While visiting the Marine Center in Port Angeles we learned how a crab grows.
Do you know how a crab grows?
I will tell you.
When a crab becomes a crab he is very small. Like the size of your pinky nail.
Then he decides it is time to grow. He carefully cracks open the back of his shell and pulls himself out of it, leaving behind a shell of what he was.
Now he is soft and vulnerable but he has the potential to get large. First he sucks in a lot of water so he is all stretched, expanded and larger than he was. He will hold this water in and bury himself in the sand and in a couple of days a new shell will form around him and it will harden. He will spit out the water and shrink back down, but now he will have room in his new shell to wiggle and grow.
He will do this every month and over a year he will grow from small to large.
Sometimes I am like a crab.
Sometimes I or someone eternally more wise than I will decide it is time for me to grow. I will have to crawl out of my shell. I will be vulnerable. But over time, in my new shell, I will have more room to wiggle and grow.
It would be a dumb crab to resist the growth wouldn’t it now? Or to blame it’s vulnerability on someone else. Or to refuse to stretch itself to a new situation so that it’s new shell will give it room to grow.
I was like a crab the time I found I was pregnant with twins..
Or the time The Princess first started learning piano. Oh the gnashing of teeth and jellyfish stature…
Or the time someone said mean things about me. (Who would ever, right?)
Or the time I thought, “Look at me. I finished all I was supposed to do today and it’s only 3pm. Maybe I’ll relax and play the rest of the day away.” And then I got a phone call that sent me into a spiral of stress and activity and a few tears. A tear leakage which could only be plugged by a bag of peanut M&M’s (which my sister so thoughtfully bought me for my birthday and which I stashed away for a salty tear day) and the doughnuts a friend was inspired to bring by. (Doughnuts and M&M’s can cure almost anything.)
Sometimes I am like a growing crab.
But sometimes I am like a caterpillar.
If you ask The Princess to describe a caterpillar this is what she will say:
no wings, moves slowly, eats leaves, short legs, cute
Yes, sometimes I am like a caterpillar.
A butterfly is nothing at all like a caterpillar.
Here is how she describes a butterfly:
beautiful, wings, flies, fast, eats nectar, attractive
A butterfly is absolutely nothing at all and completely better than what it was. But the things it ate, and the days it spent as a caterpillar all made it possible so that later it would change form, structure and substance and be something blessedly more beautiful.
Here on earth I grow like a crab, but one day I will be like a butterfly.
And the people who are sometimes mean too me…they are like growing crabs too aren’t they? Oh well, one day they will be a butterfly.
How’s that for a science lesson?