A Closer Look

In the afternoon haze, Bug and I walk the dog up the cul-de-sac.  He runs, squealing over the blacktop as Fenway lopes along behind. Suddenly, Bug stops, breathing hard.

“Do you want to touch the ivy, Mommy?”  I look where he is pointing. A froth spills over the top of the neighbor’s fence, the bubbling green corsage of delicate, airy leaves.

“How did you know it was ivy?” I ask.

He shrugs. “It just looks like it.” I consider this. This is unlike any I’ve seen before. It lacks that oiled, thick appearance and the deep green of forests. This is something with almost triangular leaves dancing on a light breeze.

“Can we touch it together?” I ask. We approach, each reaching to stroke a thin, veined tissue.  

“Oh!” I pull back. “It bit my finger!” Now the dog is interested, too, snuffling closer. Only now do I notice that all the leaves are facing outward, their limbs covered in a clever disguise. No one would have known if Mata Hari had smuggled knives in her skirts. With more care, we lift the demure chin of one leaf. Tiny thorns prickle along the spines and down the stems.

“Now, why would this ivy plant have prickers on it?”

“To hurt you?” Bug guesses.

“Maybe. A plant’s job is to grow and survive. I guess hurting me might keep me from picking it. How else might those thorns help a plant grow?”

“Hmm.” Bug puts his finger to his chin and squints his eyes in the perfect caricature of a professor. The dog still pants at the end of her leash.

After a moment, I ask, “How does ivy grow? How is it different from something that doesn’t have prickers, like that grass over there?”

“It climbs!” he says. His eyes are wide open. “Maybe the prickers help it hold onto the fence so it can climb up!”

“That sure could be it,” I say. We look together at the buds fuzzing to life with tiny leaves unfurling from their marrow.

Later, at home, we have brushes and big paper and watercolors spread out in the living room. “I am painting grass, and here is the water in the grass. Here is the rain coming down from the sky.” Bug narrates his strokes, painting brown soil down under the grass and broad blue swirls in the sky. He begins making an eerie whistling noise. “The wind is blowing all around, blowing the raindrops.”

Over in the corner of the page, I swipe my green and brown lines, tiny and careful things. I paint quietly, waiting for the image to reveal itself.

“What’s that, Mommy?”

“What does it look like?”

Bug pauses, his brush poised above the page, and gazes at my corner for a minute. At first he shrugs, looks away, then looks back. “It’s ivy!” He says, a grin brightening his face. “And a fence!”

“How could you tell?” I ask.

“I don’t know. It just looks like it.” His attention is back on his own painting. And then it is elsewhere altogether and we are putting the paints away, rinsing out our brushes.

When we walk the dog the next morning, Bug sees the spilling life at the fence again. “Let’s look at the ivy again and go home and paint it!” he says.

“That’s a great idea,” I say. “While we’re out here, let’s see what other plants we can find.”

We traipse through the grass, dew clinging like kisses to our sneakers. From the brush explodes a flowering mystery. Ghostly blossoms extend purple-gray hairs 360 degrees from cotton spindles.

“Do you want to touch it?” Bug asks.

“Let’s touch it together,” I say. We approach the furred wonder as its damp fibers reach out to greet us.

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.

Tethered

Back in 2008, researchers in Australia published a study linking dog ownership to decreased childhood obesity. This evidence has provided an extended stay of execution for old Fenway. In the chaos of the past year, the urge to get rid of the dog has been powerful. Somehow, the mutt has surprised us all and managed to keep herself out of the pound. It may be that I have managed to hang onto my impulsiveness when it comes to her welfare.

Most of us don't need a scientific study to confirm the health benefits of having canine companions in the family unit. After all, they just have to have that walk. Rain or shine, the dogs have to go out.

On the nights when my son stays with me, I pick him up either at his dad's place or at school. By the time we fight through rush-hour traffic and tumble through the door, all either of us wants to do is collapse in a heap on the carpet and play legos until bedtime. But the dog. Oh, that dancing, delighted lump of fur. She greets us, panting and turning in circles, having waited nearly twelve hours for the singular pleasure of emptying her bladder. We don our sneakers, grab the leash and the plastic bags, and head out for a turn around the cul-de-sac.

Now that the snow has melted  and a slice of daylight remains, we are venturing almost every evening into a small patch of woods nearby. When these houses were built along the Difficult Run watershed, someone had the forethought to protect the flow of the creek. A few acres of unmarked, undeveloped green space stretch along behind the homes. Down in the leaves and budding shrubs, Fenway can bound after deer while Bug balances on logs. We all follow raccoon tracks along the banks of the creek, root around in hollow stumps, and weave our way through pricker bushes. For a good thirty minutes every evening, my kid and I follow a snuffling canine out for this enforced stretch. She keeps us moving.

This is a reason to keep the dog. But this is not the reason. When we first arrived here, the prospect of hanging on to her seemed impossible. Who would care for her when I was working? How would I fit in her shots and grooming and getting to Target to buy the gigantic bags of Beneful? Just packing a lunch and dressing my kid for school were dauting tasks. What did Fenway give our family other than one more headache? The needs of the dog seemed too much for this burdened mama to manage.

On a weekend last fall when my parents were traveling, I asked Tee for help caring for Fenway. He refused. "You know," he said to me. "I wanted to get rid of her when we moved." What he failed to mention in this exchange was that "get rid of her" meant one of two things. Either I would have to seek out a good home for her because he was too blown apart even to get up and dressed every day, or I would have to take her to the Humane Society for a near-certain euthenasia.

Tee's chilling admission brought on an odd realization. Fenway had beome my responsibilty. The noise of the dramatic weather patterns up above can deafen a person to the changes down below as the small stuff clicks into its new configurations. I have to kill the spiders now and air my own tires. Sure, the dog has, in many ways, always been my responsibility because I was the one home. But in separating from Tee, the pooch truly had become mine. Was I prepared to take her on so totally?

Of course. Fenway is not a set of dishes that can be donated to Goodwill. She is a living creature, a part of our family, a life. We adopted her well before we had our son. Bug has grown up with that dog. Through four different homes in four different time zones, the only consistent things in his world have been his mom, his dad, and that dog. For all his unknowing abuse of her, she has never once snapped at him. She has walked faithfully with us on every hike, kept us feeling secure when Tee was traveling, and been a joyous -- if skittish --  playmate.

What message would it send to my son if I simply got rid of Fenway? "Our lives are too complicated to care for a member of our family?" Or, "when the going gets tough, abandon your loved ones?" How about, "Lives are expendable? "

I would rather my child learn that we always have room in our home and our hearts (and, alas, even our full schedules) to care for members of our family. We can make time to meet our commitments to one another, even if doing so is inconvenient. Caring does not always emerge spontaneously and naturally. As Nel Noddings reminds us, an ethic of care must be cultivated, and we each must learn to listen to the voice of obligation as a sign that caring is within reach.

Attening to the needs of others is as much a habit of the mind as it is one of the heart. Like so many other practices, the rewards of care may not be immediately evident. But they exist deep in the bones of the routine itself. Every night, I walk Fenway. I walk her because she must be walked; I walk her because it is my job. No matter the sharpness of the wind or the weariness of my feet, I walk her. Yet, each night, I discover all over again where I really am. The dog's need acquaints me with the phases of the moon, the state of the foliage, the cycles of local wildlife. (Tonight, incidentally: waning, budding, peepers).

Change is inevitable. This is something that both bears remembering and bears forgetting. I must prepare myself and my son for transitions we cannot see coming but most certainly will. Also, I must nurture the home and family we inhabit in this moment as if this is the only moment we have. Because, ultimately, it is.