This is turning out to be a scattered sort of week, with two kids at home with nothing exactly to do (although this morning and tomorrow morning, Lucien is occupied—today spending an hour with a wonderful physical therapist to work on balance and flexibility—and tomorrow a session with a writing tutor to get some support with his summer writing project, which is a blog—but of course—it’s the twenty-first century after all). I’d forgotten how if you believe in boredom as potentially an important, healthy childhood experience, you’ve also got to be ready and willing, as the parent at home, to suck it up for a good deal of whining. There’s my explanation for distracted brain.
Remy’s really been the master of whining. The moment he’s bored, he tells me, almost tattles at his bored self. On Sunday, boredom led to a big clearing out of shoes in the mudroom cubbies so I have to remain firm on this pro-boredom stance (because that was totally in my best interest; he did a bang-up job himself and then for another hour with his pal, Kate, when she biked over). So, the reality is there’s boredom and there are some great moments, playing with toys long forgotten about, making up games, biking around the few streets he can go on by himself (and we biked to GoBerry once this week, walked to Tuesday Market yesterday). He has next week for boredom and fun and then a good long stretch of camp ahead.
Lucien’s been melting more than whining after his very nice trip to Philadelphia to see the grandparents. The meltdowns all have the same ostensible reason behind them: he’s unhappy—understatement, sobbing and sobbing more—about middle school. He doesn’t want to go where we are sending him and frankly, as a parent it sucks not to give your kid what s/he wants even if you know you kind of have to do things somehow not to the child’s liking. I think about this almost every afternoon, because to leave Saskia at naptime involves just a few minutes of protest on her part. Those protests involve tears and the more tired she is, the more tears there are, the more stalling there is and the more urgent the don’t-go pleas are. And, of course, the more tired she is the more she needs to sleep and the best way for me to get her there is to get firm and get to that particular little finish line (like pulling of a band-aid, do it quickly). Unlike the nap, though, I cannot guarantee my just turned-twelve year-old son that he’ll like middle school or that it’s the just-right place for him.
To clarify, however good, great or fine the school is, we don’t know and won’t know and can’t know the particulars, such as how is that size a school for our kid at this juncture and we can’t change the luck of the draw (will he get onto a pretty good “team” or one that’s less so; we’re told that both things happen, more often good than not so good). It’s all new and so unlike the nap, which I can pretty much assure Saskia (and myself) is going to feel better I can’t quite do the same for Lucien (or myself). I can, however, assure him and me both that giving it a real try (as his sister would urge, “Give it a go”) will feel better than giving in to fear.
I can’t really pinpoint why this has become so difficult for our guy, but I know there’s more to the story than a school change and so we (his papa and me) are working very hard at parenting him these days. Long past choke hazards or other concerns that seem to require vigilance, this feels much more challenging, as, for me, the more emotional stuff always does. Matters of happiness always do, as I was reminded yesterday meeting a mom with nearly-two-year-old and a three-week old, who worried at her toddler’s sadness with the big life changing development of big brotherhood. Although we’d never before met, I ended up saying that she’d given her son the very best gift (exactly as someone said definitively to me twelve years ago) in that sibling and that he would again be happy. I have four kids, I told her. You can take my word on this. She looked the way I felt a few days before when my pal (brother, in spirit) Michael said of Lucien, “He’s really going to be a great adult; he’s got what it takes to anything, those incredible people skills and smarts.” When things are hard, it’s really hard to imagine they might get easier and happier. Without ignoring that to become happier very often requires more than simply time, imagining that things will, eventually, be okay seems like a critical leap of faith.
