"Isabella’s thrill with accomplishment and her abilities in serving others is as great as her difficulties in dealing with frustration and disappointment. In the world of an eight-year-old and in a moment of tears, she captures light on the use of rest, mindfulness, space and recreation to bring refreshment; reinvigorating her stores of energy and sense of personal identity" ...
***
Isabella like most bright girls her age buzzed with thoughts of what she wanted to do, or be able to do.
She would often tremble with delight simply at the chance to try something new.
Isabella was now eight years old and the second eldest in her family of four children.
They most often called her Bella, but sometimes she got names like Belly Bops, or Bell Bell.
Isabella had become quite helpful to her Mother by playing with or assisting her younger sister Millie and little brother Isaac when they needed it.
Isabella would often read to Millie, especially before dinner when Millie grew restless.
She was the one who would usually buckle Isaac into his car seat when they were going out in the van.
Sometimes she would even help make dinner when her Mother was especially busy.
Isaac loved it when his big sister Bella did things with him – he felt so important.
One Sunday afternoon, Isaac grew quite bored playing inside and he was starting to annoy Millie, who was trying to draw a picture of a pretty flower on the kitchen table.
Noticing Millie getting frustrated with the way Isaac kept interrupting her, Isabella went up to her Mother:
“Mummy, could I get the face paints out?”
It was a lovely sunny afternoon in late Summer, getting close to Autumn.
As soon as Isabella asked, Isaac's eyes grew and with a huge grin he turned to Isabella:
"Bella, can you paint my face?"
Now it was Isabella’s turn to glow as she looked up to her Mother, who was trying to decide very quickly whether or not this was a good time for face paints.
Isaac was tired.
He had recently dropped his day sleep.
But to Isabella's delight, her Mother slowly nodded, and only added:
"Try not to make a mess, and make sure you clean up after yourselves".
Isabella turned back to Isaac in excitement, who was looking very hopefully at her:
"Sure Isaac! What would you like to be today?"
She had recently become quite good at painting his face as a butterfly.
"A bumblebee!" he replied quickly, starting to jump on the spot, clenching his fists tight and shaking them in anticipation.
“I want to be a bumblebee this time”, he said again emphatically. And he started to run around in a little circle, buzzing with joy.
Isabella hadn't painted a bumblebee face before.
She hesitated for a moment. In fact, she hadn’t even seen someone else paint a bee before!
But Isabella felt that she couldn’t really say no.
At last, she replied softly. "Um… Okay, I can try."
Maybe it would be fun to try something new, she thought.
“Yay!” Isaac called out as he skipped and followed Isabella outside onto the patio. He sat up on a chair as Isabella brought the paints and began carefully applying strokes of black and yellow.
She guessed that he would look just like a bright bumblebee if he had stripes on his nose and wings on his cheeks.
But after a while, Isabella noticed that Isaac wasn’t looking very much like a bee.
As she stood back, his face was too dark and there wasn't enough yellow.
She tried to add more yellow, but it wouldn’t show up over the black. Instead, it made it worse, smudging the paint together.
Quite annoyed she couldn’t help a frown coming on.
She kept on trying.
It didn’t help, it just got worse.
Getting madder by the moment she gritted her teeth and let out a growl, throwing down her hands by her side.
"Go and look in Mummy's mirror," she said to Isaac sharply.
"See if you like it.”
If Isaac was happy enough, she wouldn’t need to keep struggling to make his bumblebee face come right.
Isaac, who had been sitting for a long time patiently getting hungry, was glad to be getting down. He ran expectantly inside to have a look.
Isabella followed slowly in behind him, feeling quite disappointed by the whole thing.
"What do you think?” Isabella asked, coming to the mirror and sighing deeply.
“Do you think you look much like a bumblebee?" She forced herself to look and smile at him in the mirror.
But Isaac got a shock when he saw himself.
He scrunched up his nose and looking up to Isabella in the mirror frowned crossly.
“Isaac!” Isabella shouted straight back, flashing red in the face.
Isaac glared at her with contempt, then turning to run off, tore away crying out at the top of his voice “Mummy, Mummy!”
Isabella was shaken. For a while, she didn’t move. She sadly looked into the mirror at herself.
She was tired, hungry and now quite miserable.
Even so, she was not emptied of ideas.
Maybe, she thought, she could use the mirror to paint her own face.
She hadn’t painted her own face before.
This was her chance to paint herself as she wanted — as a radiant butterfly.
She knew she was good at that.
Quite quickly Isabella forgot all about Isaac.
She went out to get the paints from the patio and coming back to the mirror set straight to work with the brush.
