Leaving Sunnyside one day this week, Saskia was in a hugging mood. Unfortunately for her, Allesandra didn’t want a hug, nor did Alli, nor did Vaishali. So it goes in the lives of toddlers. The desire to hug isn’t always mutual and you have to learn to ask before foisting yourself upon your pal.
Plenty of times, someone wants to hug Saskia and she’s the one who rejects the notion. Toddlerhood is fluid that way. What’s really important is that everyone’s learning to navigate the “rules” of friendship and community. Things like respecting boundaries and taking turns and all being friends come along before the more sophisticated iterations of sharing or speaking kindly or Vivian Paley’s playground mantra: “You can’t say you can’t play.”
These things are so critical and they are not necessarily intuitive, and they certainly aren’t easy all the time. That’s part of why I have such great respect for Saskia’s preschool; over the years, I’ve seen them teach what some people assume needs little facilitation. These lessons have a ripple effect, so I’ve reaped their benefits at home.
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Meantime, some of my friends have expressed missing their school year rounds, not for the homework or even the routine, but because all these daily adult interactions, the ones over homework and school events and picking up kids are lost to new routines (with camps, those are continually changing and evolving and then there are moments without routine that inevitably do not coincide with your friends’ routine-absent weeks).
Although regretfully I missed my friend Dori Ostermiller’s reading from her first novel Outside the Ordinary World at the Odyssey Bookshop (dear husband out of town for the day and evening for work), I loved hearing from one friend that “every woman in the Valley was there.” We women in the Valley, like our children, require a chance to nurture our connections. I think this is one reason I’ve developed such abiding affection for my town’s Tuesday Market. For me, it provides as friendly a meeting place as could be. Just this past week, I was more than tickled to see Sarah from Apex Orchards there (she’d been there but earlier the couple of weeks before that, so we missed each other; she’d been on the lookout for me, she said).
I really don’t find enough time to hang with my pals. Between work and kids, intentional “dates” are rare. I’m extremely fortunate that my closest friends have kids we just call cousins and we hang out kind of all the time, trading kids and houses and meals and such. If I didn’t have friends-as-family on my street, my life would be far lonelier. As it is, I feel the opposite of lonely.
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Here we are in a time when the world beyond us—wars, crumbling economy, climate crisis, cyber-bullies, and religious intolerance and on—is so grim and so overwhelming. The take home message for me is that one’s community becomes that much more valuable. So, learning to attend to friends and community is as important, if not more important, than just about anything else. I will never forget a friend of mine, after her then four year-old son was diagnosed with Asperger’s (long enough ago that much less was known about and the word was much less familiar), saying to me, “I thought I cared about stuff like where he’ll go to college. I realize what really matters is being capable of having friends.” It was one of those sentences uttered that didn’t mean to be a life-changer. For me, it really was, perspective gratefully altered.
Anyway, as we walked strolled from school, Vaishali’s mom stopped their van and mother and daughter got out. Vaishali just wanted to give Saskia a hug after all. Then, they got back into their vehicle and drove off.
