Upset people tend to see the world in a way which justifies the continuation of the upset.  At least that is what a guy told me once, and he seemed believable enough.  I was thinking about this as I looked over at Raylan, somewhere in the vicinity of age 3, currently knee deep in a man made creek in the middle of Reiman Gardens in Ames, Iowa.  He had tried to jump on a rock.  He had missed.

I laughed.  Raylan chose a different direction.  I still laughed.  He wasn’t mine after all.

My mother, God bless her, had decided we should celebrate Mother’s Day on Saturday, giving my four younger sisters the chance to spend Sunday with their families.  My mother thought she had done a great thing.  I suspect what she’d really done was give my four brother-in-laws heartburn.

She had picked Reiman Gardens in Ames as part of the way to spend the Saturday.  They were hosting a butterfly and a treehouse exhibit, and she assumed the kids would find both enjoyable.  Two sisters and an assortment of nieces and nephews went with my parents and I.

To get to the butterfly exhibit, you walk into a short hallway.  Either end has a door.  Both can’t be open at the same time.  This is to keep the butterflies from escaping they say, but I would guess it also ensured the lady laying down the law had a captive audience.  She spoke to the kids in the voice most adults use to read to fairytales to them in.  Among the instructions she laid out was, “Don’t touch the butterflies.”

There were three boys in the group, ranging in age from 3-5.  Evidently she thought the boys would try to pet them.  Evidently she hadn’t raised any boys.

I haven’t either, but I knew my own kind well enough to know they were looking to make grease spots of them.  This is exactly what one nephew, Bowen, was intending to do.  I caught him by the arm as he was bending his knees to jump on what was probably a Duke of Burgundy on the sidewalk before him.

“You can’t touch them, Bowen,” his mother said.  Hmmm.  Maybe that woman had raised boys after all.  Mothers view their children in a way which justifies the continued belief of their good motherhood, I suppose, and I am sure it is the same with fathers.

We ventured out into the gardens.  It was similar to a pasture walk without any anxiety that I would find cows out.  Free of such worries, my mind was left to think of how much its stocking rate could be improved with an application of 2 4-D.  I should tell the little old lady about it, I thought.  I’ll try to corner her in the butterfly hallway first.

As far as the treehouse exhibit, there were two main problems.  First, not a single one was in a tree.  Second, hardly any of them resembled a house.  Below are some examples.

I’m sure the adults responsible are quite proud of their contraptions, but they held little enticement for the kids.  Instead they found a green, grassy knob that they could roll themselves down, and here spent more time than with the butterflies and treehouses combined.  A mother brought her daughter over.  I would guess the daughter was 2.  The mother threw herself down the hill.  I would guess she was trying to show her daughter how to do it…or she had been drinking.

Reiman Beer Gardens, now there is an idea for a college town.  Just need to get the bug zapper installed by the butterfly display.

The say we all have an infant inside us, but that infant needn’t run the show.  Raylan was trying hard not to let him, but eventually the infant won out.  They probably do most of the time.

We grow older and think we grow up.  We take pride in that.  Instead our infant has only got more sophisticated.  We still want our mothers, our pant legs dry, someone to listen, to squash any bug we come across, real tree houses, and to be blissfully ignorant of all of it.

If we could grow up, perhaps we would lose our mothers, but might actually know them for the people they really are.  Hell though, now you’ve heard it in my voice too.