Читать книгу Hope’s Daughters - R. Wayne Willis - Страница 25

Birds do it. Dogs and frogs do it. Snakes and cicadas do it too.

Molting—casting off the outer garment—is more perilous for some animals than for others. Lobsters shed their entire skeleton up to twenty-five times in the first five years of life. Because the lobster’s skeleton is on the outside and is so hard that it has no give in it, if it does not shed its shell regularly, it will not grow up; in fact, it cannot grow at all. All through its life cycle, many times the lobster has to lose weight, crack its old shell, and wiggle free.

A just-molted lobster is as soft as a child’s rubber toy lobster. With no shell, the lobster is easy prey, very vulnerable. The just-molted lobster has to find a hiding place from predators, like a crevice or cave, until its new body armor arrives.

Shedding is for us humans a major part of “wising up.” My wife and I currently are in the process of stuffing many boxes with clothes and books we have decided we will never wear or read again and taking them to Goodwill. We are pulling junk from our storage areas and setting it out for the garbage trucks to haul off. We want to spare our surviving children that unnecessary ordeal.

An essential part of growing up and becoming fully human is shedding masks. Anne Morrow Lindbergh wrote: “I find I am shedding hypocrisy in human relationships. What a rest that will be! The most exhausting thing in life, I have discovered, is being insincere.”

It is scary to open the visor of our suit of armor and expose ourselves and, like the lobster, make ourselves vulnerable for a time. But it is necessary if, as the Skin Horse told the Velveteen Rabbit, we are ever to become real.