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parenting

Decisions

Monday 23 September 2024

Sometimes, there are no right decisions; there’s only a queue of increasingly wrong — sometimes increasingly harmful — decisions, all standing patiently in line for us to inspect them, reinspect them, obsess over them, fret over them, stress over them, reexamine once again, reconsider yet again, and constantly feel crushed by them.

Sometimes, there are no good decisions; there’s only a pile of increasingly worse decisions — often increasingly harmful — and we just have to look them over and decide which of these awful decisions we will take, which of these awful harms we will inflict.

It’s never something as morally abstract as the trolley problem. It’s always direct harm to a relationship we treasure. It’s always choosing one hurt to inflict over another to someone we don’t want to hurt at all. And so it always doubles back on us and causes us as much pain as we doled out. Perhaps more. Perhaps it’s only with a little experience and a few years that we see that.

Sometimes, there is no way to juggle all the things we’re required to keep flying overhead in never-ending arcs. Focused on keeping the chainsaw’s roaring blades away from our hands, we lose sight of one thing or another, and the knife comes clattering down to the floor, damaging something. Or worse, someone.

I feel like this teaching throughout the day: there are little decisions I have to make constantly (Do I let her go to the bathroom now or would it be better later? Do I let him go to the vending machine?) and some only seem little (Do I call him down now, knowing how he’ll react and knowing the disruption that will cause — which will be the bigger disruption? Do I correct her writing now, even though her mistake has only a tangential connection to the topic at hand? Do I try to force this kid to work with someone or let her work on her own again this time even though we’ve had the discussion about the merits of collaboration and made an agreement to try the next time we’re in groups?). But there is always — always, always — a decision just lurking.

Nowhere else is this more true than in parenting. Things glide along fine until they don’t, and then someone is always going to be disappointed; someone is always going to be hurt.

This is especially true, I’m discovering, as one’s child moves closer and closer to that magic number: eighteen. It’s especially true, I’m seeing, as one’s child becomes increasingly cognitively developed and is no longer making arguments like, “I just want to,” but sound, logical arguments that acknowledge their own shortcomings in the present situation and yet make a good case for getting what she wants. It’s especially true, I’m learning, when she fights back tears of frustration and tries her level best to keep her emotions in check and act like an adult.

“Because I said so” is no more a legitimate reason than “I just want to.” At least it’s not anymore, because the power of logic: what’s going to change in the next two and three-quarters months? Is she going to be any more cognitively developed? Emotionally developed?

K and I love being parents, truly we do, but even after nearly eighteen years of it, we’re still wondering if it will ever get any easier.

Tuesday Back

Tuesday 16 January 2024

The Girl went back to school today for the first time since Friday before last, as in January 5. It’s been a tough ten days, and we still have issues ahead of us, but at least we’re to a point where something of a normal life can return. I never missed ten days for an illness, but I missed significant time in the first semester because of having to go to the Feast of Tabernacles every year (along with the Feast of Trumpets and Atonement, which meant missing more school days). If I’d been as worried about my grades as L is about hers, that probably would have caused me more stress than it did. But then, the founder of our little sect died (38 years ago today, in fact), the new leader made a few changes, and the FOT (as we called it) became a thing of the past. Something the Girl doesn’t have to worry about.

The Boy is still frustrated with his schedule this semester, particularly that he doesn’t have PE anymore. In middle school, I hated PE. In the mid-eighties in Virginia (maybe not the whole state, but at least in our area), there was none of this “you can only fail once before high school” mentality that’s the standard here. (There are benefits to that, to be sure, but I’ve had kids tell me, “I’ve already failed once. There’s nothing you can do to me,” and then promptly do nothing the entire year.) But we didn’t have that, so kids could fail two or three times before getting to high school, which is why when I was in seventh grade (it was a junior high, with only two grades), there were two sixteen-year-old eighth graders. Dodgeball, which we played with those stinging rubber kickball balls, was utter hell. Those kids were strong. But fortunately, E doesn’t have that worry, so he consequently loves PE.

Two ways my childhood was so very different from our children’s.

Saturday Evening Downtown

Saturday 25 March 2023

We spent the evening downtown, the five of us — the two kids and the dog. It’s so rare that everyone’s schedules work out to let us do something like this. We’ll take every opportunity we have.

Our stroll eventually led us down to the river and the new Grand Bohemian hotel which is the latest highlight of the ever-developing downtown Greenville.

