Random Acts

On our walk, my son figures out how to wrap the retractable leash around the dog’s legs to make her trip. I catch him at this as he stands by the fence where the neighbor’s pooch is sniffing furiously through the posts. Bug keeps his back to me as he bends to twist the leash into a tangled knot. Fenway tries to stand but ends up hopping around in an erratic circle, finally plopping back down. She implores me with her big eyes.

I am at the fence in three strides, taking the tether from my child and releasing the dog. I do the latter with much more tenderness than the former. We march home, Bug whining, "But I want to hold the leash!" while I lecture him about kindness and care.

It could be the divorce, his developmental stage, the lack of a sibling who forces humility. Perhaps we have overbuilt his confidence or underemphasized compassion. Whatever the explanation, I cannot avoid the facts: my son is displaying all the characteristics of a playground bully.

It chills me to admit this out loud. I would prefer to gloss over the encounters I witness.

Bug sits at a doll house with another boy at school, telling him repeatedly, “No, this is how it is going to be. You have to do this.” The other boy slumps in frustration, eventually giving up and walking away.

The cousin from Germany comes for a visit. He is a bigger kid with more physical prowess than Bug. Regardless, Bug manages to determine the rules of every game and every interaction. Several times a day, the older cousin dissolves into tears. Bug shrugs and juts out his chin, sauntering away as his cousin cries.

A primal, self-protective instinct surges through me as I see these things. What have I done to create this monster? The spotlight glares directly on my failings. I can almost hear the smug whispers of the people with intact homes whose kids organize canned food drives. It is so easy to project my own distress onto the tabula rasa of the collective witness. To the deaf court, I want to shout, but I love him well! I guide him and teach him with all the focus I have in my possession! He is a good kid, really, under all that!

This first response is useless, though. Self flagellation is just another manifestation of self absorption. Dig down and I unearth a complicated parenting instinct: tough love. Helping a child succeed in the long term means hard choices in the now. Ultimately, the objective is not diagnostic or even punitive, but prescriptive.

How can I help my son learn the skills necessary to care for others?

This is the much more complex task. My boy will live a very lonely life if his sense of entitlement grows unchecked. How his behavior reflects on me is irrelevant when he is the one navigating the social universe. I desperately want my kid to know how to make friends and how to be a good friend, but Bug ultimately must learn the costs and benefits of his methods of interaction. He has no idea yet how important people outside his family will be to him.

I know very little about the mechanics of compassion. Nel Noddings has written in detailed and surprisingly rich ways about caring. There is much more to it than what comes "naturally" to us. In order to thrive, the relationships in which a person lives must be strong and balanced. Each person has responsibilities to maintain the well being of those relationships. Such simple things as doing chores and following the rules etiquette are versions of care, and they can be done without "feeling" caring.

I don't know if Bug is at a stage yet in which he can feel or act on surges of compassion. The mysterious depths of  my son's mind and heart belong to him alone. All I can do is name the expectations, live them myself, and follow through on enforcing them. If I do this with care, perhaps he will learn the same.


The past few days, I have been on Bug's behavior like a hawk. I took him to his favorite park over the weekend -- the one with the train and mini golf -- during a pause in the rain. He was on the playground, frolicking nicely for all of three minutes. Then he began lording over the other kids. My lovely boy cut in line for the slide, elbowed other children out of the way as they protested, then lied straight to my face about it. I warned him that he needed to back down or no mini golf. He continued to jut his chin and ignore me. So, I did the thing no parent wants to do: I hauled him off the playground while he sobbed. We got right back in the car for home. No mini golf, no train. Our entire outing was over and the engine hadn't even cooled.

With each repetition of this scenario in different venues, we dry the tears then talk about what could have happened differently. It stuns me to hear Bug list his alternatives. Every suggestion he offers up has to do with how to "make" the other kids do what he wants. The egocentrism of the four-year-old should not surprise me, I suppose, considering how hard it is for many adults to navigate these tricky waters.

I understand now that this will be a long journey indeed. We will need to practice showing kindness in a variety of settings. We will have to reflect on what comes of our approaches, and be awkward as we attempt new vocabularies. We will have to get it wrong, and keep on loving each other regardless.

My son will need to learn to hold the leash. I will need to learn to trust him to do so. Thankfully, the dog has the patience of Job. I could use a little of that as we three set out on our walk together.

Disoriented

I never know which grandmother will greet me at the door. Will she be the wounded one with the hair trigger? Or will I have to coax from the bed a woman who coughs, sleeps, and apologizes her way through the day?

This week, I was delighted to become re-acquainted with an old friend. A smiling, good-natured lady was waiting in the breakfast nook for our arrival. She bore a close resemblance to the grandmother I remember from my childhood.