It wasn’t easy to look in the mirror and do her own face.
After a few minutes, she started to stand back and compare herself to the butterfly faces she had often done for Isaac.
A few more minutes passed and still, she wasn’t exactly happy with how it was going.
Her wings weren’t quite right for a butterfly— they looked more like four wings, not two— more like those of a big blowfly.
Isabella felt a flush of frustration sweep over her.
But remembering the thought of the blowfly, she had another idea.
Maybe she could turn herself into a dragonfly. She could add a bigger head with larger eyes, and a longer tail that went right over her chin and down her neck!
Isabella loved dragonflies, even more than butterflies.
She was so pleased by this thought that after adding the bright, bulging eyes to the big, round head, she rushed to add the long tail.
But then something really awful happened.
As she pushed her brush with black face paint over her chin she slipped, leaving a big crooked line right down her neck.
She stood back to look at the ugly line, and her face flooded with anger.
Now more upset even than she had been over Isaac’s rude face, she thumped her feet on the floor as she marched off to get tissues.
Coming back she started cleaning the dirty great big line off her neck.
But the black paint didn’t come off easily.
She had to rub and rub, which made her skin sore.
And the harder she tried, the worse it looked.
It was no good.
The yucky smudge completely ruined her dragonfly face.
Isabella burst into tears and ran downstairs to her bedroom.
Throwing herself onto her bed she cried and cried into her pillow.
Her mother, who was concentrating in the kitchen, didn’t hear her crying.
She was too busy helping Isaac cook banana bread.
Isabella lay by herself, weeping uncontrollably and punching at her Doona.
And as the tears welled up and ran down her face, they mixed with her face paints.
Little did Isabella notice in her grief the light streaming into her room, the radiance of which was getting caught in her tears, causing it to glitter as it dropped from her eyelids onto her cheeks.
And then something very strange happened.
The teardrops, mixing together with her face paints as they ran down, caused a tingling sensation all over Isabella’s face.
It felt like something swirling around on her skin.
She stopped crying, and touching her face it seemed clean and dry.
But now she was overcome with tiredness, like a blanket that dropped suddenly and covered over her from above.
Still awake as she lay there looking up, her mind started to wander to thoughts of blowflies and bumblebees.
Then slowly her eyes closed and she drifted off into a light sleep.
But immediately, or so it seemed, she awoke with a jump to find the afternoon breeze coming in from the open window.
She didn’t remember opening her bedroom window that day.
Funnily, she had never before noticed that her window opened right out.
Presently, wide shafts of light streamed through and swept over her, much like slow-moving currents that twinkled from scattering rays of the sun, as it rained down from above.
Isabella stood up to look outside.
To her wonderment, the air looked golden and alive, dancing around in the garden.
Isabella suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to leap up and join it, like the impulse she often had to dive fully clothed from the rocks in their bay into deep water — only this was much, much harder to resist.
She had to brace herself against the window frame with both hands in order to stop herself from jumping up onto the windowsill where she might actually try to spring into the breeze!
But she couldn’t hold on for long.
A surge of energy was building up within her, and she didn’t know what was going on.
Turning around in confusion, she clutched her forehead and wondered what was happening.
It was then that she noticed herself in her bedroom mirror.
She could hardly believe what she saw.
To her shock, her face was glowing brightly and sparkling, like light reflecting off shiny silver.
On her back were two pairs of enormous transparent wings, like those of a dragonfly!
Isabella trembled with excitement, still not yet believing it.
But with energy like a dam on the verge of bursting, she noticed herself being pulled back towards the window.
And looking up into the light, she felt her wings folding and she jumped up onto the windowsill.
The air was thick and it jolted her body as it rushed past her.
Then when a sudden gust almost completely picked her up, she could hold on no longer.
She bent her knees and then gently jumping, was lightly carried up into the Summer air, her wings beating with a rhythm of soft drums.
She flew high into the light which now pulsated with movement around her and a scent running up from towards the back yard.
For a minute she darted around and around in the warm breeze, watching the colours rush by, and shooting up and down in the rays of yellow sunshine.
Her eyes could see all the way down to the veggie patch at the very back of their yard—and noticing the sunflowers in full bloom she pivoted in the sky and made a line for them.
But at that very moment, a loud bell rang out that rippled the air and sent tremors that jolted her body.
Like trying to wake from a deep dream, Isabella found herself using all her concentration to work out what that sound meant, so much so that she fell straight down as if the sky had been swept out from under her!
Isabella remembered that her mother would ring the bell when she wanted the children to come upstairs.