Eventually we made it down the the rocky area of the river just at the edge of the main downtown park, the place both of our kids loved to run about on the rocks as little kids.

“Those days are long gone” K and I constantly remind ourselves. And yet, every now and then, the stars align,

the kids are both fascinated with the same thing, and for a brief moment, we pop back a few years in the past.

First House

Sunday 5 February 2023

The last time L and I were in Rock Hill for a volleyball tournament, and Papa was still alive, I managed to find the first house I remember living in, the house Nana and Papa owned when they brought me home.

In the front was the same railroad-tie planter that Papa had built decades and decades ago, sometime in 1976 or 1977 I would imagine: I say this because I remember him building it, in vague, hazy memories that might be more the product of suggestion than actual memories.

Image from 1975

When Nana passed away and I was going through all the old photos we’d taken from their condo, I found one of us cousins in front of that house. I’m on the little horse toy toward the far right; that’s my cousin C behind me. This was from a family reunion that we had at our house. I remember a family reunion there, so it must have been a second one: I’m far too young in this picture to remember anything from that time.

From the same series of pictures is one of my grandparents: Papa’s father is on the far left; Papa’s mother is the only woman in the foreground.

And yet another one from that day, this time on someone’s motorcycle. I’m not sure whose, and I’m not sure it was the owner posing with me in this shot, and I’m not sure who the man in the picture is. These are all just things that exist in my past but not in my memory.

And the obvious move: what pictures will have this same effect on my own children? Probably none — their lives are so completely documented here that they would have no problem figuring out who was holding them on a motorcycle…

An Apt Poem for Now

Friday 18 November 2022

To My Favorite 17-Year-Old High School Girl

by Billy Collins

Do you realize that if you had started
building the Parthenon on the day you were born
you would be all done in only two more years?
Of course, you would have needed lots of help,
so never mind, you’re fine just as you are.
You are loved for simply being yourself.
But did you know at your age Judy Garland
was pulling down $150,000 a picture,
Joan of Arc was leading the French army to victory,
and Blaise Pascal had cleaned up his room?
No, wait, I mean he had invented the calculator.
Of course, there will be time for all that later in your life
after you come out of your room
and begin to blossom, at least pick up all your socks.
For some reason, I keep remembering that Lady Jane Grey
was Queen of England when she was only fifteen
but then she was beheaded, so never mind her as a role model.
A few centuries later, when he was your age,
Franz Schubert was doing the dishes for his family,
but that did not keep him from composing two symphonies,
four operas, and two complete Masses, as a youngster.
But of course that was in Austria at the height
of romantic lyricism, not here in the suburbs of Cleveland.
Frankly, who cares if Annie Oakley was a crack shot at 15
or if Maria Callas debuted as Tosca at 17?
We think you are special by just being you,
playing with your food and staring into space.
By the way, I lied about Schubert doing the dishes,
but that doesn’t mean he never helped out around the house.

Finals

Tuesday 2 November 2021

It’s nearly the end of the fall soccer season: we’re in the final week of practice before the final game on Saturday. It’s been a tough season: no wins except through forfeit (does that even count?) and only one tie (last week thanks to E’s hat-trick). There’s been a little tension within the team as a result of it all. One boy, arguably the strongest player on the team, started taking things into his own hands (or rather, feet) and trying to be a one-boy show at times, not passing or even appearing to be aware of the other players. This frustrated some boys and comforted some boys: as long as he had it, things rose or fall on his shoulders. A win would be due to him, but a loss could also be attributed to him. Perhaps they didn’t think that, but I’ve no doubt it was at least an unconscious relief for some when it was A that was losing the ball in a move that ultimately ended in an opposing team’s goal rather than their “screw-up.” But now A has been out for a few weeks due to injury, so the boys have had to gel without him. As a result, there’s been better team play, and now that everything has gelled to some degree, it’s almost over.

That’s a fairly frequent pattern in life, though: as soon as everyone gets used to the year’s teachers, for instance, and everything is clicking seamlessly, the year ends. This is even more the case in block scheduling, like at L’s high school, where classes meet for 90 minutes a day but only for one semester. By the time everyone really knows how the class works and has found their place in it, the class is over.

In the repetitions of the seasons and holidays, it’s the same. As soon as we’re comfortable in the hustle of the Halloween/Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year’s quartet, it’s over and we’re all exhausted from it.

