Learning to Worry Less

Posted September 07, 2007

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Isn't it amazing how much -- and how quickly -- kids change? I'm thinking about this now because school started this week, and I just read my journal from this time last year. Ben was beginning kindergarten then, and he was shy at school. In class and with his teachers, he was a friendly soul, a good citizen, an engaged student -- it was really the playground that worried me. He tended to avoid groups of other children; he preferred digging quietly in the sand or scrambling up into the low branches of an autumn-hued tree; he did not seem eager to insinuate himself into the various games of tag and chase that swarmed around him. This may not seem like a big deal -- and I see now that it wasn't -- but I fretted about it at the time. I bit my tongue every day in the car to stop myself from grilling him in that weirdly oblique parent way -- you know the way: "Who'd you play with on the playground? By yourself? Really?" followed by the marshmallow-phony, "That sounds fun!" Like some kind of anxious anthropologist, I studied him -- noted other kids running around in rough-and-tumble packs while Ben shimmied himself up a tree and surveyed the scene with his sweet and placid face.

He was not unhappy. "How was your day?" I asked him, and every day he answered in his same cheerful way: "B.D.E." -- which stands for "Best Day Ever." At home and on play dates he relished the company of his friends (Can't you practically picture me lurking around with binoculars and my observation notebook?), but at school he was more comfortable out of the fray. And part of me understood this and admired him for it. But another part of me pictured Ben ten years from now showing up in class with a shy smile and a hand grenade. "It's the isolated loners you really have to worry about," I'd said to Michael, and Michael, whose faith in the people he loves is not easily shaken, had shaken his head. "He's five, honey. I really don't think we're in an 'isolated loner' situation."

It's also ironic, of course, because I would do better to be more like Ben -- to know more about where my social boundaries are and to take better care of myself. As a grown-up this likely involves more saying "No," I suppose, than climbing high up into the branches. It likely involves conserving one's energy a little differently, since after a simple school drop-off, I can become completely exhausted from five minutes of parking-lot socializing. My son's levelness -- his even keel -- is more a sign of his confidence than of his lack. I see this so clearly now.

Now that school has started again, and Ben's completely comfortable there. Now that he's sweaty and smiling and talking a mile a minute when we pick him up at the end of the day. Now that he seems to be shedding his shyness like an outgrown skin, like a dried-up chrysalis, and he's stretching in the sunlight, he's unfolding his still-damp wings. But I want to have been more confident this time last year -- more confident in the inherent rightness with which my children move through the world. I want to always say, "Just be yourself" and to always mean it. I want to be sure I never do that dreadful thing -- that thing where you doubt your children, however barely, and reveal this doubt to them; where you're so worried about their happiness that you actually make them unhappy.

I'm learning by the seat of my pants here. But I am learning; I can tell. Because Birdy started preschool yesterday -- her first-ever morning away from home -- and I knew it would be fine. And it was. It was great. "I played dollies!" she said. "We had snack which was cereal squares and also water!" "I swung on the swings!" Partly she's a different kid from her brother, of course, and partly I'm a different parent now. I didn't worry when Birdy, so enthusiastic and relaxed about school, came home and wept for an hour about the way the paper backing peeled off of her fox tattoo. I didn't worry when I went upstairs in the afternoon and she had abandoned her Play Mobile figurines on the rug and climbed into bed. "Is it nighttime?" she said. "I'm so tired." I didn't worry when she and Ben watched a Dragon Tales video and she cried and cried afterwards, choking on the words, "That was too sad for me." "Was it, Birdy?" Ben asked kindly. "It was," she cried. "It was shapes. They wanted to find a circle but they only found an oval-hanh-hanh-hanh." I understand better now. The path to happiness can seem a little bit crooked.

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Learning to Worry Less

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by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Learning to Worry Less

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