Just in time, she felt her wings come back to life and swerving up she missed the concrete driveway by not much more the length of a paint brush.
The sunflowers would have to wait. She needed to fly back to her bedroom before her mother came downstairs to see the window wide open and her daughter nowhere to be seen.
In an instant, she was outside her bedroom window, hovering over the ground.
Isabella wondered what her mother would do when she saw her face and wings.
Very carefully Isabella stretched our her legs and folded her wings, landing softly on the windowsill and jumping down onto the carpet.
Would her Mother be cross, seeing what had become of her daughter?
Would she scream when she saw Isabella’s four wings?
The sound of the bell came ringing again down the stairs, much louder and longer this time, causing her bones to resonate.
Bella quickly tried to think about what to say, and how she could stop her Mother from worrying or getting angry.
But without any time and no real answers, bravely Isabella opened her bedroom door and walked upstairs.
Turning towards the kitchen, Isabella walked up to face her mother.
"Hello Bell!" said her Mother in an unusually upbeat voice, looking straight at her with a warm smile.
"What have you been up to? I've made you some afternoon tea".
Isabella stared back at her mother in complete surprise, even less sure now what to say.
Her Mother hadn’t even furrowed an eyebrow.
Then the thought popped to Isabella’s mind—
“She mustn’t be able to tell.
"She can’t see what I’ve become!"
And a very small, slightly cheeky grin came over Isabella’s face.
"Thank you so much Mummy!" she said, trying to keep a plain face. “I am so hungry!”
She jumped up onto a stool at the table, keeping back a giggle as she ate.
But the thought of her discovery and new ability made her tremble with pure delight.
Isaac now sat over on the lounge room couch, watching Octonauts. Millie and Isabella’s big brother Elijah were on the floor playing UNO together.
"You didn't answer my question Belly Bops! What have you been up to sweetie”, asked her mother again, as Isabella gorged herself on a piece of banana bread.
"Oh, nothing really. I was just downstairs trying to clean face paint off myself," she said, trying to keep a serious look about her.
"Don’t worry, you can just have a bath later, honey," answered her Mother. “Looks like you’ve had a great afternoon. Thanks for helping with Isaac earlier on!”
Isabella smiled.
Looking past her Mother through the back window, she caught sight of the sunflowers in the veggie patch.
It was stuffy inside.
And before she knew it, she heard herself mumble,
"You need to get back out into that sunlight, Bell-fly."
***
Isabella like most bright girls her age buzzed with thoughts of what she wanted to do, or be able to do.
She would often tremble with delight simply at the chance to try something new.
Isabella was now eight years old and the second eldest in her family of four children.
They most often called her Bella, but sometimes she got names like Belly Bops, or Bell Bell.
Isabella had become quite helpful to her Mother by playing with or assisting her younger sister Millie and little brother Isaac when they needed it.
Isabella would often read to Millie, especially before dinner when Millie grew restless.
She was the one who would usually buckle Isaac into his car seat when they were going out in the van.
Sometimes she would even help make dinner when her Mother was especially busy.
Isaac loved it when his big sister Bella did things with him – he felt so important.
One Sunday afternoon, Isaac grew quite bored playing inside and he was starting to annoy Millie, who was trying to draw a picture of a pretty flower on the kitchen table.
Noticing Millie getting frustrated with the way Isaac kept interrupting her, Isabella went up to her Mother:
“Mummy, could I get the face paints out?”
It was a lovely sunny afternoon in late Summer, getting close to Autumn.
As soon as Isabella asked, Isaac's eyes grew and with a huge grin he turned to Isabella:
"Bella, can you paint my face?"
Now it was Isabella’s turn to glow as she looked up to her Mother, who was trying to decide very quickly whether or not this was a good time for face paints.
Isaac was tired.
He had recently dropped his day sleep.
But to Isabella's delight, her Mother slowly nodded, and only added:
"Try not to make a mess, and make sure you clean up after yourselves".
Isabella turned back to Isaac in excitement, who was looking very hopefully at her:
"Sure Isaac! What would you like to be today?"
She had recently become quite good at painting his face as a butterfly.
"A bumblebee!" he replied quickly, starting to jump on the spot, clenching his fists tight and shaking them in anticipation.
“I want to be a bumblebee this time”, he said again emphatically. And he started to run around in a little circle, buzzing with joy.
Isabella hadn't painted a bumblebee face before.
She hesitated for a moment. In fact, she hadn’t even seen someone else paint a bee before!
But Isabella felt that she couldn’t really say no.
At last, she replied softly. "Um… Okay, I can try."
