Last night, the four of us–excuse me, the five of us–walked to the park around the corner from our house, as we’ve been doing nearly nightly since we got the dog. It’s a rectangular space between two rows of houses, with grass on either side and a small playground in the middle. The boys (all three of them) love to dart past the two massive jacarandas marking the space’s unofficial entrance and toward the park, beating us there every time. So far, we’ve had this area to ourselves, but last night a group of kids from two families were there with one parent each.
I watched my (human) boys as they reacted to this new blood in their unique ways: Little Brother, arms crossed, circled the boy who looked about his age, staring him up and down before finally asking him–in the modulated, deeper voice he uses when he’s trying to meet/impress someone new–if he wanted to play tip. The Kid stuck close to me but warmed up gradually, eventually joining the game, his characteristic sign of excitement on display: mouth to hand, and continuous laughter.
And I watched the other kids. In particular, I saw one girl staring at TK, studying him as I, always, fruitlessly, wondered what was on her mind. I wondered if she was appraising him as different or just noticing him as a person. Then I watched as her face broke out into a grin. This is, commonly, the effect he has on people: expressions of warmth. But you never know. And I reside so often in that space of not knowing, of waiting for reactions to the slight differences that play into making him, him. Into making me, me.
When the other kids had to leave, mine reacted each in their own way again. LB waved, saying, “Goodbye! If I see you again I’ll be very happy!” And TK turned to me, saying, “They were so much fun!”
And our canine companion? He sniffed around the whole area, occasionally chasing sticks and trying to jump up on kids.
They each have their own way, and part of the trickiness of parenting is making space for them to be who they’re made to be while also helping them navigate the world without working against themselves. So I’m left wondering if I should work on getting TK not to do the hand-to-mouth thing, because it looks a bit different but we all have things we do to help calm ourselves down: you bite your nails, I pick my nose, etc. And I try to figure out how to preserve LB’s accessibility and desire for company while teaching him to stand up for himself in a crowd.
Generally, though, I feel we don’t make enough room for the different and unique. For what shines about each of us before we reassess it as something that needs to be dulled down to conformity.
Kevin the Dog has a short tail with a hairless patch on it. The breeder sent us photos of this anomaly before we brought him home, which we showed to the vet to make sure we weren’t being scammed, and now we field questions about it by answering that he was just born with it: “it’s his thing.” LB often talks about the “ear surgery” (tubes) he had, equating it to the spinal surgery TK endured, as being “his thing.” And recently, TK asked me to take a photo of the scar on his neck because he wanted to see up-close what it looked like. His thing.
And the other day, they both ran out of the school gate at pick-up bursting with the news that one of their friends had just been diagnosed with colour-blindness. For a moment I considered a parallel universe where they hadn’t been raised with an understanding of how what is different can be damn glorious, where this development was “weird,” then I reverted back to reality, in which we were all saying how cool it is that he sees colours in his own way and can tell us about it.
The Aussies say with regularity a phrase that Americans don’t use as much: “if it suits.” It goes beyond whether you like or want something and into the realm of whether it fits. And I’m finding, thanks to my children and our home here and grace, that all sorts of things suit me that I never expected or considered.
This morning, I swam in the warming ocean as the wind whipped the water from its original calm state. I started to feel like a seal floundering to find purchase on a rock, whipped about myself, then for a few minutes something clicked and I was moving with the water, not against it, hearing the strains of mermaid music in my head, like I was made for this.