If I’m not Wild
If I’m not wild, I know I’ll die. I have sun that lives inside my chest and if I couldn’t be wild one ray at a time would die until I was only black and darkness inside. I have to make weird noises and move my body and tell you exactly what’s on my mind even if it’s that I once saw a dog driving a car who kidnapped a man, and I was very shocked and surprised to see that the man looked relatively calm. And then I realized that the dog was the passenger; the man was the driver, and the car was from Europe.
When I was a kid, I thank God for my farm as I could be wild weird away from human eyes. I had my favourite cow, Goldilocks. She witnessed my weird and wonderful ways. And my dog Trixie was my constant companion while I roamed the fields and spent time behind the barn where no one could see me.
I also felt like one of my best friends was the wind, she would bring me news of another weirdo - probably from Mongolia. That child stood on a mountaintop.
And they felt the same wind that I had who messages of comfort that it was cool and OK to be weird and wild.
When the wind was soft and calm. It was like sweet kisses and hugs to tell me that I was amazing just as I was and when the wind was fierce and strong, she reminded me that she was weird and wild to.
This morning I drove an hour and a half to go for coffee with my best friend. The mean woman behind the counter handed me my latte and I said “thank you so much”. My friend Natalie miss heard me and thought I said “thank you, Sponge.” We laughed about her miss hearing, but I felt sheer joy when she went up to get a napkin, and genuinely said "thank you, Sponge” to the lady behind the counter. She has this amazing ability to speak out her wild all of the time and she doesn’t care if people scowl at her because I am standing right, hind her laughing egging her on
Wild is how I decided I wanted to raise my children. I want them to know what it’s like to be unencumbered and love. I want them to know how being the most raw version of yourself can be treasured. Because that’s what they are they are a treasure and I want to treasure them.
My oldest sing songs about what they’re doing in the moment. I have my own little Adam Sandler seeing about being gassy or just making a sandwich.
I’ve learned through my eldest school difficulties that they have ADHD. The school, child and youth worker reassured me that it wasn’t just regular ADHD. My child was “the most, profoundly distracted [he] had ever seen a child ever in his 22 years working as a child and youth counselor”.
When I got my child assessed, I insisted that many of the traits of the psychologist talked about being ADHD, were simply things that we did at our home. It was simply how we were wild at our house. It was simply learned behavior. It was simply because that’s my child. that’s when she looked at me earnestly and said “tiffany, sometimes, when we do an assessment on our children, we find out that we ourselves may have the same thing that our child has been diagnosed with.“ Meaningful pause, meaningful pause, meaningful pause.
It makes me treasure all the more being wild. To me having ADHD means I just have more wild than other people do. It means that back in the time of having 100 people in a tribe I would be the brave one, the climb to the top of a tree to see where we were going. Or my child would be the person who is hunting the dangerous game. We would be the people who had a hard time sleeping so that we could protect our tribe.
To me ADHD means that my wild can’t be cut off from who I am there’s nothing to extricate. We’re still woven together, but if you took away my wild, you would take away my soul, you can’t take the wild out of a wolf but also why the fuck would you try?
