Sometimes, my listening skills seem so lacking, as Remy—my ultra-sensitive, ultra-enthusiastic, cranky, sometime perfectionist artist boy—showed me this week. Remy’s a bright-eyed, and extremely bright boy. On the kickball field, he’ll play until the bitter end. He’s kind of cool and his peers want to be his friend. He has ideas in class, and from what I can tell, goes through the school day with a wide grin plastered across his face much of the time.
Try him at 6:30 in the morning. Quite often, he’s not so sunny or easygoing. He wants to play a certain game or watch a certain video; he doesn’t want to go to school. He doesn’t like what’s in the fridge for breakfast. Why don’t we have some good dinner food? If he draws and messes up the picture, he will likely rip it up. Fortunately, for him (and for me), he’s not like this every single morning (there have been some pretty long stretches, though). He is like this enough mornings that cranky Remy is very much a guy I know quite well.
**
Tuesday was one such morning. He balked at the idea that art class was starting up after school, first day of a seven-week session. He’d spent about two deliriously happy years taking art at Lindsay Fogg-Willits’ incredible Art Always studio in Florence, starting not at five but earlier, tagging capably along with his big brother. For a while, he went—at his behest—twice a week.
I want to give Art Always its due here. Lindsay has crafted a place of such happy industry, a place where both creativity and chattiness share top billing, and a place that supports (picture an arm cradling someone from underneath, just so) children’s self-expression. If I were to tell you the after school activity I have most wholeheartedly loved my kids’ doing over all these years, this is it, hands down (so much so that I’ve been setting up really fun adult art nights periodically for the past couple of years with my friends, because, why should the kids have all the fun?).
Hear Remy out: “That’s not the point. I just don’t want to go to art class.” I think he means I don’t want to have to go.
He is seven. School is a lot of have-to in his book. While he just loves it when he’s there, he’s not the kid who anticipates September eagerly. He doesn’t get bored under his own steam all that easily. He likes his downtime. I know all this, such that when his friends signed up for soccer teams, I held off, ditto I held off from signing up for everything else. I didn’t put him in camp the entire summer. I get it; Remy needs downtime.
One art class, though? The thing he loves doing most? The thing I love, too?
Around 7:15 Tuesday morning, he asked, “Well, who is going to be in the class? I don’t want to be in it if Marco is there.” I said something along the lines of I thought that he adored Marco. “Yes,” he replied. “But you can’t concentrate with someone like Marco there.”
So, I emailed Lindsay to find out who might be in the class.
Fill this spot with about 40 minutes of acute grumpiness. I won’t bore you with details, I’m sure you have some of your own you can insert here.
Just before 8:00, an email arrived. A bonanza of great people on the list, most importantly, two we had no idea were taking the class yet are kids Remy seriously adores (hi, Jasper, hi, Oscar). So, we’d be looking at Remy, Gabriel, Jasper and Oscar spending Tuesday afternoons together. What could be more fun? “Jasper and Oscar are doing the class?” Remy asked. He smiled his wide, gloriously happy smile, the one that makes him look practically angelic. “Okay,” he replied, as if he hadn’t been a miserable wreck for nearly an hour and a half. “I’ll do it.” And he bounded off to school, cheerily.
I breathed a huge sigh of relief, and tried to erase that last hour and a half from memory. We had a lovely, chatty walk to school.
2:45 and I’m picking up Remy, his friend, Gabriel, and my second oldest, Lucien at school. Remy says he had a good day. 2:50 and we’re starting towards home and Remy launches back in: “I’m not going to art class. I never said I wanted to sign up (yes, Remy, you did, back in December). I don’t want to have to go, I want to play with Kate. I want to play Ticket to Ride (a new board game and admittedly, the cool distraction of the week). I don’t want to go to art class.” Read that litany in a fevered, frustrated, overtired, seven year-old pitch, please (just spare me having to listen).
Add to your picture of this stroll home from school on a very cold January afternoon, the just-been-sick-for-four days-11-year-old brother walking home after his first day back in the world, and insert his own set of grumbled complaints over the household’s lack of artichoke hearts.
Cap the image off with poor pal Gabriel, having to listen to all this complaining, including about the art class Remy was going to attend but emphatically does not want to attend with him. The complaining wasn’t about Gabriel, but I was about as upset about Gabriel’s being dragged into the upset as could be.
Such treks between the end of school and the beginning of art class during the first part of the school year led to our taking a break from art, with the idea that art class would be a good wintertime activity when the playground wasn’t so active (we spent as many afternoons as possible during the fall staying at school and playing at the playground, itself a happening, fun-for-all scene).
So, by 3:05 I was pretty distraught between the two kids I had in tow. I’d left Remy at 8:25 signed on to the notion of art class, right?
At home, I tried in vain to get some food into Remy (mood enhancer). No luck. I offered anything to get him to eat (want some ice cream? I gave some to Gabriel, vanilla consolation prize for his miserable, screaming, rude friend). By then, dear hubby had swooped in to drive them to art class. We looked at each other and he said, in kind Dad voice, “Gabriel, let’s just go.” He added, “Remy, this is your last chance.” We’d taken all the fun distractions off the table: no art class, no movie. No art class, no Ticket to Ride. No art class, no Kate.” Remy had, by then, dug his heels in so deep there was no extricating them from the quicksand. He was cryingandscreaming at once. Off drove Hosie with Gabriel in tow.
Less than my finest parenting moments ensued: I was really upset, really angry. I accused both kids of being difficult (ahem, they were but still…) and said I was exhausted by them. Lucien countered (and completely correctly, too), “You’re making everyone feel bad.” He called family friends and neighbors and headed off with homework to a household with calmer, less pissed off adults (and stayed for supper, too, thank you very much, Michael, Jennifer, Emily and Arella). I went upstairs with work and Saskia’s bottle. Remy followed a few minutes later to apologize for being so grumpy and then to complain that I wouldn’t let him play with Kate.
By evening, everyone settled into less miserable moods, although I have to admit I couldn’t shake my sense of disappointment and exhaustion and self-criticism. I wish I’d taken a bunch of very deep, very long breaths rather than snap at my kids. The next morning, I was still pretty rattled.
Later, as I walked to get the kids at school midday (Wednesdays are half-days), I realized that Remy always pulls it together around eight in the morning and falls back apart after school. Whatever he says around eight isn’t true, it’s what he’s telling himself and me to get him out the door. There are so many days that have followed this meltdown before eight, pull it together, meltdown later—either right after school or nearer to bedtime—I should count on this as a known behavior pattern. (Then, I spent a while feeling very frustrated at the school, for expectations being such that a first grader like Remy could be so worn out by the experience of being in school).
Well, that’s really another story.
**
Here’s where I have arrived (if still somewhat reluctantly and clearly, in a lugubrious fashion): my particular kickball-loving young artist finds first grade provides more than enough (verging on too much) structure. While I might wish he could do more right now (or that school was different and somehow less taxing for him), the truth is he goes to that school and after he’s finished with school on any given day he’s done with structured expectations (save for a little homework, which he tends to do quite readily). So, I’m resolved to continue honing my listening skills.
