Joss is a little
fire-cracker on her scooter and especially at the new bike track we have about
200 metres from our house. She freaks A LOT of people out. The thing I notice
though, is that she is not freaked out, at all. She just does what she does,
and gets a kick out of it. One time, I was sitting at the tables writing my
column while Joss and Louis were burning around the track and all of a sudden
she was there, tugging on my arm,
“Come, Mama,
COME!”
She is very
clear. So, I got up and let her lead me where she wanted to go. Which was
higher, and higher and higher, until we were at the VERY TOP of the ramp and my
stomach was flipping just looking at the drop in front of me.
“Down here,
Mama.” She said to me, to which I replied,
“Nonononononononono.
It’s too steep, Jossy. It’s too fast for you.”
Then I quickly
asked Louis, who was luckily standing nearby,
“She doesn’t go
down THERE, does she?”
Because,
actually, I wouldn’t put it past her.
“No,” he said,
“She just wants you to take her down there on the scooter.” There was a
fleeting thought in my mind along the lines of “How does he know that?” which
quickly gave way to the thought, “I’m not fucking going down THAT!”
Thinking quickly,
I said to Joss,
“Why don’t we go
down to half-way and you can go from there.”
“OK” she said,
clearly let down by the whole thing.
And that’s what
we did. I inched my way down the face of that drop to about two thirds of the
way down, gave Joss back her scooter and she took off without so much of a
backwards glance.
I was really uneasy with this whole exchange. I have always made a point of letting
my children do whatever they felt comfortable doing. And in doing so, they have
remained very aware of their own capabilities. But, faced with that steep drop,
I just could not encourage Joss to do what she so clearly wanted to do.
In my panic, I
contacted a dear friend of mine and asked her what she thought. She very
succinctly said,
“But, Trudy, she
couldn’t do it by herself and she knew that, so clearly she isn’t ready.”
And then she said, “Trust your instincts! They were so clear!”
And all of a
sudden, I remembered this extra little “rule” that I’ve always had: if you
can’t do it by yourself then you shouldn’t be doing it. That sounds really
harsh, doesn’t it? But really, a life of traipsing around playgrounds lifting
up my children, or pushing them or holding their hands as they balance – this
life is not for me. I am the person sitting off to the side working on my
laptop, or reading my book, or soaking up some sun. I have one-and-a-half ears
listening out for any noise that could indicate that I’m needed, but I don’t
watch. I think this is really important: that they have time and space where
they are not under the gaze of someone. Where they get to explore and fall and
gauge and experiment and learn what their limits are with no one standing back
and having a thought about what they’re getting up to. I love that my children
have had this experience. And I think it has set them up to be able to do
things like Joss totally rocking it at the bike track.
Please, don’t
get me wrong. I do not take my unwilling children to the playground, plonk them
down in the middle of it and say, “bugger off and play” then leave them there
distressed and screaming. If my kids didn’t want to go to the playground, we
wouldn’t be there! They want to go to the playground, so we go. And it’s THEIR
thing, not mine. So while I’m there, I’ll do MY thing, which is 25% check out
for a little while. Everyone happy.
