobic, as I always somehow thought I would be.

Why the change? What has brought out this shift in attitude and perspective?

I understand something now that I don’t think I ever did before. (Actually, I think I understand a lot of things now that I didn’t previously…..but there are other posts to address all of that.) I was never around kids a whole lot when I was younger, so I never had the opportunity to grasp an obvious fact about these little people.

They are new to the world, and everything is fascinating to them. It’s all interesting because they’ve never seen or tasted or experienced it before. They are naturally curious because to them, this big place in which they suddenly find themselves is endlessly new and unfamiliar.

It is not my job to keep her clean as she explores. Yes, if we’re on our way to church or a family photo op, she needs to be as clean as her age will allow. When she’s playing, though? A little dirt is not a problem. She’s investigating the world, and if she gets dirty in the process…..guess what? She’ll be fine…and you know what else? She probably learned something she could only have learned by getting dirty. We all have lessons like that, I think – lessons we could only have learned by getting dirt under our proverbial fingernails. Lessons that might not have been pleasant and that required some cleaning up after…but that were, nonetheless, necessary for us to learn and experience.

It is my job to teach her and keep her safe as she explores. I am to expose her to the world, explaining it to her as we go and building a character in her that she will carry throughout her life. I am supposed to allow her to experience life while protecting her from serious and unnecessary harm that she, in her youth, isn’t aware of. I’m to create a nurturing environment where she can learn and explore and develop, growing eventually into the woman that she was created by God to be.

If she gets a little dirty in the process, I’m okay with that. Sometimes the best lessons are the messiest.