A couple of
years back, Pip discovered a large coffee table book about the Civil War on our
bookshelf. This book was given to me by my parents when I was about eight or
ten years old and is filled with interesting pictures and colorful maps
depicting many of the war’s important battles. Over the next year or so, Pip
would periodically pick it up and start asking questions about where things
were and why people were fighting and who was right. Obviously, it’s hard to
explain that sort of thing to a six-year-old, especially if you’re trying not
to demonize people while touching on some of the reasons why these armies were
set to killing each other. Pretty soon Ava and I decided to move these
questions in other directions and come back to them when Pip (and Polly) had
gotten older.
This was
the right plan, and I should have stuck with it. But, I slipped. Around the
same time as we started redirecting the Civil War questions, I was shifting
Polly and Pip from taking a bath to taking showers. As it turned out, Pip likes
to talk when he’s in the shower and soon he was returning to some of the
questions about the Civil War that we had deflected earlier. In effect, he
pulled a little divide-and-conquer on Ava and me, and he soon discovered that I
was weak. After all, it was my book.
Sometimes I’d still redirect his
questions, but other times I would go ahead and try to answer them. Usually I
gave in on the simple stuff like which army was blue and which was grey, or was
our state a Union or Confederate state, or why did the Union win. After
answering these I would then get sucked in and take on some more complicated
questions such as why did the South need slaves or why did someone shoot
President Lincoln.
Eventually,
Pip tired on the Civil War questions, but other topics that he felt might be
sensitive took their place. He’d asked me questions about World War II and why
the Nazis were bad. One time he hopped into the shower, dunked his head, and
said,
“Dad, what
does ICBM stand for?”
This led to a long, multi-shower conversation about nuclear
weapons, the Cold War, and missile submarines.
Warfare and military hardware are
not the only topics he likes to talk about during shower time. He’s also told
me about the games he plays during his free computer time at school. Recently
he’s also been bringing me up to speed on the plot lines of the Percy Jackson
books he’s been reading. We even had one conversation about War of the Worlds
and the Orson Welles radio-play that freaked out the country in the 1930s.
****
I didn’t really think much about
all of this until two months ago when the kids went back to school. Every new school
year starts off with its share of rough patches, and this year Pip had to
contend with a couple of older kids in his class who wanted to test him. One in
particular spent the third day of school, in classic bully fashion, trolling
through Pip’s lunch to see if there was anything he liked. Fortunately, he was
looking for something sweeter than Pip’s sandwich, cashews, and raisins, and he
moved on.
Because it
turned out to be a non-event, I’m not sure Pip would ever have told us about this
kid was messing with his lunch. Thought it was clearly on his mind, it was not
something big enough to bring up at dinner or take a special moment out after
homework. It was just the kind of everyday annoyance that largely gets washed
away in the flow of things.
Except that
we had created this space during his shower where it was just Pip and me with a
bit of time and only something menial to accomplish. That night while he took
his shower Pip let me know what had happened at lunch. He wasn’t looking for me
to do anything about it. He was just telling me because it was on his mind. I
didn’t overreact. I told him he had handled things well and to let me know if other
things happened. Over the next week or so I checked in with him at various
times to see how things were going. We didn’t talk about bullying per se; we
just talked about handling such moments and knowing when it was okay to ask for
help from a teacher. Fortunately after a couple more tests, the older kid
apparently decided to leave Pip alone.
****
I started
to tell this story as a way to talk about how Pip has come to feel that the
shower is a safe place to unload whatever random stuff is on his mind. It
seemed amusing and somewhat bizarre, but as I’ve been writing I’ve come to
realize how lucky we are to have stumbled into that. In our daily lives there are
few places where Pip or Polly get such regular, predictable, focused attention
from one of us. At meals, after homework, on the ride to and from school, there’s
always a sibling or another parent around somewhere to jump in and complicate
things. The times we do get to have one-on-one talks tend to come outside the
course of our regular week, often on the weekend when one child goes to the
store and the other stays home. These times are nice, but they tend to be
freighted with a specialness that dissuades talking about mundane annoyances. It’s
hard to imagine Pip’s lunch time bully coming up during those times.
And so, as
it turns out I’m glad we have the shower. There are many things that I am happy
to have off my plate as the kids grow up – diapers are gone, they feed
themselves, I don’t have to monitor their bathroom needs anymore – and I
thought bathing would eventually be the same. But now, I think I’ll hang on to
that for a while longer. There’s no good replacement for that kind of time, and
it may be a handy thing to have in our pocket when the next set of challenges
come around.
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