Maybe it would be fun to try something new, she thought.
“Yay!” Isaac called out as he skipped and followed Isabella outside onto the patio. He sat up on a chair as Isabella brought the paints and began carefully applying strokes of black and yellow.
She guessed that he would look just like a bright bumblebee if he had stripes on his nose and wings on his cheeks.
But after a while, Isabella noticed that Isaac wasn’t looking very much like a bee.
As she stood back, his face was too dark and there wasn't enough yellow.
She tried to add more yellow, but it wouldn’t show up over the black. Instead, it made it worse, smudging the paint together.
Quite annoyed she couldn’t help a frown coming on.
She kept on trying.
It didn’t help, it just got worse.
Getting madder by the moment she gritted her teeth and let out a growl, throwing down her hands by her side.
"Go and look in Mummy's mirror," she said to Isaac sharply.
"See if you like it.”
If Isaac was happy enough, she wouldn’t need to keep struggling to make his bumblebee face come right.
Isaac, who had been sitting for a long time patiently getting hungry, was glad to be getting down. He ran expectantly inside to have a look.
Isabella followed slowly in behind him, feeling quite disappointed by the whole thing.
"What do you think?” Isabella asked, coming to the mirror and sighing deeply.
“Do you think you look much like a bumblebee?" She forced herself to look and smile at him in the mirror.
But Isaac got a shock when he saw himself.
He scrunched up his nose and looking up to Isabella in the mirror frowned crossly.
“Isaac!” Isabella shouted straight back, flashing red in the face.
Isaac glared at her with contempt, then turning to run off, tore away crying out at the top of his voice “Mummy, Mummy!”
Isabella was shaken. For a while, she didn’t move. She sadly looked into the mirror at herself.
She was tired, hungry and now quite miserable.
Even so, she was not emptied of ideas.
Maybe, she thought, she could use the mirror to paint her own face.
She hadn’t painted her own face before.
This was her chance to paint herself as she wanted — as a radiant butterfly.
She knew she was good at that.
Quite quickly Isabella forgot all about Isaac.
She went out to get the paints from the patio and coming back to the mirror set straight to work with the brush.
It wasn’t easy to look in the mirror and do her own face.
After a few minutes, she started to stand back and compare herself to the butterfly faces she had often done for Isaac.
A few more minutes passed and still, she wasn’t exactly happy with how it was going.
Her wings weren’t quite right for a butterfly— they looked more like four wings, not two— more like those of a big blowfly.
Isabella felt a flush of frustration sweep over her.
But remembering the thought of the blowfly, she had another idea.
Maybe she could turn herself into a dragonfly. She could add a bigger head with larger eyes, and a longer tail that went right over her chin and down her neck!
Isabella loved dragonflies, even more than butterflies.
She was so pleased by this thought that after adding the bright, bulging eyes to the big, round head, she rushed to add the long tail.
But then something really awful happened.
As she pushed her brush with black face paint over her chin she slipped, leaving a big crooked line right down her neck.
She stood back to look at the ugly line, and her face flooded with anger.
Now more upset even than she had been over Isaac’s rude face, she thumped her feet on the floor as she marched off to get tissues.
Coming back she started cleaning the dirty great big line off her neck.
But the black paint didn’t come off easily.
She had to rub and rub, which made her skin sore.
And the harder she tried, the worse it looked.
It was no good.
The yucky smudge completely ruined her dragonfly face.
Isabella burst into tears and ran downstairs to her bedroom.
Throwing herself onto her bed she cried and cried into her pillow.
Her mother, who was concentrating in the kitchen, didn’t hear her crying.
She was too busy helping Isaac cook banana bread.
Isabella lay by herself, weeping uncontrollably and punching at her Doona.
And as the tears welled up and ran down her face, they mixed with her face paints.
Little did Isabella notice in her grief the light streaming into her room, the radiance of which was getting caught in her tears, causing it to glitter as it dropped from her eyelids onto her cheeks.
And then something very strange happened.
The teardrops, mixing together with her face paints as they ran down, caused a tingling sensation all over Isabella’s face.
It felt like something swirling around on her skin.
She stopped crying, and touching her face it seemed clean and dry.
But now she was overcome with tiredness, like a blanket that dropped suddenly and covered over her from above.
Still awake as she lay there looking up, her mind started to wander to thoughts of blowflies and bumblebees.
Then slowly her eyes closed and she drifted off into a light sleep.
But immediately, or so it seemed, she awoke with a jump to find the afternoon breeze coming in from the open window.
She didn’t remember opening her bedroom window that day.
