I saw a bit of parenting advice a few days ago and wrinkled up my nose, “Thinking, oh that won’t work for us.” Not because it was *bad* advice exactly, but because it was advice I knew didn’t work for us. I had not only tried it, but recommended it myself in the past!
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.
“First we took the orange trail and then red and we came down the green,” my older son said from the backseat of the car. I stared at the phone in my hand, where I had pulled up a map of hiking trails. No, he couldn’t have remembered it that clearly. We hiked it two years ago. This is a kid who forgets things minutes after I say them. I looked again. He was right – that was exactly what we had done.
“Yeah, I think you’re right,” I said.
Memory makes things strange.
A small brown haired head with flecks of blond leans down. My son’s nose is almost touching a bright orange flower, its torn pedals sprouting from a huge green stem. In the middle of the flower, there’s a fuzzy yellow and black bumblebee butt sticking out. It has its whole face immersed in the flower, guzzling down nectar. My son watches it in wonder, occasionally speaking to it.
“Hi!” my older son chirps to people walking by on the sidewalk as he pedals by on his bike. A few minutes later, he yells to me about the injustice of how short the green is on this traffic light – we’re stopped at a red light *again* – and how we have to wait for it. Honestly, of all the things he could get angry about, it’s pretty harmless. Throughout the ride, my younger son chatters away sitting behind me, telling me all the observations he held in during class.
“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.
“Why do all of these people already have friends?” I thought to myself looking around the elementary school cafeteria during parents night for kindergarten. Clumps of parents sat at long tables, chatting away. Even my anti-social husband had wandered off to talk to someone he knew from preschool. I stifled the urge to get out my phone and stare urgently at the screen. Instead, I read the multi-colored handouts with an intense stare. Being there brought back so many experiences that color my perspective on my kids today.
He runs up to me, his hand loosely grasping mine. I go to squeeze it and he’s gone again, dashing away from the oncoming waves licking at his red and blue sandals.
I stand firm, the water pulling on my feet, flowing back out to the ocean. He darts around me, unpredictable, coming and going, coming and going. The waves can’t be predicted either – sometimes they stop feet from me, sometimes they wash over my knees, pulling me out to the endless water.
“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.