Dementia is disorienting for everyone involved. I had not realized how tense I was about the trip to Dallas with Bug until about halfway through the second day. It took me this long to notice my grandmother had not lost her temper with my son or me. Sure, she asked a dozen times if I had the garage door opener. For this visit, she had latched onto a recollection of arguing with a neighbor boy about the driveway of her childhood home. Each telling, the first telling. But through all this, she was still smiling and bobbing along the surface of whatever familial chaos unfolded around her. I felt my shoulders relax. Maybe she would, in fact, make it through our visit without morphing again into one of those other women who inhabit her skin.

My grandmother turned 91 on July 5^th. She is living most of the time in her own house. With assorted relatives and hired hands cycling through to refresh the contents of the fridge and ferry her to doctor’s appointments, she is managing much better than anyone expected. Despite the fact that the calendar has become nothing more than wall art, she can still remember which grandkid and great-grandkid belongs where and to whom. She kvetches over the Dallas Morning News every day, feeds the birds in her overgrown back yard, and occasionally remembers to eat.

 

We had a 4^th-of-July barbecue and birthday party with family up the road. Bug chose a singing card. He danced around the house to “I like to move it, move it,” shaking his booty as laughter rained down. Another grown grandson helped with the grill. We ate burgers and let the lady reminisce. Bug reversed the order of the candles. Grandma turned 19.

The next afternoon, I deposited Bug with a generous aunt for a date with my grandmother.  She doesn’t have the stamina for much these days, but she can still rally for a ladies’ lunch at Neiman Marcus.

I would rather eat beef jerky from the Mobil Short Stop than lunch at a store filled with things I can’t afford and will never have occasion to wear. Strolling through Neiman’s, however, is the old girl’s giddy pleasure. “Oh, isn’t this just lovely!” Grandma cooed and oohed over the Louis Vuitton display, touching the buttery leather. The sophisticated gleam of the store widened her eyes and her grin. My gut contracted with envy as I watched trim man in a suit indulge his blond companion in a search for the perfect Prada bag. My grandmother noticed only the exquisite order of the jewelry counter.

I cannot understand this kind of appreciation for the unattainable. A woman who spends most days decked out in a bathrobe was lingering over a $2000 Roberto Cavalli sheath designed for someone with the figure of a prepubescent boy. While she stroked the hummingbird printed into the aquatic blue fabric, I squirmed in my consignment store sun dress and DSW sandals. Next to Lalique wine glasses, turtle-shaped salt-and-pepper shakers encrusted with rhinestones, and distressed outdoor furniture, my grandmother chatted up employees and gushed in wonder at the beauty of it all. “Do you believe it? Here I am, 91 years old,” she told the salesgirl over a mirrored display of crystal bud vases. “My granddaughter came all the way here just to take me out to lunch.”

“You have a lot to be thankful for,” the salesgirl grinned.

“Oh, you don’t have to tell me,” she said, resting her thin hand on my shoulder.

My grandmother counterbalanced every ounce of my covetousness with an equal measure of joy.

We made our way up to the third floor café where we sipped tiny cups of warm broth and broke open steaming popovers. The servers and manager dipped and fled, quick as dragonflies. They refilled our glasses, delivered dishes of radiant salad greens, and swept the crumbs from the table. They made sure the birthday girl knew her mere presence was a gift.

Swallowing gets harder as you age. Appetite keeps pace with the metabolism of the sedentary. It took my grandmother nearly an hour and a half to work through a third of her Cobb salad. She talked instead. “Those neighbors called in county engineers to build that cussed driveway,” she said. “They weren’t road builders. What a mess it was.” We were back in 1928, sitting on the curb with the neighbor boy, arguing over whose side of the yard belonged to whom. Somehow, this woman plodded her way through the 20^th century, stumbled along the front end of the 21^st, and landed in a big old house in the Dallas suburbs with a military pension and enough love to carry her through to the end.

A raspberry-studded meringue drizzled in caramel and cream lit on our table, candle dancing. My grandmother made her wish, keeping that one secret to herself. Then she clapped her hands dug in, rolling her eyes in ecstasy.

“This time next year,” she said, gesturing with her fork. “Right here.”

We all fret about her. We all worry and tsk-tsk about how sad it all is. But I sat right there and watched an ancient lady make a wish for her 92^nd year. How many of us will have the luxury of drifting through the last chapter of our lives, buoyed by a craft comprised of such care? I don’t know about sad. Try rare and wondrous.

Finding any of my grandmothers waiting in that breakfast nook in a year’s time would be a blessing. It wouldn’t matter in the least which one is there. You don’t need age and Alzheimer’s to help you forget certain things. Just turn your attention away from the silly distractions and gaze in dumb wonder at what is right in front of you. Indeed, dementia disorients. A new orientation may not be such a bad thing after all.

“Right here,” I said, leaning across the table to scoop up some sweetness. “You’ve got yourself a deal.”