Lessons from Bluey’s Chilli
There are magical people who can switch their brains off and simply relax. They drive home from work, perhaps cook a delicious dinner, and immerse themselves in cooking or crafting. Maybe, like my spouse, they turn on a basketball game, but whether it’s watching the NBA finals or playing as if they are on a video game, and they are there. While on vacation, they’re immediately on vacation.
Then there are people like me, people who take a few minutes, a few hours, or a few days, to transition from one activity to another. As a professor and mom, I find that transitioning from the semester to summer is rarely easy. This semester has proven especially difficult. May is often the busiest for parents and teachers alike: Grading, graduations, recitals, and tournaments abound. My family is blessed with two birthdays during this period. My daughter enjoyed First Communion this year. Plus, this May I juggled a few professional deadlines, including two academic conferences, a writing retreat, and the completion of a book project. It was a wonderful but exhausting balancing act—an act I suspect many readers can relate to with their own end-of-school-year stories.
When I returned home from my final conference I sat down to watch a family favorite, Bluey, with the kids as we gobbled down pizza for what seemed like the twentieth dinner in a row. An episode called “Relax” came on, and while I’ve told you about all of the trials of May, it was already June. Earlier that day I had gone to the neighborhood pool with my children. My mind still rushed from professional task to task, even as we splashed around. Though I had been trying my best to be present with my children, I I was not fully there. I had even taken a book to the pool that I had been meaning to read: Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing. Odell writes that “To do nothing is to hold yourself still so that you can perceive what is actually there.” How simple, right? Yet there I was at the pool, my mind in a classroom and then an academic conference, not “actually there” with my children. It’s embarrassing to admit.
I bring us back to eating yet another slice of pepperoni pizza and watching Bluey. In that episode we encounter Bluey, a cartoon Heeler puppy, and her family on vacation. They arrive at their beach hotel and we see Chilli, Bluey’s mother, with her book in tow: It’s a book on how to be happy. She’d brought a book on vacation with her about how to be happy. Automatically, I thought about my book about how to do nothing, and I burst out laughing—I’d already written elsewhere that Chilli, the blue Heeler cartoon dog, has become an unexpected parenting role model.
She’s a role model not because she is perfect but because she struggles. Her focus is always on how to be there for her family and friends. But like me and many other moms, she has trouble turning her brain off to focus on the present. There are many tasks and many beloved family and friends that she wants to attend to. How can she simply relax? Even when it’s summer and the goal is relaxing, how can she do so?
In this episode, Bluey and her little sister Bingo do what Odell instructs in How to Do Nothing. They gape at every nook and cranny in the hotel room, wondering at every small thing. They unwrap the “ribbon-wrapped” toilets,” scream about the joy of bunk beds, wrap themselves up in towels, and pretend to be mermaid waiters serving soap pies to each other. As Odell states, they “perceive what is actually there” and they play with it. They are present, doing nothing as I was trying to at the pool with my kids and being as happy as Chilli was trying to be with her book.
Chilli begins the episode with a frown and is still frowning as her pups play because she wants to get to the beach. Yet the pups are playing instead of slathering on sunscreen, as she had requested. Her husband, Bandit, tells Chilli to go relax at the beach: He’ll look after Bluey and Bingo. Once she is at the beach, though, she opens and closes her book and stares at the water, wondering whether to swim or read her book first. She looks quizzical—and stressed. (It isn’t surprising that at this point in the episode my eight-year-old daughter pointed at me and squealed, “That’s you at the beach!”)
When Chilli returns to the hotel room, seemingly within minutes, she admits a truth that I often feel at the end of every school year, but especially this one. “I don’t know how to relax,” she tells Bandit; “It’s harder than it looks.” Bandit hugs her and tells her to take some “tips from the masters,” who are currently hitting each other with a reclining chair’s footrest and giggling. Children relax without effort because they see the world with wonder, not with adult worry. Chilli pauses, stares, and then smiles for the first time in the episode. She leans into the chaos of her family’s life, no longer seeking outside guidance from a book or worrying about some other time than the one she is in. She leans into the present.
Of course the moment that she settles on the balcony with her book the pups come screaming that they want to go to the beach. First, though, they take in the beauty of water outside, which they had missed because they were in the hotel room. They realize this is what their mother had been hoping they would see all along. In the end, Chilli and her children both needed each other to enjoy the full expanse of the present.
Before ending this essay, I want to mention that one of the best parts of any Bluey episode is the music, and the song used as a refrain throughout is “Simple Gifts,” an 1848 Shaker hymn. Importantly for me, the song was also a part of my late 1990s and early 2000s Girl Scout summer camp experience. “‘Tis the gift to be simple,” the song begins. I remember singing these lyrics and laughing with my camp friends. The hymn ends with these two lines, whose melody, without the lyrics, make a crescendo at the end of the episode as the children take in the awe of the beach that they had missed but then see when they join their mother on the hotel room balcony: “To turn, turn will be our delight, / ‘Til by turning, turning, we come round right.”
Chilli, and busy moms like me, may often need a little bit of turning at the end of busy school semesters to “come round right.” Whereas we are often tending after our children, it is in these moments, as Bandit reminds Chilli, that we most need them to remind us to turn toward them, toward delight, toward the present, and toward the simple.
Likewise, children need us to remind them to turn toward the bigger picture, toward the world outside, toward the expanse beyond what is right in front of them. In appreciating simple gifts, we together discover relaxation. In loving each other, we are turned round right.
LuElla D’Amico is an Associate Professor of English and the Women’s and Gender Studies Coordinator at the University of the Incarnate Word. She is co-editor of Girls’ Series Fiction and American Popular Culture and co-editor of Reading Transatlantic Girlhood in the Long Nineteenth Century. Her current book project examines exploring the Catholic faith through the wonder of children’s literature.
Image: Australia Broadcasting Corporation