The white board hangs on our basement wall, rather disused. A few letter magnets – an A there, a D there – hang on it, along with a mess of adorable Where the Wild Things Are magnets. In bulletin board letters, the words “Question – Imagine – Wonder – Explore“ posted around it declare its purpose – to inspire questions and inquiry. But while it seems unused, its appearance belies its real impact.
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As I watched my younger son walk through the school’s front doors, I could feel the words not leave my lips. I usually yell “Take care of each other!” to him and his brother as they walk into school together. But that morning, his brother had a doctor’s appointment and wasn’t with us. It felt strange telling him to take care of someone who wasn’t there. But it was strange not saying it as well.
While some of the strangeness came from breaking my habit, some of it was because the words I say to them each morning encompass so much of what I want to teach them in life: “I love you” and “Take care of each other.” While these are simple phrases, they hold so much meaning.
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Breaking off twigs heavy with red cherry tomatoes, my mouth twisted in dissatisfaction with the brown leaves around it. I should have watered it better, I should have cleared the yellowed leaves out more, I should have, I should have, I should have.
But no, I thought, pushing that criticism aside. I was deriding myself for not fighting the plant’s natural cycle. Trying to keep cherry tomatoes neat and pruned is a fool’s errand. It works against rather than with the plant. We’re still getting loads of tomatoes – so what if it’s messy?
So often we try to buck the natural cycle of things even when they fulfill their purpose, don’t we? So often we try to make things neat and fast when they are messy and take time – like childhood.
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I opened and closed my mouth trying not to say anything to my younger son. Finally, I just had to. “No, not like that!” I cried, as our kayak started moving backwards. I sighed and thought, “I thought he knew how to do this?!”
My younger son was sitting in front of me in a red double kayak. I was attempting to leave shore. He dipped one side of his paddle in the water, then dipped it on the same side again, and then dragged it backwards on the surface.
“Take your paddle out!” I yelled. I struggled to figure out how to explain the sixteen different things he needed to fix, all at the same time. I tried to start with something concrete.
“Ah, ah, your hands, your hands need to be spaced the same amount apart. Can you spread them out?” I stammered as I paddled, trying to keep us from running into another boat or going backwards. As he fixed his hands, I replied, “Yes, like that.” Then thought, “Or not,” as his hands shifted exactly back to where they were before. And then his paddle was going backwards again. “Ack, no, stop paddling!”
My husband, Chris, spotted our flailing. My older son was in his kayak and while his form wasn’t perfect, he had done it before and was remembering the rhythm. My husband was in a good place to provide a metaphorical hand.
Smearing sunscreen on my face at the pool, I realized it was just me and my older son. My husband had already taken our younger son to the water.
“Hey, how does my face look?” I asked him. Rather than giving me a silly answer, he looked thoughtfully at it and said, “There’s some near your hair.”
Now, I could have looked at the selfie setting on my phone, but I’m glad I didn’t. That’s because I don’t want to teach my children independence. I want to teach them interdependence.
Processing the name tag of the person standing at my table at the local book festival, I had an ah-ha moment. “I think my kids are going to go to see you talk later today!” I exclaimed to her,. “You wrote the elephant book, right?”
She smiled and nodded. “That’s why I stopped by your table – the elephant sign,” she said, gesturing at the sign that said “Protect Elephants from Climate Change” sitting next to a stack of my books. My younger son had made it a few weeks before for a climate change rally. It seemed like an appropriate decoration to accompany an environmental parenting advice book.
“But you know what?” she added, leaning in conspiratorially. “Everyone thinks elephants are my favorite animal because I wrote a book about them. But they’re not. Squirrels are.”
“After a while, are they just sick of it? Are they just like, ‘Not another climate march!’?” an interviewer asked me on a podcast about my book.
That question came back to me on Bike to School Day, after we had stood in the drizzly rain that morning.
“I can’t get the bike lock open!” My older son came up to me with the keys to my bike lock in his hand. He was supposed to be unlocking his bike from the rack at school.
“Uh, just make sure you put it in carefully. It’s kind of fussy. Why don’t you try again?” I said.
“Hahaha, I was just tricking you!” he said. I sighed. He went back to the bike.
A couple minutes later, he was back again. “I really can’t open it. It’s really stuck.”
“Uh, okay, I can help then.”
As I started walking towards the bike, he laughed and said, “I got you again!”
Cue me looking at the non-existent camera in my life, like I’m a sitcom character.
“Ha ha. Yep, you definitely got me. Go unlock your bike, please.”
“Hey, where are you going?” my friend Randi called after my younger son. My kid was wandering away without telling anyone, as he has a tendency to do.
My head jerked that way, suddenly realizing that she was the only one who had eyes on him. I had been absorbed in conversation with her husband, Drew, one of my oldest friends and someone I hadn’t seen in person in years.
Shame and fear flooded my brain. What if she hadn’t been watching? How far would he have gotten? We were at the National Museum of American History, so it would have been easy for him to just disappear. I should have seen him before she did! Wouldn’t have a good mom noticed that earlier?
My kids love video games. Really, really love them. In particular, my older son is intensely into Mario Bros games. Classic, new – if it’s Mario, he loves it.
I like video games. I enjoy them and was hard-core into a couple of computer games as a kid, but I’d usually prefer to read a book or watch a movie.
But one thing my kids and I all have in common is a love of music. In fact, a need for music. None of us do well with silence. If things are too quiet, the kids will drive each other (and me) to despair by competing to make noises or sing loudly.