One of the
things I try to do with my kids is make physical contact with them as often as I
can. When we walk places together we often hold hands. When Pip is standing
nearby, I usually pull him in to bump against me. When we brush our teeth
together, Polly sits on my lap. I give them kisses each morning before sending
them into school, hugs whenever they do something well, and piggy-back rides
when things around the house get particularly slow.
All of this contact is strategic. As
Pip and Polly go out into the world each day, I want them to feel connected to
me. I want them to feel my presence - my touch on their shoulders, my hand in
theirs – wherever they go. I want them to know that when they need support or
help or care, I will be there. I want them to feel it – in their skin, in their
skulls, in their bones. I can tell them these things in words all I want, but
there is something infinitely more convincing when that knowledge is more than
mental, when that knowledge is visceral as well.
****
On most
days we ride our bikes to school. We live about a mile from the school building
and it usually takes about ten minutes or so to get down there. Polly has a
pink bike she has named Taffy which she likes to pretend is a horse carrying
her swiftly through the fields. Pip has a red mountain with gears and
handbrakes that he got over the summer and he can really move when he puts his
mind to it. During the early fall and late spring the ride down to school is really
fun. The sun is rising. The birds chatter. The air is warm. We whip down the
sidewalks and cruise happily along, bouncing over curbs and racing along the
open stretches between streets. During the intervening months from late fall to
early spring the ride is more of a challenge. The mornings are significantly darker.
The air is significantly colder. Over time we’ve built up the proper equipment to
handle these conditions. Each of our bikes has its own light that flashes brightly
in three directions. Sometimes we look like a line of ambulances going down the
sidewalk. We’ve also evolved the proper assortment of clothing to keep the cold
at bay – hats that go under helmets and cover our ears, scarves to cover our
mouths, thick gloves to keep fingers from freezing, and good coats to push off
the chill. This allows us to ride almost every morning.
However,
there are some mornings when it is just too cold to ride even with all of our
gear. Last year after too many frozen fingers and some collisions with
stationary objects – a trash can, a parked car - because hats were pulled down
almost over our eyes, we determined that when the temperature drops below fifteen
degrees Fahrenheit, we should bundle ourselves up in all our gear and walk to
school.
Last week
brought us two of those mornings. On Wednesday Polly in particular went all in,
putting on three layers of sweaters and fleeces before donning her heavy coat
then adding a thick scarf and a second hat over her first. This second hat was
shaped liked a horse’s head and with its eyes and mouth protruding from her
forehead she looked a good six to eight inches taller than she actually is.
Running down the street with her hands at her sides, her skinny legs clad only in
a pair of khakis and everything from her hips up layered in all that cloth, she
looked top-heavy and a bit unsteady like one of those sausages that race
between innings at baseball games. As Pip bounded up the sidewalk ahead of her she
kept up a solid pursuit catching him from time to time before he sprinted off
again. I walked briskly behind them, my gloved hands balled up in my pockets
and my nose tucked down tightly into my scarf.
About
halfway down to school Polly stopped chasing Pip and asked me to hold her hand
instead. In the darkness and with her face almost completely covered with the
scarf I think she wanted to have me guide her along for a while, helping her
keep her balance and providing some moral support as the cold began to overcome
her initial burst into the dark. I was happy to do it. There’s a strength in
doing something like that together. It makes the cold less painful. It also helped
keep the two of us on pace, her moving forward and me from going too fast. It
was nice to be helping out each other.
It was nice
for another reason as well. The previous week or so Polly had gotten in a
negative rut. She’d started whining and complaining about things, pouting
whenever something small didn’t go her way, finding something wrong in whatever
was going on around her. What was particularly frustrating in all of this was
that she wasn’t really sad or moody. It was more that she had gotten into the
habit of talking about things in this negative way and had literally forgotten any
other route through which to engage the world. At dinner she would want to
become part of the conversation and her go-to starter would be to complain
about something – the food, the cold, being tired. We’d ask her to try another
angle and she would have a hard time coming up with anything else.
This streak of negativity had a
very gendered feel to it. Polly was starting to sound like a prototypical whiny
girl - a caricature of one even – who shrieks at the slightest provocation and
groans whenever she’s asked to do something that doesn’t immediately interest
her. This made Ava and I think that much of this was coming from being back at
school with some of her friends after the holidays. For whatever reason, those
moments of reconnection tend to intensify Polly’s sensitivity to some of her
friends’ less admirable qualities.
After a week or so of eye rolling,
complaints about food, and a general unwillingness to say anything that wasn’t
negative in some way, Polly and I sat down and hashed out how these things were
making everyone feel. We grabbed some time on Saturday morning when she was
fresh and I was not yet frustrated over constant corrections and talked about
ways to change the general scope of our interactions. What we came up with was
an agreement that I would signal her anytime she made what I felt was a
negative comment. However, I would not try to correct it. In this way we could
make her aware of the things that were concerning us but avoid moving into the
patronizing lines that we were all more than tired of hearing. Only after she
had a better sense of what these things were would we then move towards finding
alternatives. It took about two days of this for Polly to begin catching
herself and by Wednesday it felt like things were on an upswing.
That she wanted to hold my hand that
morning as we walked down to school gave me extra confidence that we were all
going to be alright. The emotional bond between two people is never a permanent
thing. It’s always subject to the emotional swings of a given day or week, and
I’ve never been more aware of this than I have been as a parent. You have to
push your children to do things they don’t want to do, to fix things they’re
doing wrong, to learn lessons that no one wants to have to teach. These things
are not pleasant, and they test the connection between parent and child. You
want them to know that you love them even as you push or punish them. But it’s
easy to mix things up, to say one thing and do another, to undermine one’s
seriousness by switching too quickly to expressions of love, to bring your
expressions of love into question by dwelling too heavily on the serious. You break
the bond a little each time you have to disappoint them or punish them or point
out when something’s wrong. And you never know for sure if those breaks will heal
or eventually lead to a much bigger tear. So it was a relief to have Polly
reach out for me to help her. In doing so she gave us the chance to heal over the
smaller breaks between us and maybe even help make our bond grow a little
stronger.
We walked on towards her school
quietly and without speaking. This too felt right. Words would have been too
abrupt, too quick, too definite for the work that needed to be done. Words
would have required a rehashing, an articulation of feelings gone past, a
dredging up of the past week that would either revisit our frustrations or
minimize their importance. Without words in that moment we were able to keep
walking forward, leaning on one another, helping keep each other upright and
going in the right direction.
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