“In my beginning is my end,” wrote TS Eliot

Questioning

Monday 1 February 2021

At some point recently, K was reading to the Boy about Moses and the plagues, and as children are wont to do, he zeroed in the most shocking one: the death of the firstborn male. He was trying to figure out who in the family would be the firstborn male.

“Would it be Papa?” he asked.

How does one respond? How does one say the obvious: “No, it would be you”?

“But why would God do that? It’s against the commandments.”

This is the crux of the issue of me of late: how are we to incorporate all those horrible things the god of the Old Testament does with the notion that the Bible supposedly comes from the mind of an omnipotent, omniscient, all-beneficent being? (The story of the death of the firstborn is problematic both for God’s beneficence and his omniscience: the Hebrews are to mark their doorway with the blood of a sacrificed lamb in order to indicate that the angel doing the killing is to pass over that house — why wouldn’t the angel know without that?)

Believers start with the premise that the Bible is from an omnipotent, omniscient, all-beneficent being, and then they work backward to try to explain these horrible passages. A skeptic like me starts with the premise that the Bible is supposedly from an omnipotent, omniscient, all-beneficent being and looks for evidence of that within the pages. The clear evil that the god of the Old Testament does, then, is clear and damning evidence against the supposition that the Bible reflects the mind of an omnipotent, omniscient, all-beneficent being. That god is petty and selfish, jealous and immature, narcissistic and self-absorbed, and above all, that being as portrayed in the Old Testament is evil, toying with some by demanding human sacrifice and then rescinding the order at the last minute (thinking of Issac here) and accepting human sacrifice in other situations (I’m thinking of Jephthah here). He is murderous and rampaging on both an enormous scale, commanding the Israelites to wipe out whole nations, men, women, and children, and a small scale, sending bears to maul children:

He went up from there to Bethel, and while he was going up on the way, some small boys came out of the city and jeered at him, saying, “Go up, you baldhead! Go up, you baldhead!” And he turned around, and when he saw them, he cursed them in the name of the LORD. And two she-bears came out of the woods and tore forty-two of the boys. From there he went on to Mount Carmel, and from there he returned to Samaria. (2 Kings 2.23-25)

Believers have to become apologists for God, coming up with reasons why these horrible actions are perfectly reasonable and in fact good. (Here’s an attempt to explain the bear mauling.) They resort to explaining what it means in that time and culture, failing to realize that they’ve just placed a limitation upon this supposedly-divinely inspired book that counts against their argument. They discuss the nuances of the original Hebrew, failing to realize that they’ve just placed a limitation upon this supposedly-divinely inspired book that counts against their argument. They produce wildly different interpretations and explanations, failing to realize that they’ve just placed a limitation upon this supposedly-divinely inspired book that counts against their argument.

For the skeptic, things are so much simpler. Occam’s razor simple. We mark these passages in the “Against” column and move on. In the end, we look at how many marks are in the “For” column and how many are in the “Against” and make a summary judgment from that. And there are vastly more things in the “Against” column.

The Challenge

Monday 7 December 2020

I texted a picture to K this morning: “This is what my classroom looks like now,” I said.

“Wow — no more rearranging rooms, I guess,” she replied.

I know a lot of teachers are concerned about the impact this will have on their teaching style, on the types of lessons they can do. I for one am not terribly worried about that because this year I’m teaching only honors classes, and most honors students are relatively mature and somewhat adaptable. There are some things that will take getting used to — not as much motion, more teacher-based lessons, etc. — but overall, I think they’ll do fine.

When I got home, I noticed a little paper with Shakespearean insults on the table. Remembering that L’s class has just started Romeo and Juliet, I thought it might have been from her, but the Boy filled me in when he got home from swimming lessons: “The kids in challenge today were working on Shakespearean insults,” he said. He told me about how funny it was when his friends who went to challenge shared it with him, and I’m assuming he got K to help him find a list of insults on the internet and print them out.

It was only then that I realized: E didn’t get an invitation to join challenge when he started this year. The invitations are based on standardized test scores from second grade, and I immediately thought that the Boy must feel a little left out, a little, well, stupid compared to the others.

K had the same concerns, and we talked about it in the evening when the Boy was sound asleep. “He wanted to know if we could sign him up,” she said forlornly, “and I had to tell him you don’t sign up for it; you get an invitation.”

