Karen liked the book
“I could tell Karen liked the book I got her.”
“She liked the book, eh?” I reached into the backseat, bumped the edge of her carseat and fumbled to hold her hand.
“Yeah.” She squeezed my hand between both of hers.
“That’s good. It’s nice when someone likes a gift you got for them.”
“Well, the nice part is getting a gift for them.”
“Yes. It’s nice to buy gifts for people. I meant also that it feels nice if someone likes something you got them.”
“It also just feels nice to get someone a gift. Even if they don’t like it, they know you wanted to get them a gift.”
“That’s true. Good point. I like that.”
I’d stood behind her chair at the birthday party. A mom next to me turned to me when her daughter gave Karen the birthday girl her gift, and said “I’m not sure they actually know each other’s names. They’re in the same dance class.”
“Mine’s in that class too.” Later I thought that I should have introduced myself to her and her kid, and introduced my kid, but I was distracted by not knowing anyone else, by watching my kid stand watching the birthday girl open presents, watching the little boy picking presents for the birthday girl to open as he picked my daughter’s gift last, noticing that every other family had put their gift in a fancy gift bag and that only one other kid had made a hand-made card and that only one other kid had given a book instead of a doll and that the birthday girl barely glanced at the card my daughter spent half an hour on drawing and writing the birthday girl’s name herself. I told my wife all of this, adding “I didn’t get the sense that we parent exactly the same as everyone else there, if you know what I mean.” “For sure,” she’d answered, nodding. What I left out was that I felt terrified that my kid would notice these differences, that other kids would notice, that my kid would notice the other kids noticing. (I also felt terrified for the maybe thirty seconds I couldn’t find my kid. I said “would you go tell Karen’s parents thank you for the party?” and she looked at me, blinked, shook her head, and said “I don’t want to.” Fair enough. She’d been gracious and great and it’s not like any other kids did so. As we walked out of the party room after the cake I thought I should thank the parents though so I bent down and told my kid I was going to go back and thank Karen’s parents and she should stay on this floor of the museum, don’t go to any other floor. She said okay. I walked back, thanked the parents, came back out, and she was gone. I walked the perimeter of that floor twice scanning the crowd, asked an older sister of one of the kids who was at the party if she had seen my kid [‘the girl with the gold dress? you seen her?’], she shook head no, ran off to keep playing, how can you play when my baby is missing you monster, all you monsters! Then I spotted my kid, my pulse slowed, I smiled, walked quickly over to her, resisted the urge to pick her up and kiss the top of her head.)
Karen the birthday girl ran up to my daughter when we first arrived at the children’s museum where the family held the party. Karen called my daughter by name and said hi and thank you for coming, and did the same when she was leaving, and she’d run up to my daughter after dance class and handed her an invitation to the party. That felt cordial. My kid didn’t know Karen’s name until we read it on the invitation. This has not been a relationship my kid cares about.
I am unhappy, or I am unsure whether I am happy or unhappy. I spend too much time on things I dislike doing - work, job hunting - and have too many uncertainties in my life and I sleep and exercise too little. I carry this in my jaw and neck, let it out in grumbles and curses and the occasional shout. I worry this will come out to my kids, that I will be - that I am - shitty to them, and I worry that my kids will become unhappy adults. I worry that they are actually unhappy kids, that behind the smiles they are miserable. This is mistaken because they are young enough and their personalities are such that they are quite demonstrative when they are unhappy, and they are mostly quite happy. And sometime when they act out it’s not that they are unhappy over all, it’s that they are experiencing normal friction - being tired and hungry makes lots of people crabby, that is not a sign of anything being wrong. And yet my kids are private, even at their young ages. If they fall and get hurt they want to walk away and be alone for a moment, or if they want to be held they don’t want to talk about what happened. I am the same way. I want to feel discomfort alone internally first, then express it, and control that expression, and control when and if and how I talk about it. I respect that my kids are private and in a way I love it, it’s a personality quirk that is relatively rare among kids I know and so that makes it relatively unique to them and so I cherish it, but their privacy also means that I know I will someday sometimes not be privy to every feeling they have, certainly not as soon as they feel it. I will also likely be surprised when that occurs, as in, they will be private before I know they are. I worry then that they will be unhappy and I won’t know, that they are unhappy and I don’t know. I worried that my kid felt awkward and uncomfortable at the party and that she didn’t have fun. Part of me wanted her to have demonstrative fun like extraverted children do, because I wanted the reassurance, the certainty that she was enjoying herself. I suppose I have a trust issue.
And so I relaxed when she said Karen liked her gift. To me this meant that she had felt welcome and normal and comfortable at the party, at least enough. I know there will be situations in her life where she won’t feel that way because those situations are in everyone’s life sometimes, and for some of us more than others. She will be okay, I trust that, I trust her because she is so smart and creative and strong-willed. I want to know that I have done whatever I can to help prepare her for those situations when the time comes. This is part of the worry at the party, a vague sense that I might be failing her somehow. In a way this is narcissism - my kid is at a kid-party and I am worrying about me - but it is bound up with that ‘I love my kids SO MUCH’ feeling that goes with parenting and with wanting them to get all the goodness that all kids so deserve and with knowing that as a parent I can only control and provide a small fraction of that, and decreasingly as she ages. You have a kid and you give your kid your whole heart and you give your kid the world or as much of it as you can and you can’t help it, you give the world your kid, and it exposes your whole heart to the whole world.