April 17, 2006
hide-and-seek
This morning, Charlie and I were sitting on the benches outside Henry’s school, waiting to pick him up. Another mom was there with her toddler; he and Charlie were checking each other out while the other mom (someone I know only from seeing at carpool pickup and the occasional music program) smiled politely at each other. Her son licked the bench, and she reprimanded him, and then explained: “He is pretending to be a puppy. He goes around licking EVERYTHING.”
“We do that, too,” I told her. “It’s disgusting.” We both laughed.
It’s hard to explain how labor-intensive my children are; parents of quirky kids like Henry innately understand, and parents of typical kids like Charlie just can’t. I don’t say that with any resentment or anger, it’s just a fact. It takes so much time and effort and energy to parent my kids these days. We are trying to encourage (read: compel) Henry to stop obsessing about superheros and get interested in other things because his single-mindedness is causing some social and behavioral problems. But redirecting him takes a lot of work; if he’s left on his own, he always falls back on superheros. So I try to plan what we will do next–play outside (not superheros!), build with blocks (not superhero headquarters!), read stories (not Spiderman!). And no matter what we’re doing or playing, eventually he will start to talk about superheros, and my job is to redirect the conversation. Of course, this means that Charlie gets ignored or has to play what Henry is playing, even though he’s perfectly capable of playing on his own without any direction.
Last week, when I told the speech therapist that we were concerned about Henry’s superhero obsession because of the way it was interfering with his play, she said, “Well, YOU’RE the parent.”
I was stunned; was she implying that his hyperfocus was MY fault? That I wasn’t parenting him the “right” way? When I told Wade, he said that it pointed to her inexperience with kids like Henry, not any fault of my parenting, and I think he’s right. But it’s still irritating, in part because there is a grain of truth in it. Part of my job is to help Henry learn how to play; part of my job is to constantly redirect him. It’s the part I am coming to hate the most.
So today, when this other mom and I were laughing about our children and their puppy dog tongues, she said, very nicely, “Do you work, or do you stay home?”
“I stay home,” I said.
“Do you miss working?”
Without hesitating, I said, “Yes. I really do. The older my children get, the more I miss it. Yes.”
She nodded. “Because they need us so much less as they get older.”
And I wanted to say, no, because they need me so much MORE. And because I need me so much more.
Charlie is going through a funny little baby love phase. The other day I took the boys to a restaurant for lunch; while we were waiting for our food, another family came in, with a toddler who was probably 18 months old. He came totting by our table, twice, and Charlie watched him, fascinated. The second time he came by, Charlie waved and said, “Hi!” and then, as the little boy totted away, Charlie said, “He’s so CUTE!” Today, at the zoo, we passed another toddler in a stroller; Charlie said, “I see a baby! Look how CUTE she is!” I am amazed by his attention to smaller kids, by his gentleness and fascination.
A lot of the time, Henry seems disconnected from the rest of our little family, in his own world, but then, out of nowhere, he will have an almost inappropriately intense response to something. Like missing Kinderfit on Wednesdays. He cried the entire way home from school today, and for half an hour after, because he doesn’t want to go to speech therapy any more. I’ve been trying to help him understand why he has to go, why he has to have the special applesauce in the morning, why he’s not going to school in the afternoons any more. I’m not very good at it, this explaining. And it breaks my heart when he cries like that.
We played outside this afternoon until it was too hot to move, and then came inside. Henry was asking if he could play superheros, but before I could say, no, let’s play something else, he said, “Let’s play hide-and-seek!” And I remembered my friend Cheryl saying that she loves to play hide and seek with her sons because it gives her ten or fifteen minutes of peace and quiet while they search for her. “Sometimes,” she said, “I fall asleep.”
So I hid in the guest room, on the floor, between the bed and the wall, where it was dark and cool and quiet. I could hear the boys going through the house, yelling, “Found you, Mommy!” and then laughing when I wasn’t wherever they were looking. Henry would say, “Wait! We need to make a plan! Maybe she’s in her closet!” And Charlie kept saying, “I think she’s GONE!” Eventually, they decided that they needed to put on their bunny ears, so they could hear me. During all of this, they were running past the guest room door, laughing and calling, “Mommy! Mommy? Where are you?” When they finally found me, they piled on top of me, delighted with themselves. “I thought you were GONE!” Charlie shrieked, laughing.
“Where would I go?” I asked.
“Nana and Papa’s!” he said.
“You know I would never leave, right?”
“Right,” Henry said.
I’ve been thinking a lot about going back to work–actually, I’ve been thinking about HAVING work to do, and having TIME to do it. I have all sorts of ideas and projects, and I am working on a few specific things. I’ve actually finished one big thing and sent it off. But mostly, on a day like today, I just wonder if wanting to work is just another form of playing hide-and-seek and hoping for a little rest.
