Gather. Discover. Cultivate.
We are allowed to love ourselves.
We are allowed to show up. We are allowed to take the compliment even when we fall short of our own standards.
We are allowed to determine the standards.
We are allowed to talk about how hard it is to love ourselves. We are allowed to enjoy our own simple company. We are allowed to release our grip. To revel in the small days. To have just one or two good friends.
We are allowed to think of our family, whatever its shape, as worthy of a crest.
Face down. Flung across the bed. He cries and cries, body shuddering with sobs. Something has happened outside.
I heard about it first from an upstairs neighbor who called me after witnessing the melee from her balcony. Then two little girls, teary and clutching each other, filled me in on oh-so-many details of Bug punching one of them. The bigger kids arrived in a pack to corroborate.
My boy, the one who hits.
My boy, the object of this witch hunt. Hiding somewhere. Shunned.
Little holes in the bag of rice gave it away. Three and half years living in this place, and here was the first sign of uninvited guests. On our next trip to town, we stopped at the hardware store for traps. Despite Bug’s insistence that we buy the $39 ultrasonic pest repeller, I opted for Tomcat traps. A four-pack for four bucks.
We smeared on peanut butter and tucked it into the cabinet corner. The next morning, we heard a snap. Big brown eyes, white fuzzy belly, limp broken body. “Oh, he’s so cute,” Bug said sadly. Into the weekday rush we crammed this death. We shrank it down to fit. School, work, a morning meeting and already late. I dumped the trap, mouse and all, into the garbage. Another dab of peanut butter on a clean trap, and off we hustled into our overfull day.
On the drive to school, regret hit hard.
He slides into bed next to me, his left side far warmer than his right. His chilled skin presses in as he drinks from my heat. “Can you put your arm around me?” He asks.
“Sure, scoot down.”
A shifting. The sheets tangle and we kick ourselves back to softness. Dark lingers. December morning takes her sweet time stretching awake. We wait her out.
“It’s funny how the neck is shaped,” he says in his dreamy murmur.
“How so?”
“It’s like it’s designed exactly right so someone’s arm can fit underneath.”
He blocks the dryer, wild eyes and a grin. I duck, pump, shoot. His wet boxer shorts whip past his ear and splat against the back wall of the drum.
“Oh man!” He turns and yanks a shirt from the washer tub, untwisting its rope of an arm from a pillowcase. He cuts in front of me and pivots. Past my block, he fakes then scores. “Yes!” Fist in the air.
We can do so much better. For the past few years, our patterns were stuck enough to seem hopeless. This past June, I made the choice to cultivate a more loving home.
After a long summer that included a stretch of five weeks apart, my son is back. This is the first night of his 4th grade year that he is spending with me. The evening coincides with a parent-teacher event. This means my boy runs wild around the neighborhood with his pals for a few hours before I have to leave him behind. He comes in, flushed and breathless, and parks himself in front of his video games. I lock the door behind me.
The motionless dragon in deep waters becomes the prey of the crabs.
– A fortune in a cookie in Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth
My mother is taking a Spanish class. This is her retirement. She also teaches ESL several days a week and is active in two book clubs. Each spring, with a gaggle of bibliophiles, she travels to the UK for a mystery writers’ conference. She goes to church, putters in the garden, cooks a meal almost every evening to share with my dad, and shows up at Bug’s school events. She even pops by my house to give Noodle a daily walk while I’m at work.
All of this, and now Spanish.
“I need to do something to keep from being bored,” she says.
In all seriousness. Bored.
We are at the midpoint of our nine days together. On the first night, I arranged to pick up my son’s little buddy from down the hall to join us for the free Seldom Scene bluegrass concert at a local park. Bug snarled and fussed while I packed up watermelon and blankets. Then at the show, the banjo twanged, the audience swayed. Bug and his buddy rounded up a half dozen other kids and played soccer in a clearing until the trees twinkled with lightning bugs. He rode home flushed and grinning.
Yesterday morning, when packing up to go to the Spark!Lab at the Smithsonian, Bug fought until he cried. Then on the train, he thrummed with questions and leaned forward in his seat peering out the front window down the dark tracks. At the museum, he spent 2-1/2 solid hours building laser mazes, a sonar rover, a helmet with night vision and echolocation.
Think of your child as a plant who is programmed by nature to grow and blossom. If you see the plant has brown leaves, you consider if maybe it needs more light, more water, more fertilizer. You don’t criticize it and yell at it to straighten up and grow right.
Kids form their view of themselves and the world every day. They need your encouragement to see themselves as good people who are capable of good things. And they need to know you’re on their side. If most of what comes out of your mouth is correction or criticism, they won’t feel good about themselves, and they won’t feel like you’re their ally. You lose your only leverage with them, and they lose something every kid needs: to know they have an adult who thinks the world of them.
– From “Building a Great Relationship with your Child” in Aha! Parenting
On our spring break trip to California, my son rounded up other kids at the hotel pool and played for 4 hours without pause. At the San Diego Botanical Gardens, he climbed up into tangled two-story treehouse and built a shelter out of balsa wood. On one bright morning, he hiked with his grandma and me through the hills at Torrey Pines as Pacific tides lapped at the cliffs.
He also fought, screamed, raged, cried, hit, kicked, and hurled insults. Every single day at every point of conflict, his body went rigid with defiance. He said hateful things. He brought his grandmother and cousin to tears. Me, to worse.
Shannon E. Williams 