A few weeks ago, I signed Little Brother up for two days of a drama camp and got one of his best friends’ moms to sign up her kid too. My apparently addled brain thought LB would be excited: two days with a close friend doing one of his favourite things (getting attention)?! Win win, right? The child is, after all, a born performer, tearing around the house on dance sprees while improvising lyrics that could easily qualify him for an Off-Broadway show.
Well, he was not amused by my choice. He rejected the premise entirely. When I told him that he’d get to perform Peter Pan onstage, he replied, “I don’t know how to do that.” Finally, the promise of an after-camp playdate including a trip to Ben and Jerry’s led to his reluctant acceptance of one day–ONE DAY!!!–of camp. Sure enough, at the end of the day when I picked him up, his verdict arrived: never again.
The Kid, meanwhile, was gleeful, both at the prospect of a day alone with me (awww) and at LB’s uncharacteristic hesitation toward a social event (not so awww). He kept asking LB if he was sad about drama camp, and when we pulled away after dropping his brother off, TK mused, “It’s a big day for Will.”
This is probably because he’s had enough Big Days of his own to last a lifetime, including but not limited to major surgeries, doctor visits and follow-ups, and birthday parties, and he’s happy to spread the wealth around. He was relieved, for once, that it wasn’t a Big Day for him. Meanwhile, The Husband was starting his first day of a new job, so half of our family, in the end, was having a Big Day.
And they made it through, TH arriving home after a commute he thought would be worse than it turned out to be, and LB having been smacked with a stick by someone he called “a toxic friend” whom he’d just met. As LB and I waited for TK at his speech therapist’s office, another little girl came in and he invited her to play. She declined, and her grandmother told him she’s shy. LB looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, “Sometimes I’m shy too.”
Ha. Not really. Except…maybe? He told me later that one reason he hadn’t liked the camp was because he had to be up in front of everyone he didn’t know. I would’ve thought he’d love that, but that’s what I get for thinking, and our children are, for better and worse, endless surprises. And if nothing else, I count the camp a win for what I saw register on LB’s face. That sometimes I am too moment that is the foundation of empathy, of relationships, of kindness. Of grace. The identification with others who once seemed so different from us but now (now usually occurring after some sort of unwanted struggle that tapped into a deeper place within ourselves)? Now, not so much.
It was a big day.