Funnily, she had never before noticed that her window opened right out.
Presently, wide shafts of light streamed through and swept over her, much like slow-moving currents that twinkled from scattering rays of the sun, as it rained down from above.
Isabella stood up to look outside.
To her wonderment, the air looked golden and alive, dancing around in the garden.
Isabella suddenly felt an overwhelming urge to leap up and join it, like the impulse she often had to dive fully clothed from the rocks in their bay into deep water — only this was much, much harder to resist.
She had to brace herself against the window frame with both hands in order to stop herself from jumping up onto the windowsill where she might actually try to spring into the breeze!
But she couldn’t hold on for long.
A surge of energy was building up within her, and she didn’t know what was going on.
Turning around in confusion, she clutched her forehead and wondered what was happening.
It was then that she noticed herself in her bedroom mirror.
She could hardly believe what she saw.
To her shock, her face was glowing brightly and sparkling, like light reflecting off shiny silver.
On her back were two pairs of enormous transparent wings, like those of a dragonfly!
Isabella trembled with excitement, still not yet believing it.
But with energy like a dam on the verge of bursting, she noticed herself being pulled back towards the window.
And looking up into the light, she felt her wings folding and she jumped up onto the windowsill.
The air was thick and it jolted her body as it rushed past her.
Then when a sudden gust almost completely picked her up, she could hold on no longer.
She bent her knees and then gently jumping, was lightly carried up into the Summer air, her wings beating with a rhythm of soft drums.
She flew high into the light which now pulsated with movement around her and a scent running up from towards the back yard.
For a minute she darted around and around in the warm breeze, watching the colours rush by, and shooting up and down in the rays of yellow sunshine.
Her eyes could see all the way down to the veggie patch at the very back of their yard—and noticing the sunflowers in full bloom she pivoted in the sky and made a line for them.
But at that very moment, a loud bell rang out that rippled the air and sent tremors that jolted her body.
Like trying to wake from a deep dream, Isabella found herself using all her concentration to work out what that sound meant, so much so that she fell straight down as if the sky had been swept out from under her!
Isabella remembered that her mother would ring the bell when she wanted the children to come upstairs.
Just in time, she felt her wings come back to life and swerving up she missed the concrete driveway by not much more the length of a paint brush.
The sunflowers would have to wait. She needed to fly back to her bedroom before her mother came downstairs to see the window wide open and her daughter nowhere to be seen.
In an instant, she was outside her bedroom window, hovering over the ground.
Isabella wondered what her mother would do when she saw her face and wings.
Very carefully Isabella stretched our her legs and folded her wings, landing softly on the windowsill and jumping down onto the carpet.
Would her Mother be cross, seeing what had become of her daughter?
Would she scream when she saw Isabella’s four wings?
The sound of the bell came ringing again down the stairs, much louder and longer this time, causing her bones to resonate.
Bella quickly tried to think about what to say, and how she could stop her Mother from worrying or getting angry.
But without any time and no real answers, bravely Isabella opened her bedroom door and walked upstairs.
Turning towards the kitchen, Isabella walked up to face her mother.
"Hello Bell!" said her Mother in an unusually upbeat voice, looking straight at her with a warm smile.
"What have you been up to? I've made you some afternoon tea".
Isabella stared back at her mother in complete surprise, even less sure now what to say.
Her Mother hadn’t even furrowed an eyebrow.
Then the thought popped to Isabella’s mind—
“She mustn’t be able to tell.
"She can’t see what I’ve become!"
And a very small, slightly cheeky grin came over Isabella’s face.
"Thank you so much Mummy!" she said, trying to keep a plain face. “I am so hungry!”
She jumped up onto a stool at the table, keeping back a giggle as she ate.
But the thought of her discovery and new ability made her tremble with pure delight.
Isaac now sat over on the lounge room couch, watching Octonauts. Millie and Isabella’s big brother Elijah were on the floor playing UNO together.
"You didn't answer my question Belly Bops! What have you been up to sweetie”, asked her mother again, as Isabella gorged herself on a piece of banana bread.
"Oh, nothing really. I was just downstairs trying to clean face paint off myself," she said, trying to keep a serious look about her.
"Don’t worry, you can just have a bath later, honey," answered her Mother. “Looks like you’ve had a great afternoon. Thanks for helping with Isaac earlier on!”
Isabella smiled.
Looking past her Mother through the back window, she caught sight of the sunflowers in the veggie patch.
It was stuffy inside.
And before she knew it, she heard herself mumble,
"You need to get back out into that sunlight, Bell-fly."
