Parenting Is Quite The Adventure

On Monday my son turns eleven.  Eleven! That hardly seems possible.  Just the other day I was watching him pour himself  a bowl of cereal and thinking, "How did that happen? How did we go from my having to feed you with a baby spoon to your blithely making your own breakfast?" 

I was the first of my friends to get married and the first to have a child.  In fact the early interactions my friends had with my son may be the reason so many of them are just now finding the courage to have children of their own.  My child was not an easy baby. Smart, yes, the child showed his brilliance when he started speaking at 7 months old.  By the time he was a year he was speaking in sentences.  But good God he was a handful and a half.   He wasn't a good sleeper and he only stopped crying when I held him, bounced him and sang to him all at the same time.  Otherwise he would just scream.  The whole Ferber method was a joke.  The child could easily scream all night long.  It's a miracle he didn't damage his vocal chords.  Once in a fit of desperation I put him into the automatic swing at three in the morning and when that lulled him to sleep I left him in it, swinging for four hours straight while I crashed in my own bed.  My mother kept him at arms length during those first two years admitting that she was, "a little scared of him."  When he was two months old I sought out a mom's group run at a birthing center and run by a nurse practitioner.  There was no doubt in my mind that I needed the help of the experts.   A large group of women would sit in a circle and each would have their chance to ask a question or voice a concern they were having in regards to their new baby.  A few years back I ran into two of the women from that mom's group.  We took a few minutes to catch up and then one of them said, "I loved that group.  I would go every week and I would listen to everybody talk about their problems and I'd think, oh, okay, so I don't have the most difficult child in the world."

The other woman nodded in agreement and then turned to me.  "What I remember was you.  You would always be in the back of the room, standing up and bouncing your son, trying to keep him calm and I would just feel so much better!"

"Yes," I snapped, "because I did have the most difficult child in the world! That's what I got out of that group!"

And that is how it felt.  The nurse practitioner suggested I test him for food allergies but as it turned out my son was just intense  And yet I remember the first time I heard him laugh.  I have a picture of that yet I don't have to look at it to perfectly visualize what he looked like at that moment.  I was singing the Beatles to him, Love, Love Me Do and he thought it was the funniest thing he had ever heard in his full ten weeks of life.

When he was 14 months old he was giving me a hard time while I was feeding him and I stepped away, took a deep breath and counted slowly to ten. When I was finished my baby looked at me and said, "Eleven."

I hesitated.  "Eleven?"

"Twelve."

"Twelve?" I repeated again, trying to wrap my mind around the significance of this.  

"Thirteen, fourteen!" He said triumphantly.

"Sweetie," I said carefully to my 14 MONTH OLD CHILD, "you can count to fourteen?"

He flashed me a sly closed lip smile before smugly saying, "Try twenty."

The next day I went to Toy R Us and returned the toy I had planned to give him that I had imagined would help teach him how to count. Obviously it wouldn't be needed. My mother was right, he was a little scary.

And you can't say he wasn't empathetic.  When I first sang to him about the ten little monkeys jumping on the bed he cried for about a week, bemoaning the fate of those poor injured primates. 

And when he was three I found him crying over a show he had been watching on Animal Planet while I was in the shower.  "They're cutting down the trees!" he moaned.  "They call it deforestation and all the animals are dying!"

I sat down next to him.  "I know." I said.

He looked at me accusingly.  "Do something about it! Get on a plane and tell them to stop right now!"

I hesitated a second too long and my son's angry gaze shifted to one of bereft grief.  "You can't do anything, can you mommy?  This is bigger than you." And then he started crying in earnest.  I think at that moment I began to realize how scary the world must be for someone who is that young and yet that aware.  Three year olds should only have to worry about lost toys and popped balloons.  They shouldn't be stressing out over deforestation.  When a baby hears a song about monkeys falling they should be laughing about how funny it would be to see a bunch of monkeys jumping on a bed, not what it means to actually hit your head and feel pain.  Eighteen month old children shouldn't be able to understanding anything they overhear on a CNN report.  When he was five and struggling in school a psychologist suggested to me that he had an anxiety disorder.  When I told a friend of mine this he laughed, "What does a five year old have to be anxious about?"

I didn't answer, but in the back of my mind I was thinking, a lot. 
Of course when I would dare to whisper the world "gifted" teachers and other parents would scowl at me and accuse me of bragging.  Excuse me? I was seriously sleep deprived, I was constantly having to calm my boy down, I had gone through three preschools trying to find one that worked for him (none of them did for any length of time), I hadn't been able to go back to work when I had initially planned to and they thought I was bragging because I thought the child was smart? At that point in time I would have jumped at the chance to trade a few IQ points for an hour more of sleep every night. 

It hasn't been an easy road.  He struggled with fine motor skills, his anxiety held him back in school despite his intelligence. In fact most schools just couldn't handle him at all.  He made a few close friends but his inability to keep it together in a classroom made things more difficult socially.  Of course the close friends he made stuck by him like glue.  He still talks to kids he met in preschool who have long since moved out of state and clearly the affection he feels for these children is mutual.  But his quirks and eccentricities have meant that I've had to manage his life more than I would have liked to.  I homeschooled him for a while which means that I was also responsible for setting up all the playdates (there are no friends to hang out with at recess when you're homeschooling), his fine motor skills made it difficult for him to do certain tasks independently, I've paid huge amounts of money to psychiatrists, occupational therapists and private schools (most of which didn't work out). 

But now we're a few days away from eleven and something has shifted.

It hasn't been a sudden shift.  I can see that it's been gradual and yet it still managed to sneak up on me.  He has a cell phone now and with it he arranges his own playdates.  He has a favorite radio station and it's different than my favorite radio station.  His fine motor skills seem to be improving by the day and at long last I seem to have found a school that he is incredibly successful at.  He even made it on the student council.

And then last night at three in the morning he came into my room upset by a nightmare.  "I dreamt about all those dying pelicans on the gulf," he said, his sleepy eyes all teary.  "This is worse than global warming because at least we can do something about that.  We can drive less and recycle and stuff. But there's nothing we can do to stop this spill and the animals are going to keep dying!"

I kissed him on the forehead and put him back to bed, filling his head with fantasies about magical lands filled with all his friends and favorite animals. 

Things have changed a lot. But maybe not that much.

And I just love that he's making his own breakfast.

Kyra Davis
Bestselling Author of:
The Sophie Katz Mystery Series
and
So Much For My Happy Ending
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