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Writer's pictureShelly Blaisdell

Pondering in Pillows


Here Mommy, let me help you.

When she was six, and it was September, we curled together in bed. Her hot little head tucked into the crook of my arm. "Again, Mommy" she said. And I whispered our tiny prayer into the back of her head again. "God is the feeling in your heart that knows right from wrong and needs you to be kind and brave and happy."


"Again, Mommy." Sometimes she'd ask me to say it fifteen times. Sometimes she'd say it to me while stroking my arm exactly the way I stroked hers, each of us fading in and out of sleep. Whispered words wove in and out of mouths and ears and hair and pillows.


One night, in the spaces between, I asked "Baby, do you know the word 'sentient?'" She did not, at six years old, but she taught me early to make no assumptions about what she did and did not know.




I want bacon, therefore I am.

"Sentient means self aware. You are sentient. You know that you are a girl laying in a bed with her Mommy. You can see us from inside your own mind. You can think about yourself. Almost all people are sentient. Many animals are sentient. Like, we're pretty sure that horses and dogs and whales and elephants know them selves. Rocks are not sentient. Rocks don't know they are rocks. They don't think. . . . as far as we can tell."


"Is Layla sentient?" she asked.


"Probably. She knows that she's your dog and that I am her human. She makes decisions about herself and us. You can see it on her face when her eyebrows wiggle all over her head and she's trying to decide whether or not to steal your breakfast. She's thinking. She's making decisions."


My girl pondered this. She was a big ponderer when she was little. More of a reactor now. She, like so many of us, has pre-recorded responses to most new ideas now. Where she used to think "I wonder if that's true?" she now says "That's not true."


"I want to ask you a question. We've been saying this prayer every night since you were born. I've never said God is a "who," like a person. I think of God as a "what," like the ocean or like electricity. Some people think God is sentient, that God has a mind and a personality. Daddy does. Daddy believes that God knows him personally and thinks about him, just like we think about you all day. A lot of people believe that. And it might be totally true.  But it doesn't feel true to me. I can't describe God but I know it's really huge and important, it's all around me, and in me. I think about it but it doesn't think about me. I don't feel like God is sentient. What do you think?"


"Oh I'm like Daddy" she said at once. Absolute certainty. "God is thinking about me."


"Wow" I said. "That's excellent."


"Yeah."  she said, while we gazed at glow-in-the-dark stars on her ceiling.  And in that instant I was envious and grateful, angry and thrilled.  I felt the presence of god in the little blue bedroom.  He thought about her and I thought about It and we fell asleep in a warm pile of certainty and pondering and pillows.

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