I remember seeing the challenge kids leave — our district was a little worse in their naming: it was the “gifted and talented” group, which makes everyone else feel less gifted, less talented, and that’s exactly how I felt. I watched them troop out of the classroom in elementary school, wondering what they do there, wondering why I wasn’t a part of it.

I got an invitation at the end of fifth grade and spent sixth grade with the GT kids who’d been doing it for several years by that time. I didn’t feel any different, really, and I don’t really recall doing anything all that spectacular. Of course, that was over 35 years ago, so I can justifiably be a little fuzzy on the details, I’m sure.

Throughout high school, I was most decidedly average. I was in the “advanced” classes only insofar as I was not in remedial English or remedial math. I didn’t take algebra until ninth grade; I never took a single AP course; I had no “Honors” affixed to my class names; I didn’t graduate anywhere near the top 10, and I highly doubt I was even in the top 10%. And yet for high school superlatives (how I loath to this day that idea), my peers voted me “Most Intellectual.” (I was tempted to refuse the award during the senior luncheon, but my mother convinced me it would be rude to do so.) So the recognition for my academic achievement was a mixed bag — conflicting signals. In the end, I just didn’t put much stock into what people thought of my intellectual abilities.

But somehow, when it comes to my kids, I feel a little differently. I want them to be geniuses, above and beyond even those who are above and beyond. What parent doesn’t?

The Boy is starting to realize some people work faster than he does, maybe a little more accurately, K and I concluded. And that’s fine. We’re all different. We all have different gifts. But still, I felt the Boy’s sting just a bit, so I went back to his bedroom and cuddled with him a little more.

“You’re very gifted in many ways,” I told him.

“How?”

“You’re a very good reader. You’re an excellent drawer. And you’re very kind and sensitive to other people’s needs and emotions.”

A pause. “Thank you.” He snuggled in a little closer and went to sleep.

Finishing the Toolbox

Tuesday 13 October 2020

Yesterday was the cut day; today we assembled everything. I struggled to figure out how much to do and how much to let him do, to decide how many mistakes to correct and how many to let slide.

“Oh, Daddy, that nail is actually coming out of the bottom.” That’s one to correct.

“Daddy, I didn’t evenly space these nails.” Just pat him on the head and say, “It’s not a big deal, buddy.”

In the end, it wasn’t perfect, but he’d done almost all of it — a good reason to do your best Dr. Seuss character imitation. (“Daddy, why do so many of the characters go around with their eyes closed?” he once asked. I’d never really noticed that.)

Day 16: Uncertainty and Certainty — Random Thoughts

Tuesday 31 March 2020

I am no longer certain about anything regarding school. We’ve been out for almost three weeks now and we have another three to go, but the rates of infection here in South Carolina are not decreasing. I, and many of my students, suspect and fear that we won’t be heading back this year. But we could be wrong; I hope we’re wrong.

I am no longer certain about Papa’s condition. Something neurological seems to be going on, and with COVID-19 pillaging our country right now, it throws the whole medical community into comparative chaos. It’s not a simple matter getting an appointment with a doctor anymore.

I’m no longer certain I want to update this daily. It’s been my longest streak: over 100 consecutive days at this point, stretching back to December 22. I’ve been doing it more out of a sense of stubbornness than anything else. “I’ve made it a month: might as well try to make it two.” “I’ve made it two months: might as well try to make it three.” And to what end? And if I do continue, to what loss? A few minutes’ time every night to make a record for — for whom? I don’t even think it matters.

I am certain about the value of the increased time we’ve been spending together. Being it home makes schooling both easier and more challenging, but we’re spending more time together as a result of everything being shut down — nightly walks, movie nights (tonight, Hugo — E loved it; L claimed it was boring but still demanded we pause it when she went to the restroom), evening games of Monopoly, afternoons spent in the backyard messing around.

Changes

Wednesday 4 March 2020

Our daughter now leaves the bathroom trailing a Monet scent of blossoms and linens, the mingling of surf and grass — the thousand and one scents of a young teenage girl. She started out smelling of “pinkness and warmth and contentedness,” a warm mix of comfortable and soft scents that came from her effortlessly, naturally. It was who she was; it was how old she was, or rather how young.

Now, too, her scents bloom from her age, though now from deliberate choice and purposeful will. They come from body washes and facial scrubs, hand creams and lip balms, shampoos and exfoliants. They are from her will and a representation of her will — a desire to be pleasant, to be sweet, to be pretty.

