Wednesday, March 9, 2016

An Incident and A Recurring Character

First off, I have a special place in my heart for this girl.  She was a cue to me on perhaps the first of those growing-big moments for Gabriel.  Nadine was about to return to work after her year of maternity leave and she did not have the heart to take him to daycare on that first day.  She knew that she would be crying the whole day, so I took Gabriel to drop him off.  The details of the logistics to get in the door and do whatever administrative tasks there were completely escape me.  The clearest memory of that morning was the moments spent saying, "Goodbye."

(The reality is that after only blogging for the last six months of Gabriel's life, it is privilege to flash back to this story.  But, as I often do - see - I digress.)

After getting him undressed and sitting him down, I told Gabriel that I was leaving and I did not get much or any response from him.  He remained seated and apart from me, taking in his surroundings and observing. He was not too troubled by my goodbye and my wave, so I did it again just to make sure we had an understanding.  And after that I did it again.  I still worried that my footsteps to the door would provoke a response but he remained still, indifferent to the possibility of being left there alone. Then this girl, who is six months older than Gabriel, was plopped down near him and he got off his bum and crawled toward her to hang out.  I was appropriately ignored, so with a wry turn of the mouth I headed for the door.

After changing daycares due to a lack of space, we eventually, in December 2014, found our way back into a daycare that was 500 metres from our home.  One afternoon when we took him to get oriented, there she was again and I got a warm sense of familiarity about the place and the connections Gabriel would form and reform there.

In the year that has passed Gabriel and this girl have been to one another's birthday parties and she happened to give him his first Star Wars toy, effectively introducing him to that entire universe. His first playdate, which wasn't a complete disaster, was with her and another boy and we have grown fond of the feisty waif who has been a part of Gabriel's orbit time and again.  We look ahead to the possibility of them parting when she starts school in September and wonder if that will close the chapter where they have known each other.  Hopefully, that won't be the case, but kids grow in their on ways.

Today, however, when Nadine and I found ourselves negotiating the terrain of uneven truths of our first, "So how did it happen" debriefing of his school day, it was her again.  I got a call during lunch that Gabriel was in an incident at school and that he was okay but that his wire-rim Harry Potter-evoking glasses were knocked off and then stomped on.  By a girl.  (Advice to any parents buying glasses, no wire-rims!!  Feel free to gather friends and kin around your computer monitors to join together in a course of, "Duh!"  If it didn't happen today Gabriel's glasses would have likely met their end in short order regardless.)

When I arrived at the daycare to pick him up, I peered in on him to get a sense of how the day and the incident were effecting him.  At first he looked quite different without the glasses, different enough to suggest that the incident had left a lingering mark on him.  Either that or he got plenty of playground smudged into his face.  Before I could get face to face with him, I was called into the office to review the paperwork for the incident and signed it.  Between the call with Nadine and my arrival I wondered what Gabriel may have done to provoke it and by the looks of the report he seemed to have been relatively innocent.  Just as I was leaving the office, Nadine texted to say the girl's mother emailed to apologize.  I laughed at the realization but felt awful that it was her and wondered about how her folks felt about it.  The cookie is tough in this one.

When I finished the paperwork with the daycare staff and picked up the remains of his glasses, I headed to the playground to greet him.  He was as cheerful as always and announced that "[She] stomped on my glasses!", as if announcing that he saw dinosaur bones or a particularly unique digger at one of the two construction sites nearby.

We walked home and I waited until Nadine got home to spare him two rounds of interrogation.  Of course we did not get the complete story from him, especially as tired as he was at the end of the day. I suspect that it would be fair to say that he was not completely innocent.  He did say that the two of them were angry at one another and that there may have been an issue sharing a book but we will never know exactly what instigated it.  We just know that the two of them have left yet another milestone in one another's lives.  Here's to more peaceful ones.

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