Out of the blue, my 9-year-old son hands me instructions for life
But it’s a gift to be trusted with a kid’s heart and questions
I stopped saying, “Kids should come with an instruction manual” after my son was born, because this child is a living, breathing set of instructions.
He tells me everything he needs. He always has. Sometimes it’s buried under a layer or two of something — tired, proud, sad, embarrassed — but always it’s close enough to the surface that we can extract it, together, with a little bit of time and talking.
A seemingly trivial sibling argument over a skateboard this summer turned into a wide-ranging, two-hour discussion about his sadness that his sister was changing schools and leaving him behind, his fear that she’d never see one of his baseball games because her weekends were getting too busy and his frustration that she was leaving him out of vacation plans she was conducting with their beloved cousin. (Plans that happened mostly via texts, and he doesn’t have a phone.)
He needed reassurance. That he’d still have a place in his big sister’s life and her heart and her calendar. She provided it. I served as witness. All good.
Sometimes his instructions are more subtle.
I got some Wednesday when we were driving to school, and they stopped me in my tracks.
Anyway. Out of the blue, from the back seat, he said, “I thought of the ‘Lin’ in ‘Braylin.’” What?
“I know who Lin is.”
Help me out, bud. I don’t know Lin or Braylin.
“On the Patriots. It’s Julian Edelman.”
(Silence.)
(More silence.)
(Still a little more silence.) Ohhhhh!
Days earlier, we were at lunch with my friend Asra, and the Bears/Patriots game was playing on a TV in the background. Asra told us that her friend is so devoted to the Patriots that she named her daughter Braylin after Tom Brady and ... some other player. None of us could think of the other player.
Until Wednesday morning on the ride to school.
Julian Edelman. (That’s my son’s theory, anyway.)
A few weeks ago, again out of the blue, he said to me, “You know the ketchup that comes with Kalahari?”
Kalahari the water park or Kalahari the desert?
“No! The food. With the ketchup. After football.” (Silence.)
(More silence.) Calamari?
“Yeah. After football.” At Vernon Park Tap? “Yeah.”
Like three months ago? “Yeah.”
He wanted to talk about the Friday night in August when the kids got their own table with bottomless pitchers of Sprite, and the parents sat a table away talking about boring parent stuff, and the kids had free rein to talk about football and fourth grade and not use napkins.
The horseradish cocktail sauce (“ketchup”) was his entrée into the conversation, but really he wanted to talk about something that had been on his mind ever since. Something one of his friends said. So we talked about it.
He often revisits stuff days, weeks later. I have no idea it’s bubbling under the surface, and then, bam, he brings it up, seemingly out of nowhere.
“Remember when the power went out at school and my lightup shoes were the only light?” No. When was that?
“In kindergarten!”
Four years ago.
Here are my instructions. Moments and comments and questions and conversations linger in this child’s mind for days and weeks and months and years. Moments/comments/ questions/conversations that may not have even registered with me, at the time, as all that consequential.
I’m guessing he’s not so different from any kid in that regard. I’m guessing a whole lot of kid brains work like this. (Adult brains too, probably.)
My responsibility, as his mom, is to remember, always, that what I say and don’t say, do and don’t do, ask and don’t ask, leaves a possibly permanent mark.
They’re a gentle reminder, these out-of-the-blue exchanges, to parent him with thought and intention and tenderness, even in the moments that seem, to me, trivial. Or time-crunched. Or beside the point.
He’s listening. He’s watching. He’s searching for cues and clues to take with him on all his days. He wants me to provide them. He will turn them over and over in his head indefinitely.
It’s a lot of pressure.
Especially when you’re also sort of drowning in laundry, and someone needs a ride to practice, and your neighbours want you to feed their cat, and it’s your niece’s birthday and you need to send flowers, and you owe 7,000 people emails, and the mortgage was due yesterday.
But it’s also a gift.
To be trusted with a kid’s heart. To be trusted with a kid’s questions. To be treated to a kid’s stories and memories and realtime narration of life.
And it’s a gift that comes with instructions.
Mostly they boil down to: handle with care.
Gladly. Gratefully.