To what end? As far as I can tell, she’s not seeking the eye of anyone, not interested in any such things, and though the time is right for such interest to begin budding, we’ve not heard a word.

But realistically speaking, would we? Didn’t I try desperately to hide from my parents the fact that I no longer found girls foreign and frightful? Didn’t I try desperately to hide from my parents the fact that this girl or that had caught my eye? Didn’t I try desperately to save myself from that embarrassment, because how could they possibly understand?

Giggles

Tuesday 3 March 2020

When putting to bed a 7-year-old, the giggles are sometimes inevitable. Just about anything can set them off. A giggling 7-year-old is usually a joy, but it bedtime there’s a touch of gray to it as well: the kid needs to go to sleep, but it’s so much fun just to lie there giggling together.

Tonight the word “nipple” the boy giggling and he couldn’t stop. “Such a funny word!”

I put my index finger to my lips to shush him.

“Daddy,” he said, “you’re trying to shush me but you still laughing.”

“I know,” I laughed.

In the end, I had to leave. I knew he would never get and I would never stop laughing if I didn’t.

There was an added tenderness to that moment from a passage I had read earlier in the evening in a book by Paul Auster. One of the characters is a man named Peter Stillman who’s father had literally locked him up in a dark room from the age of three so he would forget English and revert to the natural language of God.

Needless to say, it didn’t work.

The only thing the father’s cruelty accomplished was to create a scarred man who could barely speak.

No father would behave way. Depravity is possible but not to that degree. At least we tell ourselves that. Insanity is the only explanation for such horror.

It seemed to me then that I was not only having a sweet moment with my son but also giving him an extra helping to make up for other children’s horror. As if that would help. 

Lost Stories

Friday 28 February 2020

In 1986, I went to Austria with a group of about 120 teenagers from various congregations of our church. We didn’t go as part of a mission trip — our church members didn’t proselytize, for that was the responsibility of the leader through his television program. (Members’ job was to support him, i.e., pay for his TV time.)

The program was called the Winter Education Program, and it was intended to teach us kids who went about two things: winter sports (like the church’s SEP did for summer sports) and theology (which could more aptly be called programming since questioning was out of the question). It was, in reality, an extended ski trip for the kids whose parents could afford it.

I really remember very little about it other than two salient points: first, I never really connected with anyone there and didn’t develop any close friendships. When I went to the summer equivalent a few years later, I made great friends, some of whom I’m still in contact with. Second, I bought my first Pink Floyd cassette on this trip, A Momentary Lapse of Reason. My father, taking his duty to protect me very seriously, had to approve a given band before I could buy anything by them, and I had a suspicion that Pink Floyd wouldn’t make the cut. (There’s a double pun in there for anyone familiar with their discography.)

I hadn’t even thought of this whole adventure in probably 25 years when going through photos we took from Nana’s and Papa’s condo, I found these images. It’s a significant event (in a sense) of my youth, and it’s something my wife and children know nothing about. And that realization is what really got me thinking.

I’m forty-seven years old now. That’s roughly 17,155 days and change. By any conservative estimate, I’ve had thousands of little experiences that I remember to some degree or another, making them at least slightly significant, about which my family knows nothing about. They were insignificant at the time, but I remember them years later — that provides some degree of import, I think. There is, of course, no way or reason to share all these experiences with them, but that means much of my life is a mystery for them.

The same, though, is true for my own parents. I know only what they’ve told me, and now that Nana has passed, there are stories upon stories that I will never know.

Looking Down

Friday 10 January 2020

The call came in at 3:30, when I had fifteen minutes left of my day. Kids were milling about, waiting for their parents to pick them up or to head off to after-school. I looked at my phone to see that it was from Nowy Sacz. I thought perhaps it could be Babcia, perhaps Wojek D. It was, however, neither of them. Instead, it was Pani M, my former landlady in Lipnica and the closest I’d had to a Polish mother until I actually got one (-in-law).

She’d called to thank us for the Christmas card we’d sent, which the family had received only this week. We got to talking for a while, and she asked about the family.

“L looks like she’s getting very tall,” she said.

“She’s taller than her mother now,” I said. We’d learned that when she went to the doctor this week. Five feet eight inches — one inch taller than K.

“How tall?” she asked. Knowing imperial measurements would be meaningless to Pani M, I Googled it quickly. 

“172,” I replied.

“Oh, that is tall.”

