Learning to ride a bike

When Little Man taught himself to ride a bike with no training wheels yesterday, I was standing chatting with a neighbor and watching him out of the corner of my eye. He was having a hard time at first, struggling over and over to get the bike going before he started to fall sideways and catching himself just in time. I started out helping him, but, honestly? Bending over that far and keeping the bike straight up while running next to him? I wasn't so good at it. The bike wobbled -- it wobbled a lot. And having me in control (in name, anyway) of the bike seemed to make L.M. nervous. Finally he wanted to try it by himself, so I let him.

I had mentioned earlier that everyone falls once or twice while they are learning to ride a bike, and he was appalled. "I don't want to fall! I'm not going to fall," he declared, and I thought, "Oh, sure you will. Why is falling so terrible?" but I let it go. Weirdly, though, he didn't.

Within what seemed like a short amount of time -- an hour or two? -- he was making it 3 feet -- 5 feet -- 10 feet before starting to lose balance. And then he was zipping up and down the street, only losing it sometimes while turning, but otherwise fine. Still chatting with my neighbor, I watched and applauded him, "You're doing great, honey!" My attention was only partly distracted, because I really was beaming with pride at his determination and success.

Even so, I almost missed it. He said it quietly, to himself really, and I was in the middle of a story and only watching him peripherally, but I did catch it with some part of my mind. Because I didn't respond at the time, but later I woke up and remembered that moment and had that experience I've never been able to put properly into words. I didn't get tears in my eyes, but I was -- halted somehow -- in everything: breathing, thinking, feeling. Lost in wonder. Grateful. What he had said so quietly to himself was,

"I have dreamed of this."

What I saw, yesterday, with my very own eyes, was my son experiencing, literally, a dream come true.

walk

Re: the suggestion of taking a walk around the block: "Yeah mom! and then we can lose ourselves, and then find ourselves again!" Exactly.

Naturalist poet

Driving by the river this morning. From the back seat: "Mom! I saw a heron!" [pause] "At least I think it was a heron. It was as tall as a baby tree and as thin as a bicycle wheel. And kind of blue-ish."

The three little wolves

New favorite story: one Little Man told me at bedtime last night, about the three little wolves and the big, bad pig, who kept trying to blow their newly-built houses down. See, the bricks- and cement-based houses went down easily with sledgehammers and jackhammers, but the one made of flowers? That one survived. Because of the beauty and aroma of the flowers, people. The pig was overcome by beauty and decided to make friends with the wolves instead of eating them.

See? It's like I've always said: Art saves lives.

Independence, inter-dependence

The blog about my conflicts as a parent. Is what it should be called. Today I am thinking about Little Man's struggle for independence -- or, more accurately, his struggle for its opposite. Mommy, can you put my shoes on? help me in the bathroom? zipper my coat? He's my first and only (so far), and I just don't know what is reasonable to expect. At five, he sometimes strikes me as, I don't know, weirdly done. No, not done, of course, not like he's ready to look for an apartment and get his own checking account. But he needs me for so little now. He can get his own snacks out of the kitchen, pour his own milk, design his own craft projects. He can negotiate with me over rules, he can remember tiny details about animals who live in the rainforest halfway around the world, he corrects me on my spotty understanding of how a steam train works. He knows what he wants to wear, and he reminds me to put on my seatbelt, after having clicked on his own.

But he also wants to be a baby forever. And who doesn't want to be babied? (See my husband during his last cold. Ahem. But, honestly, me too -- when my latest cooking project wasn't going well, did I not want someone to step in and say "Oh don't worry, honey, I'll finish that. You got put your feet up and let me bring you a cup of tea"?) But when Little Man won't fasten his own kid-friendly shoes "because it's hard," (and we're talking velcro, here, people), or won't even try to take care of his own bathroom hygiene, or is reluctant to zipper his own coat, I wonder. The bad part is that I find myself wavering between empathy (I do understand his feelings, after all) and frustration. The thing to do, I begin to understand as I'm writing this, is to express the empathy but without letting him get away with fostering his own dependence. Because it's the emotional part I find compelling; it's not that I don't want him to learn to take care of himself; I just don't want him to feel abandoned.

This morning at preschool, when he said he wanted me to stuff his mittens into his coat sleeve because it's "too hard," and I said, "Honey, it's not that hard," and he said "Because you're a grownup," I could simultaneously see two things: sure it's manipulative, in a way, but it's also true that his world is full of things that he struggles to do and grownups find easy. My refusal to help must seem to him arbitrarily mean at times. Look, it's easy for you and hard for me, why not just do it for me? Right. Reasonable. Except that you won't be a kid forever, and I can't come to college with you to tie your shoes.

