How old’s your little boy?
My walk to work, following the straightest line, passes through a large park with two playgrounds. I trudge up the grassy hill as a small child runs from his mother, who calls “hey! you gotta tell me before you just take off!” He continues up the hill, his mother walks after him, alongside me now.
“How old’s your little boy?”
“Two!”
“My littlest daughter is about a year and a half,” I rush to mention my kids and concentrate on not sounding like I’m rushing. “She walks off like this too.”
My mother circled her children. “I watch them like hawks,” she would say. She meant “I watch them like a hawk” (but older now with my own children I appreciate the double meaning. And I remember now that we used to tie our terrier to a line in the back yard when we lived out in the country, a line that let him run the length of our long yard, and hawks would start to circle and my dad would go bring the dog in just in case.) Born about a decade after my brothers, I did much childcare, and in the family tradition I watched closely, worried these little rabbits might run, or be carried off. From early on I associated strangers with predators, especially unmet out of sight strangers who might - no, who did - lay waiting for the unattended child to wander away alone. Children: vulnerable; harm: irreversible. That sums it up.
“I’ve got two older boys, he’s my most independent like this. He goes wherever he wants and expects me to follow, or not. He doesn’t care if I follow or not.”
“My kid’s the same way, she’s all ‘I’m going over here now, it’ll work out, see you.’”
“Exactly. He sometimes looks at me like ‘what? what’s your problem?’ when I want him to wait or if I get mad that he took off.”
I’m told, via comic books, that girls who suck the ends of their hair accumulate hairs in their stomachs, small strands tying into small knots, small knots collecting into large stone-like bundles that sit forever in the gut. This may not be true scientifically but it is true emotionally. We live some way, acting out in the world, and our insides adapt, residues collect until they amass a size that can be felt. Knots of uncertainty sit in my intestines and even more since I became a parent - children: vulnerable - they regularly cramp my belly.
“Well, he’s a cute kid. You have a nice day.” I continue up the hill.
“You too honey.”
Habits formed from acting out scripts placed in our hands just as (really, before) we learned to read, a web woven of years of odds and ends, running from gut to heart to brain. Tug one knot, tug them all. What might happen to children; I was once a child, am still someone’s child, children: vulnerable. Vulnerable to whom? Like women, above all to men. (I am not making a claim, I am describing a felt knot. By the way, it takes great resolve knot to tangle the thread of my thoughts by beginning to pun now on this material.) An adult man now, I pause before approaching children and women with children. It is usually women with children. Approaching men with children I feel almost entirely untied, fetterless.
At top of the hill a fenced-in second playground. I spot my neighbor with her son. I’ve never met my neighbor but I’ve met her boy. He’s turning one in a week. I’ve talked with his dad several times at the park and on the street. Knots tug. Say hello? Don’t? Hmm. I walk past then turn back toward the gate into the enclosure. I reach the gate just as the woman with running-off-boy does.
“I spotted my neighbor, I’m going to go say hi. It feels a little funny to walk in here without a kid.”
“You’re fine,” she smiles and I want to thank her.
“Excuse me! I’m your neighbor, I’ve met your husband. My family and I live across the street from you, a couple houses down. Actually I’ve talked with your husband here at the park a few times. And your son. Hey buddy!” He grins at me. He remembers me, he likes me, for a moment all knots untie.
My neighbor smiles as we introduce ourselves, shake hands, “Oh I’ve met your wife. You have the baby and the big girl who wears the fancy dresses?”
“That’s right. She’s got a lot of style.”
We make small talk. I say goodbye, ask her to repeat her name, shake hands again, think of my kids at home as walk the rest of the way to work, different knots tugging different directions.