In the evening, I was standing across from L as K helped her prepare her nightly medicine regimen, and I realized I was looking straight ahead as I looked right into her eyes. Straight ahead. We were only about five feet apart. And it hit me: we’re almost there physically. That little bundle of pink that we could hold in a single arm thirteen years ago is now almost fully physically grown.

Today’s Photo, Completely Unrelated

I reworked a few photos from our Grand Canyon trip. This is one of my favorites.

Ten Years

Thursday 9 January 2020

Ten years ago, K’s mother came to visit and help out with the Girl. We were still reluctant to put her in public daycare, and J was willing and eager to come help.

Finding these pictures was another “how has it gone so quickly?” moment. And they’re only piling up, I realize.

L is now 13, which means in only a few more years, she’ll be heading off to college. Is she ready for that? Are we ready for that? And I know that every parent goes through this, but going through it ourselves — that’s something entirely different.

Today’s journalism journal entry:

This has got to be the longest week in the history of weeks. This week had a week of Mondays, a fortnight of Tuesdays, a few dozen Wednesdays, and though it’s now Thursday afternoon, I can’t imagine what’s awaiting us tomorrow. All of that to say it’s been an exhausting week. It’s been made even more exhausting by the fact that our daughter is still sick. Four days out of school. She’s positively paranoid about the amount of work she’ll have to make up, and I’m positively paranoid about how she’ll fuss about having to make up all that work. One more thing to deal with this weekend.

Speaking of this weekend, I have an ungodly amount of grading to finalize over the weekend. A test for English 8; English I’s IXL work; this final article in journalism. I’ll probably be drinking coffee this weekend by the pot. Just put it in an IV drip for me — it would probably be simpler.

Free Monday

Monday 28 October 2019

Today was a teacher workday, one of three that we are able to take off without worry. Exchange days, they’re called. If we’ve gone to meetings and such after school, we use those hours toward the time we would have ordinarily spent in school. I didn’t have those hours, so I took a personal day.

E and I spent the morning working on the large tree that had fallen in the drainage ditch — which we call a creek — that runs behind our house. I knew that if we didn’t, the first big rain storm would cause flooding.

I didn’t realize how much of the tree was under brush and vines that I’m assuming it took down with itself as it fell. We cleared all that away so we could get to the tree, and we cut and removed as much as we could with just two of us.

E is of an age that he actually is starting to be helpful. I can pull on a large tangle of vines and have him cut the critical vines that are keeping everything locked and immobile. He can bring tools to me, help pull things up out of creekbeds, offer helpful commentary on the whole process.

Once we got that done and ate some lunch, we spent the afternoon at Denver Downs — fun with hay, ropes, and corn…

Loss

Saturday 12 October 2019

The Boy was the goalie when it happened — the break, through the pack that always orbits the ball, past the last defenders who have spent most of the year looking on, that left the Boy basically one-on-one with the attacker.

From the moment the break started, I fear for the worst. And a few short seconds later, there it was. The first goal of the game. The only goal of the game. The team’s first loss. With E manning the goal.

I knew he would be distraught about it. “I’m no good at defense,” he declared.

The question is, will this affect his love for the game? Can we help him move past it? How long will this bother him? These were the thoughts I rehearsed on the way back to the house.

By the time we got home, there was no real mention of it. No mention of it for the rest of the day. But what about Tuesday, when it’s time to go to soccer practice?

Drawings

Thursday 26 September 2019

The Boy has taken to drawing again. And being the generous soul that he is, the kind soul that he is — so much a more generous, a kinder soul than I — he regularly draws things for his friends at school.

Today he explained he was drawing a soccer ball for a friend at school who loves soccer.

“Is he a good friend?” I asked because I had certain concerns.

“Well, we don’t really talk. Just when we’re playing soccer. You know, stuff like ‘Let’s get the ball!’ and things like that,” he explained. That didn’t sound like the closest friend in the world. More like a soccer-field acquaintance.

And so I imagined a nightmare scenario of E, so thrilled with his drawing and happy to give something to someone that he imagines will bring only joy, giving this boy this drawing and the boy being completely nonchalant about it. Or worse, asking something like “Why’d you do this?” Or worse still, throwing it away in front of the Boy.

And then I imagined the conversation later, the confusion and pain the Boy might feel. “I would never do anything like that to someone,” he would protest. “Why would anyone do that?”

Why, indeed?

