Contest judge Stan Rubin, a master teacher, poet and friend of writing, wrote that Emma Hunter’s essay: Gracefully lives up to its rather daunting title, with wit and philosophical sweep. Concisely renders a dual vision — adult and child, the mundane and the cosmic — with natural dialogue and internal reflection, in a realistic scene. The relationships are delicately and convincingly established, including a flashback that adds depth to the character. Good physical immediacy, vivid similes, and wry, loving irony let us share a sympathetic adult perspective on the unanswerable.

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God’s Breath and Bolognese
by Emma Hunter

 “So, some TV programmes are just drawings, some programmes are made out of plasticine, some programmes have real people but they are pretending and some have real people but they are not pretending?” He looks at me quizzically.

I peel garlic and simultaneously look for the other clove which is somewhere amongst this morning’s cornflake-congealed bowls, an empty milk carton, today’s unopened post, last week’s school newsletter, a box of ‘treasure’, and a tractor, piano, and talking dog all awaiting new batteries.

“Yeah…” I begin, but he is already pencil in hand storyboarding his forthcoming TV programme on the kitchen table. It’s about his little brother Corin, he’s not sure what’s going to happen yet. He sets the scene, proud to have had the idea of telling the story from Corin’s point of view instead of his own.

“Daddy is in the big chair typing on the ipad. Mummy is in the kitchen cooking as usual. Brynley” (that’s him) “is drawing an amazing drawing at the kitchen table whilst I,” (he pauses for dramatic effect) “Corin, am playing with my blocks on the floor.”

Brynley chews his pencil thoughtfully. His dishevelled brush of brown hair with a hint of my red is refusing to be tamed today and his school jumper is mottled with various food and craft substances.

“Mummy, if the universe is always expanding, what happens after that?” He asks as if this has been the topic of discussion all evening. His forehead is crinkled and he blinks his long dark eyelashes with intense seriousness.

I throw tomatoes into the pan and try to focus my thinking on the finer points of entropy. I glance around for the iPad. We’ll ask Google. Ah, Daddy is in the other room typing on it. I bristle but remind myself that he is allowed to catch up on work emails.

I prod the sauce briefly wondering what else to put in it then turn to him.

“Well, ah, what do you think happens?” He grins in the spotlight of my attention then with a deep inhale he’s off and running with his ideas.

“Well, it gets bigger and bigger and BIGGER like this.” He kneels up in his chair and opens his little arms wide and strains and stretches across his chest, grimacing under the tension. “Until POP!” he slaps his hands together in front of him then makes that little-boy-explosion-noise, “Kerchoooooo, ” as his body twists and contorts and crumples and curls. “Then it all explodes but inwards…”

“Implodes?” I offer.

“Yes, implodes inwards until it gets smaller and smaller and smaller until it is the tiniest dot, like the tiniest speck of dust or a tummy bug that you can’t actually see.”

“And then what?” I lean on the worktop. His theory seems very plausible.

“It goes to almost nothing, then kerchooooooooow!” and his arms burst open again, he is standing on his chair now, his lithe little body straining to occupy as much space as possible, “It goes big again! Then it does it again and again and again.” His mime of the universe expanding and contracting speeds up now as his theory unfolds into a kind of dance. An idea simmers in the tension of his muscles and he chases it, the in and the out sensation, and he blurts out, “It’s like God is breathing!”

I stand astounded, spoon in hand, staring at my child. Bolognese sauce drips onto the floor. God has been on his mind of late. He’s been learning about the Christian God at school this week. Last week, they learned about Brahma and the week before, Brynley came home with all kinds of stories about an elephant-headed God who might have been blue and may or may not have played a flute. But I’m fairly sure this particular theory is his own work.

He goes back to his storyboarding and says half to himself, “Or… maybe it’s God trumping!” He chuckles, very pleased at the ingenuity of his toilet humour and then he’s off again; the Milky Way is God’s wee-wee, the planets are poo. He chuckles a naughty chuckle as he draws.

