Blanket statements, when it comes to children—and many other things, too—aren’t always helpful. My eldest guy struggled with pretty extreme constipation when he was small. He ate lots of fruits and veggies; he was healthy, yet he was plugged up. One call to the doctor’s office yielded this blanket statement: Toddler boys are often constipated. This was not at all helpful; I wasn’t reassured and I wasn’t offered any help. What’s more, as the pieces of my particular child’s “puzzle” came together—timid on the playground, unable to ditch the training wheels, constipated, reticent about drawing and handwriting—the picture came clearer—including the constipation—Sensory Integration. His sluggish vestibular system affected fine motor and gross motor performance, balance, and feeling his body’s signals.
We were extremely relieved when fabulous first grade teacher Gina Cowley flagged the handwriting and lack of a two-footed jump and sent us to the equally fabulous Diane Droescher for physical therapy. We also connected with Lenore Grubinger, a practitioner of Body-Mind Centering (find her through Amajoy). The work Grubinger does has occupational therapy tenets—and more. This week, I was remembering again how in the midst of all this, her sage parenting advice—that went way beyond the issue at hand, which was dealing with constipation: of the bathroom, she said, Get him there and leave him without worrying or caring beyond that. This (she meant pooping at the time) has to be a conversation between him and him, not you and him.
So often in the years—and children—who have followed, do those words chime in my mind: let this be a conversation between him and him, not me and him (or now, her).
In order to do that, you have let go of the outcome. My friend Sarah Hoffman just wrote on her blog about a story on the Parenting magazine website about how parents might feel if their child is gay. As she wrote—more eloquently than I will here—good on Parenting for opening the door to that question, because that signals some acceptance and bad on you for implying that a boy who likes pink will de facto be a gay boy and that those boys ditching the pink is necessarily a healthy thing.
Having raised a pink boy, I can tell you there’s a big ol’ push-pull between wishing being his pink-loving self was just acceptable to all across the board and kind of longing—for his safety if nothing else—that he’d like what others deem acceptable.
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All of these questions are coming up again for me as my second guy finishes elementary school and is dealing with some major disappointment at the fact that the school he probably most wants to go to—Pioneer Valley Performing Arts Charter School—is out of reach (original lottery number, 27, now maybe up to 25). With some of the nearest-dearest headed exactly there, and others of his buddies also getting some choice or their top choice, and some fear about the scale of the bigness and rough and tumble-ness of the middle school—as he sees it—he’s not a happy camper about what’s looming ahead. Transitions are hard for him, anyway (a trait he got from his mama!).
And so we’re sitting in the midst of a general hard thing, and trying valiantly (not always successfully) to hold his feelings—the sadness and disappointment, the not being able to give him the thing he might most want, all that stuff—without trying to push him to the next. At this moment, a couple of things are clear: we can’t make him want to go where he doesn’t want to go and we can’t dissuade him from thinking his solution (homeschooling for two years) best. Last night, as I listened to my lovely caring dad of a husband try to talk the guy down from his dream, I almost heard that wonderful advice again as if the words leapt into the air: let this be a conversation between him and him. For now, at least, that’s really the best tact.
The other part of that advice, of course, and it’s hard for any parent thinking s/he knows what’s best—pink, no pink, the conventional handwriting grip, the middle school—is that at some point, your way may or may not be the way things go. This isn’t to say our kid gets to make the big-ticket school choice of his own accord; he needs parental buy-in. It’s to say that if we do our very best job around stuff that counts, we’ll hold the feelings, we may try our way, and also, we may try his, if it stays his. The truth we hold onto—that kids need peers and school is—I am reluctant to admit to myself, a blanket statement. I hope that our listening and holding brings him to a contented place at the middle school with his peers, I do. I’m just trying to remember that absolutes sometimes get in the way of listening.
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For the record, I put each of my tiny boys in pink and gave them dolls and I put the girl in blue and handed her trucks. I put the boys in blue and the girl in (copious amounts of) pink. She’s got dolls; they had, if they wanted, endless trucks. As it goes, the boys didn’t much like the dolls, the girl loves the dolls and two boys loved trucks, but not all three. So far, conversations about marriage are very often open-ended and wife or husband is the way they describe future spouses. Living in a town where the Pride March is practically a civic event and so many families have such varied constellations of parents surely supports open minds and hearts. I’m sorry for Parenting readers they don’t enjoy that amazing privilege.