I don’t know that this will happen; I don’t know that, if it does, the Boy will even bring it up. But I do know that I can’t always be there to step in and block a painful situation, that I can’t always steer him away from people that seem callous or hateful, that I can’t always stop the pain before it starts, so I let it go at that. We’ll see tomorrow how his friend took the gift.

Winning, Losing, and Soccer Practice

Tuesday 3 September 2019

The Boy headed over to his young soccer team with a nonchalant gait that suggested ambivalence.

“Run, E,” I said. “Show some enthusiasm.”

He broke into his power stride: he slams his feet down in short strides and rocks his whole upper body back and forth. It’s not a particularly efficient gait, and I’ve tried several times to help him improve it.

“Slamming your feet down quickly doesn’t help you run faster,” I once explained. “In fact, it really has the opposite effect.” We practied a better step together, but anytime he wants really to run, he reverts back to his jerky, stomping gait.

I suppose his thinking is logical in a way: to run full speed, you have to put all your energy into your run. What more obvious way is there of accomplishing this than expending massive amounts of energy in slamming your feet down?

So he was running across the field toward the circle of players while I retrieved my folding chair from the trunk. I closed it, looked up, and saw E sprawled on the ground, his arms out at his side, his feet still traveling upward as he rocked ever so slightly onto his upper body from the momentum of the running and falling.

I sighed.

The Boy has such a time with his self-confidence. He’s keenly aware that he’s slower than a lot of his peers; he’s quite cognizant of the fact that he’s far from the most aggressive player on the soccer field; he knows he doesn’t play any number of sports as well as his friends. The only thing he feels truly comfortable and confident doing is riding his bike with me.

I couldn’t tell what happened in the end. He just got up and continued over to the group, but I don’t know if anyone said anything, but I don’t think that’s even necessary: we’re perfectly capable of feeling we’ve made a fool of ourselves without anyone saying a word.

The question was, should I say something?

There was a part of me that wanted to talk to him, wanted to reassure him, wanted to make sure he was okay, that his ego hadn’t taken too big of a hit. Yet there was another part that felt I should just let it go. Bringing it up later might not do anything positive, I thought.

In the end, I just let it go. He never said anything about it, and it seemed like the coach was giving him a little extra dose of praise later — perhaps thinking the same thing I was and trying to give that confidence a little boost? I don’t know. I didn’t talk to him about it either.

It’s that fine line — when to step in and when to back off — that I suppose every parent tries to find in every situation.

When we got back home, the Girl was asleep: she’d just finished a volleyball game and had been fighting a sniffle for most of the day. “Just let her sleep a while,” K said, and so we did.

“How was the game?” I asked.

It turned out that L’s team didn’t just beat the other team; they completely demolished them. “I’m not sure the other team had a total of 25 points in both sets combined,” K said sympathetically.

The coach of the other team had come out and told the audience that they were a young and inexperienced team. “Please give them all the support you can,” she said.

I’m not sure how I feel about that. In a way, that’s like saying, “We know we’re about to get our asses handed to us, but cheer for them anyway.” It’s a tacit admission of what’s about to happen. And yet what’s wrong with that? Isn’t that really just knowing one’s own limitations?

In my own brief coaching career, I got reprimanded by a parent when, after a player on our team, watching the other team warm-up, declared, “We’re going to lose! There’s no doubt,” I replied with, “Yes, you certainly are.” Dramatic pause. “If that’s how you see it, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.” I continued by pointing out that they’d given up before they even started, and nothing good ever comes of that.

“Well, I think you could have been more encouraging,” the mother said.

Perhaps. By that time, the girls had lost not only every single match but every single set. We won one set the entire year and lost every single match. I’d been trying to encourage them, but I suppose it wasn’t enough — not for the girls, not for this particular mother, not for any of them.

It was my one and only season of volleyball coaching. Fortunately, I have a lot more seasons of parenting to get it right.

Interruption

Wednesday 24 July 2019

One of the things I miss about living in Boston is walking down a street or emerging from a subway car to hear someone busking. Granted, there were enough buskers with little enough talent to make them a nuisance more than anything else, but every now and then, someone would make me stop, take a little time out of my day, and immerse myself in their world.

These guys, who sadly play in NYC and never ventured into Boston’s subway system (and probably didn’t even exist when I lived there — the sax player would probably have been a toddler then), have perfected busking: ten-minute sets filled with energy, dynamism, and a touch of humor.

It makes me wish that our family lived in a place with more of this type of thing going on.