This summer
Polly and Pip have started looking older to me. It’s been about two years since
this last happened. When they were four and six respectively, they started
losing the softness around their stomachs and growing longer limbs. Now, those
limbs are becoming more and more muscular. Polly’s arms slope outward at the
shoulder, and Pips legs have gotten tautly bunched above and below the knees.
Their faces have changed, too. They’re more engaged and articulate, more
complex. They’re no longer cute. I look into their eyes, and I expect a level
of sophistication from them that I never had expected before.
It is not a
coincidence that as Pip and Polly have come to look increasingly older, Ava and
I have come to expect a greater level of responsibility from them. We’ve
started asking them to take on more aspects of household maintenance – helping
with dishes, making beds, laying out clothes for school the next day, cleaning
bathrooms. We haven’t made any big speeches about these things or tried to tie
them to particular ideas like “being older” or “being in first/third grade.”
Instead, we’ve just started asking them more often to do things to help us out
around the house. Right now it’s actually kind of fun because things like
filling the water jugs or cracking eggs or tearing up lettuce for salad are new
activities for the kids. They get to figure out how to do them and what these
previously unknown experiences feel like. Plus, Polly and Pip both like feeling
useful and we make a big deal out of how helpful they are being. I imagine all
of this will get harder once the novelty has worn off.
****
This
gradually emerging sense of being older is bringing with it some bittersweet
moments for the kids as well. A couple of mornings ago just before school
started up again, I was making lunch in the kitchen while Pip and Polly were
hanging out together in the living room. They were playing a kids’ version of
the classic game Mastermind in which each player has a secret stack of
different animals and the opponent has to deduce the order of the stack by
asking questions such as “Is the lion above the giraffe?” or “is the penguin
below the monkey?”
Now, we’ve
been playing games like Memory, Go Fish, Bingo, and Chutes and Ladders for
several years, and usually Polly’s interest in these games trends towards being
silly with them rather than trying to win them. She likes messing around with
patterns, making goofy faces, laughing at odd coincidences that come along. It
isn’t that she doesn’t like to win, but she’s never gotten particularly
invested in winning as a measure of whether something was fun or not.
But that
morning was different. Whether it was because the game came from Grandma or
because it involved animals – her self-proclaimed area of expertise – or
because it was just her time, that morning Polly decided winning was important.
She was going to be the Mastermind champion or the world was going to end.
This
development wasn’t terribly surprising. When Pip was six years old, we started
playing Checkers together, and it was one of the more tortured experiences of
his life. Because he had never played a game through to the end, he couldn’t
see past the immediate visceral emotion of each and every move. He would gloat
over every successful jump and get teary every time he lost a checker. I was
constantly having to coax him along by making silly mistakes that gave him a
jump or by offering obvious hints about where he might best move to get closer
to getting kinged. This coaxing I found to be especially hard because I wanted
to try out some of my own strategies to see how they would work. I wanted to be
able to win. But I also wanted to keep playing. I was enjoying thinking through
things and talking with Pip over the game board, and if I always pounced on
Pips mistakes he’d get so frustrated he never come back to the game again. I
struggled constantly with finding the balance and often finished an evening
feeling like I’d done more harm than good.
Listening
in from the kitchen while I flipped grilled cheeses in the skillet, I heard the
sound of Polly celebrating as she won the first two games. She was jumping up
and down happily while Pip clicked the animal tiles back into the pile. A few
minutes later as I went to pull some bananas from the fruit bowl, I was
surprised to hear Pip bellow like an elephant and subsequently give a gentle
lion’s roar. Following another celebratory dance by Polly things seemed to get quieter
and more serious. I put some corn on the stove to cook and tried to listen in to
the background of their game but all I could hear was the volley of questions –
“Is your hippo above your peacock?”, “No. Is your snake below your alligator?”
Then while the corn was finishing up, there came this huge wail from Polly. A
moment later, Pip came around the corner with tears in his eyes, saying “I just
wanted to win once Daddy and now she won’t play anymore.”
He had held back for three full
games, coaxing Polly along, giving her hints, watching her celebrate when she
won. He had played my role and had done it well. They were having fun together,
talking and playing, but there was this little bug in the back of his mind. He wanted
his chance to win, too. He wanted to be able to turn it all lose and just play
the game and not worry about the larger picture for a few minutes. And so he
did. And he won. And now he was feeling hollow and horrible because Polly’s
aura of invincibility had been shattered and she didn’t want to play anymore
while all he really wanted was to go back to the genial back and forth they’d
had going while she was winning. He was miserable because this is exactly what
he knew would happen and yet he couldn’t quite rein himself in and let her keep
winning.
****
Pip and
Polly haven’t played Mastermind again since that morning. I don’t know whether
that’s because of how things ended that day or because they got distracted by
other games (we’ve been playing a lot of Uno recently). Whichever the case,
they’re both a bit older now. Polly got an exposure to handling sudden
reversals of fortune which will hopefully make the next one easier to deal
with. Pip began to figure out a new complication when it comes to playing
games. In both cases I think they are getting another step closer to the kind
of people we ultimately want them to be.
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