Raising These Boys

Last weekend we took the boys downtown for a few days. It went about how you would expect when you get a big hot city, crowded loud streets, a tiny hotel room and small children and mix them all together. There was lots of crying (not just from them) and lots of…opportunities…for us to be very, extremely patient. And we got lots of practice at failing and trying again, and failing again. It turns out that there are only so many times a child can high pitched scream in a 30×10 foot hotel room before someone else freaks out too. And there are really only so many times that you can tell an active boy that you’re so sorry, but he cannot walk across these intersections and he has to stay in the stroller again, for a long time yet, before he absolutely breaks down.

 

So there was a lot of that. And there were a lot of cracker spills, and all the small but seemingly uncontainable messes that hotels accumulate so well: that small pile of dirty clothes in the corner, the wet towels because they just never seem to provide a bath mat and your children shake off the bath water like dogs and go streaking to the beds to jump on them, the smell of the old cereal you had to throw away in the trash right after the maid came so it will be there until the next morning.

It’s not really glamorous. And we pushed them pretty hard so that we could do the things we wanted to do. So they had two hour late bedtimes each night, no naps either day, and new place after new place which overwhelms our small people who have to spend their days looking at the knees of the people in front of them in the sidewalk, or in line to get into a museum or restaurant.

And we took it to a parenting level we’d never yet done the second night we were there: Chicago pizza, at a sit down restaurant, which always takes an hour to make, let alone eat, when it was almost bedtime. So we took deep breaths, prepared our expectations, and started making games out of everything we saw. They colored with the crayons and they made shapes with them. We talked about the pictures on the menu. We talked about the baseball game on TV and the waiters and then for a long time they ate plain Parmesan cheese with a spoon that they poured on their plate. For a second we wondered if that crossed the line, but then we decided if the restaurant thought that they could take AN HOUR to make a pizza, they had to expect some sort of repercussions, and this was probably the least they could imagine. So, licking the Parmesan cheese piles it was.

And then, of course, the restaurant messed up our order, making an hour turn into an hour and a half, and we felt the air change from mild annoyance and boredom to frantic WHY CAN’T I EVER MOVE AND THEY WON’T LET ME DO ANYTHING AND I NEVER GET ANY PIZZA.

Every parent can smell that change in the air and knows exactly what I’m talking about. The hyper ratchets up ten notches and even making pyramids with the forks doesn’t work and you start to see disaster racing up from the horizon.

Finally, we got our food, but because they had comped us an extra appetizer to make up for the mistake, the boys weren’t hungry, so now we had to keep them calm while eating our dinner and the quality of life for our neighbors went downhill fast. Lincoln started pulling a woman’s purse strap, and then he kissed it, and Eliot kept going around and around the table like a merry-go-round, and then sobbing crying because PARMSAN TEESE MAMA MORE MAMA I LOVE IT MAMA. I collected Lincoln from two tables over because he was about to steal a businessman’s napkin as he was very earnestly talking to his coworkers, and led Lincoln back to the table and we shoved the last few bites in and silently screamed at the waiter that if he knew what was good for his restaurant he would have gotten us our card back five minutes ago.

And in the midst of this chaos, while we started the parmesan cheese piles again, the woman next to us looked over at me, took a breath, and I could tell that she was nervous and I braced myself (who could blame me after this incident), and she said, “I just wanted to tell you how glad and impressed I am that you brought your kids here without tablets or phones or anything.” I was surprised and touched and told her thank you, and also mentioned that if I had those things I probably wouldn’t have to be collecting my child from the neighboring tables, and maybe he wouldn’t have even kissed her purse. She laughed a little with me, and smiled at Lincoln, and we left.

And I’ve been thinking about that since then, about what she said, and about the way that we’ve tried to raise our kids. I certainly have nothing against screens at the right time. When we came in on the Metra and the boys almost raised the roof with screams you can bet I whipped out my phone and loaded a tractor show on it faster than a ticket master coming by can count out the correct change.

But kids don’t learn, and in fact, almost nothing in life ever improves or increases if you set it off to the side and ignore the hard work of doing the thing.

It’s why we go to tiny hotel rooms even when it means we want to tear each other’s heads off. It’s why we talk about the pictures on the menu instead of enjoying a drink in silence as they watch a show. It’s why we let them push the elevator buttons even when it means that half the time more than one button is pushed, or the wrong button is pushed, or the emergency button is pushed. You can’t raise kids who are engaged, active, and knowledgeable about the world if you are not willing to do the hard work of engaging and teaching them.

In fact, one of the sure fire ways I know something is probably good for them to know is if I don’t want to do it with them. And to be honest, there are lots of things I would rather not do with them. Cooking is a prime example. I hate cooking with kids. It’s the worst. They spill, they put the wrong things in, the amounts are never right, and they are never helpful cleaning up. But if I want to raise boys who think they can cook, who like to do it, then I have to do the work with them now.

And if I want to raise boys who can sit in a restaurant, who can be confident in a city and in a garden, who can walk on trails and swim in lakes, then I have to do it with them first, and we have to (usually) fail.

So we do it. We engage, we discuss, we go in tiny hotel rooms and big, wide spaces. And when they make mistakes, we let them try again. There’s no other way to learn, not for them, not for anyone. It’s simple, but we forget it. I forget it. If I want to be proficient at anything, I first have to start by doing the thing badly. Again and again. Nothing ever starts perfect.

Not me, not these boys.