'Comment Mania!' Contest: Clubhouse Conundrum
Rated by 4 members
Sometimes in the middle of the night I awaken to find my mind recounting my most egregious and deplorable parenting moments -- incidents of words used too harshly, obvious irritability during a middle of the night barfing episode, the tooth ache we allowed to go too long. The laundry list of mommy misdemeanors and crimes is interminably long and eats at you if you let them.
Which brings me to our home. We had to choose our words carefully when we described our new home to Julia and Henry, who were 5 and 3 when we purchased it. "The kitchen isn't as nice as the one we have now, but we have more space. We'll be a short walking distance to an amazing school where you will go to kindergarten." Then I delivered what I thought would be the main selling point. "And, we'll have our own yard."
"Will it have a playground or swingset?" Julia fired back.
I paused and thought about the small lawn with the beautiful red Japanese maple and struggled to find the right words to describe its merit to a 5- and 3-year-old.
"No, but it has a great climbing tree," I replied.
"Can we build a clubhouse?" She asked.
"Yes. That sounds like fun!" I responded. Julia beamed, but Dave was silent.
Although the upside to our new house had to be qualified and explained, what we had forsaken for more space and better public schools didn't. Our new kitchen was small and outdated, the light in Henry's room insisted on flickering instead of turning off, and the house didn't even come with a set of keys. "We can only lock it from the inside," I explained to Julia as I tried to cinch my body out a window. The first night we slept in our "new" old house I served a decadent chocolate cake for dessert to celebrate. The next morning the four of us awoke to find several sets of chocolate mouse paw prints running along our gold-speckled kitchen countertops. I could see mine and Dave's previous status of "Wonder Mommy" and "Super Daddy" dissolving quickly in Julia's eyes as she contemplated the ruined chocolate cake.
For the first few months we lived there, we were completely overwhelmed with unpacking boxes, fixing perilous things like faulty electrical wiring and getting a locksmith over so we could actually lock our doors. As soon as we could we worked in the yard reducing the size of flowers beds and seeding more lawn for the kids to play on, but that fall we never had a chance to even contemplate the clubhouse.
When Julia asked about when she'd have her clubhouse, I told her not until the spring. As that first winter in our house wore on, Julia rounded up some of kindergarten friends who would make up members of the "clubhouse" membership in eager anticipation of spring. That spring torrential rain seeped under our front door into our house making it apparent that we were in dire need of a new drainage system. So that spring while we took care of our latest catastrophe, Julia and Henry amused themselves with endless climbing and swinging in our Japanese maple, which they named "Rosie."
When you're overwhelmed with your life and home, time seems to barrel forward. Soon we had another baby, and that same year Julia planted zucchini and carrots under Rosie. The following spring as her baby brother learned to crawl and then walk, Julia began to love bugs and befriended the larger ants, using sidewalk chalk to draw them houses. And both kids learned to climb higher and higher into Rosie's branches.
When she was 8, Julia made one last attempt to give us a deadline for the clubhouse. She planned a neighborhood play to be performed at the clubhouse and made flyers and invitations and distributed them to everyone she knew. The performance was set for October 15. It had to be postponed indefinitely when the clubhouse failed to materialize.
It wasn't that I didn't take her requests and wishes seriously, and there were moments when I was racked with guilt over our failure to build a clubhouse, or even set up a swing set, for the kids for the yard. One fall I tried to get our entire family to buy a clubhouse, instead of toys, as I finally realized that Dave's silences about the matter meant that it wasn't even on the long to-do list and probably wasn't even a contender for it, but the relatives seemed uninterested.
Now, five years after we moved to our house, when you look up into Rosie, our tree, you will see lines of garden hoses, a harness for climbing and various things like inflatable tubes and boogie boards hoisted up with ropes and pulleys constructed by Julia and Henry. They have learned to tie great knots, to raise and lower eachother and their friends into the branches, and have become endlessly fascinated with their own original yard creation.
We had friends over the other night and as I began looking around for our patio chairs someone quipped, "I believe they're hanging from your tree." At first I giggled at the joke then realized that all our plastic patio chairs were hanging at various heights from Rosie. But instead of being embarrassed by our missing chairs and the wacky tree full of hoses that substitutes for a swing set or clubhouse, I felt a surge of pride at Julia and Henry's creativity, and at mine and Dave's ability, even if it was by default, to let them go.
It's a lesson to me that sometimes our best parenting doesn't happen by supplying expensive swing sets or clubhouses, but in letting our kids forage and find themselves in the upper reaches of a simple tree branch.
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