Whit and I spent the morning at Read & Romp, an annual fundraiser for Reach Out And Read that I have gone to for several years with Gracie. It was really interesting being with him this year. There are activity stations, each themed around a different children’s book. After participating in each activity (decorating a cookie, playing with doctor toys, building in a construction zone, making a spider out of a foam ball and pipe cleaners, etc) the children get a stamp in their “passport.” Grace, of course, was always very goal-oriented and wanted to fill her passport with stamps. Whit just wanted to sit and play with the blocks and trucks in the Mike Mulligan construction area. He also decorated two cookies and held a baby bunny rabbit.
It’s been a weekend of time with Whit for me (and next weekend will be as well as Grace is going to Disney with her father and grandparents). Yesterday afternoon we had dinner with the Lavallees and Woods at Christina and David’s house. While the rest of the kids roamed around the house and yard screaming and playing together, Whit quietly made his way up to the third floor play room and proceeded to play with the train table and dump trucks for almost an hour. I sat with him and watched him play and had a moment of strong recognition of myself in him: this kid is kind of private and a loner at heart. This is a trait of mine I’m only starting to really recognize and embrace now, in midlife, but I see it loud and clear in him.
Today I sat back and watched Whit navigate around the trucks and construction toys, and then gravitate to the window and look out at Boston Harbor (“Mummy! The big big ocean!” he cried). I felt, for a moment, how inscrutable he sometimes is to me. This is in marked contrast to the almost painful identification I have with Grace. I watched him looking out at the harbor and honestly struggled to remember his birth, his babyhood; I felt like he was not mine at all. Of course we know he is not mine, and I’ve written a lot about that, but what I mean is in that moment I felt like I did not know him particularly well.
Maybe this is a theme of parenting: looking at your children and seeing them as themselves, as separate individuals with personalities, preferences, and lives apart from you. My growing sense that my son approaches the world in entirely different ways than I do is wonderful at the same time that it is daunting. He seems as blessedly free from many of the insecurities and preoccupations that have marked me as Grace seems possessed of them. One thing I do know for sure is that the ways in which Whit is different from me will teach me just as much as the daily face-to-face confrontation I have with my own flaws in the form of Grace.
