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.”
“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.”
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.
I felt a nipping at my jeans and looked down. “Hey, stop that!” I chided our pet rabbit Hoppity. I frowned. “You have plenty of hay, water…do you want attention?” Softening, I sat down criss-cross on my son’s floor. The bunny hopped over and started licking my jeans. I petted him, running my hand over his soft ears and back. He hopped onto my leg and started licking my other one. I smiled, realizing that this is the first time he had hopped into my lap that didn’t involve food.
What was first a moment of annoyance turned into a moment of connection.
“I just wanted to thank you,” said an unfamiliar voice beside me. Looking left, away from the informational plaque I was reading, I saw an older woman standing next to me. “I was behind you and heard you explaining all of the information to your kids and they were so interested. I heard other kids saying that they were bored and I knew your kids weren’t. I even learned a lot!”
“Uh, thanks!” I responded, very flattered. We were at the Whydah Pirate Museum in Cape Cod, a very good historical museum with a wealth of information and artifacts. I had been guiding my kids through by summarizing the informational plaques and connecting the information to concepts my kids were already familiar with. They seemed to be genuinely interested until the very end when my five-year-old understandably began running out of steam. I was too busy carrying on my patter and keeping my kids entertained that I hadn’t even noticed the woman behind us.
“Look, there’s a bat!” I exclaim, my finger moving as a dark silhouette flits across the sky. My younger son and I are sitting on the back steps of our deck, looking up into the darkening night sky.
“There’s another one!” he points out.
“So Bowser would be chaotic evil, right?” my older son asked as we sat on our front steps, referring to the villain of his favorite Mario Bros video games.
“Hmmm, I think so. He just wants to cause chaos and hurt people rather than follow any laws while doing so. Maybe neutral evil,” I replied, talking in terms of the alignment chart from Dungeons and Dragons.
Peering at the front inside cover of the battered book, I noticed something for the first time. I had opened the copy of Alice in Wonderland to show my younger son that it had once been my book – that it said “Shannon Brescher” in the front.
But my name wasn’t the first one in the book. No, elementary school-me had crossed out someone else’s name and written mine below it. I peered at it to try to make it out. Above my name, visible underneath the black marker line, it read: “Patty Brescher.” My aunt.
In the darkness of a child’s bedroom, I stretch my legs out, parallel to my child’s, two sets of limbs going opposite directions, complementary.
I close my eyes for a moment and remember another room, another pair of legs mirroring mine.