I want to do both: wrap my kid up in my arms, making him feel safe and warm forever, cherished and cared for all of his days. And, also: I want to help him grow up to be self-sufficient, stable, clear-visioned adult, not looking to other people to fill up the holes in his own heart. I need to stop indulging his feelings by doing for him, because indulging a feeling isn't the same as honoring it. Instead, I can empathize while also helping him find his way to greater independence. Even if it means he will eventually leave me and go to college, or a mountain in Tibet, or wherever. Because he will do that anyway, and it would be better if he didn't need to ask a dorm advisor or passing yak farmer to zip his coat for him.

ESP?

My five-year-old guessed what I was thinking last night. Then he said, "Mom, I read your mind!" (pause) "I took a book out of your mind and read it, and then put it back." (pause) "The book WAS your mind!" Me: "You took my mind out? Did you put it back?" He: "Not yet. Here you go."

On that slightly scary note, Happy New Year!

Reader Response

When Little Man started to memorize books, when he was able to recite all of "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!" over dinner, I had a feeling I'm not sure I can describe. It's connected to another feeling I can't describe, one which always comes over me while I'm reading to him. Let me preface this by saying that I really, really enjoy reading aloud. That whole learning to read silently thing we all get to in elementary school, after the stage of sounding out all the letters, one pudgy finger under each word; it was a real falling off for me, the end of something good. There's not much reason to read aloud anymore, once you're beyond that stage, until you find yourself doing a reading at a wedding, or, say, mocking a mean-spirited ex-lover by reading his narcissistic letter out loud to your drunken girlfriends. (You've never done that? Um, me neither.)

Maybe I'm a frustrated actor or something, but it's fun to me, much much fun, to wind your way through someone else's words, letting just the right expressive tone slip in, paying attention to meter and volume. It's like singing. I used to try to read to my partners, romantic or erotic poetry (what can be sexier than The Goblin Market, for example? all that licking and sucking and dripping juices, warmth and open mouths?), but usually they were politely unimpressed, and in one case actually fell asleep. (I ended up marrying that one, so probably I didn't hold it against him, but rather chose to interpret it as his being soothed by my voice into a profound state of relaxation. Which, I'm sure, is exactly what it was.)

But now! the luxury of it! the rapt audience! how many times a day do I hear "Mommy, can you read this book to me? and this firetruck one too, and this one with the goats?" It's a guilty pleasure, running out to the library to pick up 10 more delicious books for him from the lovely buffet of the children's room, knowing that he will page through them in his car seat on the way home, and immediately upon regaining the house demand that I read all of them to him, immediately. I like everything about reading to him: the cuddly presence on my lap, the rapt attention, the stream of questions "Mommy, why is that donkey sitting in her dress on that rock?" "Mommy, why is the sun leaning down in this picture?" "Is that a frog or a bug?" And I love the trance I get into, every time, as if coasting on the current of someone else's words, someone else's story, the emotional lives of donkeys and fish, my voice like a canoe, slipping through the ripples. ("Mommy, why are you beating this water metaphor to death?")

And the weird internal jokes: am I the only one who thinks of Fergie's "My Humps" every time I read "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish"? ("Mr. Gump has a seven-hump gump!") and try to get through the page without my adults-only internal guffaw coming out of my mouth? ("What you gonna do with all that junk, all that junk inside your trunk?" Hm, Seussical echoes in Fergie? No? Maybe just me, then.) This internal dialogue I have with myself cracks me up, literally, every time. A very weird but satisfying pleasure -- it's the aburdity of the connection that gets me, I think.

It's odd that I should enjoy this activity so much, since usually, I hate the sound of my own voice. I occasionally leave messages on my home answering machine for my partner, making arrangements for dinner or the plumber or picking up the Little Man, and as soon as I get home I hurriedly erase it, as if fearing that someone will hear how awful I sound, as if they couldn't hear that every time I open my mouth. But somehow, when it's "Sylvester and the Magic Pebble" instead of "should I stop and get some veggie burgers for dinner?", somehow it's ok. Weirdly, it's a more bodily experience of books than reading silently to yourself, and I can see how different tones or expressive choices can effect Little Man differently. Depending on how tired I am, I can put more or less expression into what I'm saying: "Frogs are frogs and fish are fish and that's IT!" And he will correct me if I accidentally, in a moment of failed attention, lend Piglet's voice to Eeyore's words, or (unimaginable, really) vice versa. As well he should.