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Last Tuesday afternoon I talked with a mom who was concerned about her kid. She said that she was going to pull him from his private school, hoping that the alternative school that she had thoroughly researched would take him. She wasn’t sure that he would get in. She described her son as feeling the pressure of performance; while he was reading at a high school level, he had been admonished for his “liking to make the other kids laugh.” He was having trouble with organizational skills; she described a morning checklist that she was developing to help him get ready for school. When I asked her how old he was she said that he was seven. Seven. I didn’t say anything for a moment and I am sure that she heard me take a breath. By my calculations, that puts him in the second grade. She went on to say that, within their urban environment, friendships are difficult to maintain because his play dates necessitate her driving him—sometimes miles and miles. Some of the seven-year-old friends’ moms are not willing to make the drive to their home. As a result, he spends a lot of time playing alone or with his younger brother.
My children grew up in Ashland. They played in the yard, the street, and walked to their elementary school. Our neighborhood was their sweet world—one friend’s family had a swimming pool; my three kids learned to swim there. I remember the morning that I could hear a scratching noise near the front door and when I went to check, there was my youngest daughter’s friend, on all fours, with his head pointed toward our front door screen. He had escaped the notice of his mother and had crawled, down three houses and across the street—-to find her. There he was, diaper clad, on our front porch. He was eleven months old. It is a story that our families laugh about when the two twenty-five-year olds get together. There were no play dates in those days; I remember, over and over again a knock at the front door along with the ensuing, “Can Kevin or Robyn or Megan play?”
I don’t remember ever worrying about my children’s “performance.” I remember thinking that each one was surrounded, cocoon like, by the ease and confidence that came from being seen as someone special and unique—from their friends on the street to the parents of those friends to their teachers who guided them through all of those early years. When the summer tent would be constructed in our back yard, the kids would sleep outside and I like to think that their love of the open, starry sky comes from the freedom of those warm, summer evenings. I didn’t worry about them out there alone; I trusted that they carried a knowing of love and protection and that they knew how to find the back door if the noises of the night scared away their sleep. I don’t remember thinking about reading levels or organizational skills when each one of my children was seven. I was grateful, every day, that for them, school was a really fabulous place and that each day was filled by the promise of magic. Their laughter, their tendency to want to dress themselves and the resulting mismatched combinations of color marked them as individuals that I loved more than my life. As I sit here in this moment, I would thrill to have a day again to walk with all three—Robyn at seven, Kevin at five, and Megan, one year. They have become young adults in the blink of my eye.
As our conversation reached its end, I wished the young mother well. I remember her saying something about, “freedom” and how she wasn’t sure that her child had grown up within its wide arms like she had. I said something like, “If you remember what freedom was like for you, can you help to create it for him?” There was a pause, and I wasn’t sure that she was still on the line. “Are you still there?” “Yes,” she said, “thank you for listening.” And then she said “freedom;” it was a whispered musing, mostly to herself. I hung up the phone and I have thought of that whisper every day since.
Tags: Adolescents Teens Parenting
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