I turn back to stir the bubbling Bolognese, which plops and spatters. I don’t know why but hot stinging tears flood my vision. Maybe I am crying for his future loss of easy creativity that seems inevitable as grown-ups beat it out of him with education, culture and socialisation. Maybe it’s because I see his unbounded marvel and delight, his courage to meander along the tendrils of an idea, to embody it and see where it takes him and then his ability to ride a wave of deep faith knowing that it does matter and that equally it doesn’t. And oh, how I wish I could hold that paradox with as much grace as he does. Maybe I’m crying because I haven’t had any sleep pretty much since I became a mother and every time he says something truly mind-bendingly, achingly beautiful, I feel the crushing weight of responsibility to preserve and protect those qualities in him. How can I do that for him, when I can’t do it for myself? Maybe these are tears of grief for my own loss of easy creativity. And then I stop stirring.

I am five or six years old, the age Brynley is now. I am travelling back from my Grandparents house in Yorkshire to our house in Cumbria in the backseat of my Mother’s mint-green Ford Cortina. We are somewhere over the Pennines. Dark and bleak and desolate moorland rolls below a star spattered sky, which seems to me unmoving in its vastness as we career along the motorway below it.

“Mummy, where does space end?” I ask. She replies that it has no end, and that is called infinity. I am dumbfounded. “What? How can something go on forever? It must have an edge, everything has an edge?” In my mind I imagine flying across space with my fairy wings and I just cannot accept the forever-ness of that flight. I demand an explanation.

“Well, I suppose it’s like a circle,” she says with a sigh. It’s late and it’s been a long day, she doesn’t want to answer big questions. “A circle doesn’t have a beginning or an end does it?”

“No, but it has an inside and an outside, so where does the outside end?” I argue.

“Just accept that there are some things we can’t understand Emma.”She says, emphasising my name with exasperation. She turns on the radio.

Staring out across the moors, I think about understanding and knowing. I feel what it feels like in my body and brain to be so far from understanding, the straining and yearning tension, I follow tendrils of thoughts, like tree branches becoming ever more spindly and precarious as I tiptoe to the outer edges of my tree of comprehension. Then I feel around that edge, the blankness of not-knowing beyond it and I wonder: could we grow our thought tendrils out of the confines of our brains into the vastness of the mystery like adding on extra bits of train track to my toy railway? I imagine trees of toy wooden track stretching out to the none-edge of the universe, and then I imagine people travelling out of their contained little brains along those railway-lines into understanding. We would arrive into some kind of knowing that we can’t possibly imagine.

I think I was onto something, enjoying the slippery sensation of big truth being at the edge of my brain. I liked playing with the mystery and the lack of nailed down facts. When did that ease of vivid imagination disappear? As I stir the Bolognese and the thick sauce plops and gurgles, I see it has been ready for ages. I notice my tense shoulders and tight jaw: a side effect of constant mental list making.

The kitchen is empty now; Brynley has abandoned cosmological theories and storyboarding TV programmes to go de-frag his brain in front of some loud and garish cartoon. I let out a sob and catch my breath. Then underneath these swirls of strange grief I feel an overwhelming sense of love, not just for my boy, but for life for delivering him into my care with all his curious little gifts, for the way the choreography of the entire universe dances through his flesh and bones.

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Emma’s use of dialog and the way she builds the scene allows us to experience the moment with her and appreciate the way we are fortunate sometimes to regain ourselves through those who are very young. Here’s what she wrote about her experience writing this essay:

The inspiration for this essay comes from the title of a book After the Ecstasy, the Laundry by American Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield. This neat little axiom sums up motherhood perfectly, at least it does for me. I wrote the dialogue first and realised that what I wanted to capture was this daily swing from the magic of looking at the world through a child’s eyes to the mundanities of domestic life.

Writing dialogue is quite a new thing for me so my revisions were concerned with making sure that the dialogue, especially when my son speaks, was true to his voice and that each line of dialogue added something essential to the story. I also worked hard on the small details of the scene, to ground the big ideas, so that it would ring true. I went through my drafts re-working any words or phrases that ‘told rather than showed’.